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The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law

2025-04-19T18:46:07Z

JKilchenmann: changed "pg" to "p" or "pp" in sfn

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in ''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law''}}
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{{Byline |last=Cohen |first=Sarah Jo |abstract=A discussion of Mailer’s career, interrelating Mailer’s ethnicity with his corpus of work, with special attention to his cinematic work. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr05coh }}

{{dc|dc=N|orman Mailer’s sizable FBI file begins with his voice.}} The 165 pages of Mailer’s 171-page file available to the public cover fifteen years of observation and surveillance, and includes materials ranging from endless notes tracking Mailer’s passport applications and international travel, to FBI agents’ reviews of Miami and the Siege of Chicago (with meticulous notes about each mention of the FBI), and even a letter from a high school teacher asking J. Edgar Hoover for permission to teach ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{efn|In a letter dated March 18, 1964, also included in Mailer’s file, Hoover wrote back telling the teacher that this request was beyond his area of jurisdiction because the FBI “neither makes evaluations nor draws conclusions as to the character of integrity of any organization, publication, or individual,” and because Hoover has made it a habit “not to comment on any material not prepared by the FBI.”}} The file begins, however, with a clipping from ''The Washington Post'', a June 6, 1962, George Sokolsky column called “These Days,” that moved J. Edgar Hoover to leave a note for his staff reading, “Let me have memo on Mailer.”{{sfn|United States Federal Bureau of Investigation|1962–1975}} Sokolsky’s article responds to an ''Esquire'' piece Mailer wrote about then first lady Jackie Kennedy that describes Mrs. Kennedy’s voice as “a quiet parody of the sort of voice one hears on the radio late at night, dropped softly into the ear by girls who sell soft mattresses, depilatories, or creams to brighten the skin.”{{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}} Sokolsky takes offense at Mailer’s mockery of Mrs. Kennedy and scrutiny of her voice, responding, “[A] person’s voice is what it is. I never heard Norman Mailer’s voice but whatever the Lord gave him, baritone or tenor, soprano or bass, it is what it is, and he can thank the good Lord that he does not suffer from cerebral palsy or some such thing.”{{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}} Mailer’s voice, however, much like his persona, is not at all God-given and never “is what it is.” Rather, Mailer’s{{pg|183|184}}

voice is a deliberate construction pieced together from bits of others’ voices in order to mask the adenoidal voice of his childhood.

Mailer reflects briefly upon his voice in his chronicle of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'', written in the third person with himself as its main character. Part IV of ''Armies'' begins with an apology from Mailer for bringing the story of the March on the Pentagon to a climax and then launching into a diversion about his relationship to film and the cameras following him through the melee of the march. Mailer writes of his relationship to film: “he had on screen in this first documentary a fatal taint, a last remaining speck of the one personality he found absolutely insupportable—the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn. Something in his adenoids gave it away—he had the softness of a man early accustomed to mother-love.”{{sfn|Mailer|1968a|p=152}} For Mailer, the paradoxical experience of seeing his voice undermines the masculinities he works to materialize in his career as a writer and public intellectual, which he goes on to enumerate: “warrior, presumptive general, ex-political candidate, embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling sweet wives, amiable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter.” As a result of feeling outed on film as a “nice Jewish boy,” “accustomed to mother love,” our presumptive general and champion of obscenity vows to “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself.”{{sfn|Mailer|1968a|p=152}}

The problem of Mailer’s voice is intimately connected with both sexuality and masculinity. The adenoids, after all, are located in the nose, a stereotypical marker of Jewish otherness and degeneracy. We do not need Sander Gilman to tell us, although he does in the chapter of ''The Jew’s Body'' entitled “The Jewish Nose,” that the Jewish nose is the locus of redirected anxiety about the Jewish penis—both are body parts that develop and take shape at puberty—the latter of which is a threat to national purity through its potential to increase the Jewish population. The adenoidal voice signals a kind of impotence for Mailer, revealing him as accustomed to mother love, and functions as “the acoustic mirror in which the male subject hears all the repudiated elements of his infantile babble.”{{sfn|Silverman|1988|p=81}} The infantile babble here, the mother tongue of the mother’s voice, is Yiddish.{{efn|Mary V. Dearborn writes that Mailer picked up Yiddish at home from his parents, “enough so that many years later, in Germany, he was able to ask for directions in this language and be understood.” {{harvtxt|Dearborn|1999|p=14}}}} Kaja Silverman writes that the voice of the mother resonates in the male subject and that “the male subject frequently ‘refines’ his ‘own’ voice by projecting onto the{{pg|184|185}}

mother’s voice all that is unassimilable to the paternal position.”{{sfn|Silverman|1988|p=81}} Mailer is a case study in this relationship to the maternal voice; when Mailer first sees himself on film, he hears the adenoidal, Jewish, maternal voice within himself. Because the paternal position Mailer strives to create is distinctly not Jewish, or at least one that allies itself with Jewishness without performing it, the mother’s voice becomes unassimilable (or in his words, “unsupportable”) to his identity. Thus, while Mailer asserts that he will “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself,” he returns to film as both actor and director in order to refine his voice by expunging its maternal layers.

Norman Mailer’s film career, often dismissed as vulgar and/or irrelevant, was short but intense; he directed four films, two of which were released in 1968, ''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'', one in 1970, ''Maidstone'', and, after a long break, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' was released in 1987.{{efn|Mailer was also featured in several documentaries during these years, including Dick Fontaine’s ''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' (1968) and ''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.'' (1970); the former is a filmic companion to ''Armies'', documenting Mailer’s actions during the March on the Pentagon, and the latter produces a record of Mailer’s 1969 New York City mayoral campaign. Mailer was also documented in Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s ''Town Bloody Hall'', a film of the 1971 debate between Mailer and Germaine Greer about women’s liberation at Town Hall in New York City.}} Mailer’s first three films were largely influenced by John Cassavetes, although Mailer predictably argues that his mastery of what he calls “existential acting” makes him a much better filmmaker than Cassavetes.{{sfn|Mailer|2006|}} In his essay, “Some Dirt in the Talk,” Mailer defines existential acting by addressing each of the terms that comprise the phrase. He notes that existentialism and acting exist at two opposite “poles,” writing, ''“If existentialism is ultimately concerned with the attractions of the unknown, acting is one of the surviving rituals of invocation, repetition, and ceremony—of propitiation to the gods.”''{{sfn|Mailer|1972b|p=104}}{{efn|It is quite possible that Mailer is thinking in part of Kenneth Anger here, the word “invocation” invoking Anger’s ''Invocation of My Demon Brother'' (1969), as well as the ritual and ceremony of highly-stylized films like ''Kustom Kar Kommandos'' (1965) and ''Scorpio Rising'' (1964). Incidentally, in the Boulenger interview, a copy of Anger’s book ''Hollywood Babylon'' can be see on the bookshelf over Mailer’s shoulder, almost like a cartoon devil egging him on.}} His theory of existential acting, then, strives to collapse these two poles, freeing acting from repetition and ceremony, and liberating his actors (and himself) from the propitiation of the gods. Existential acting, he argues, works because in our daily lives we always pretend, lie, and act, and works by more effectively representing the chaos and “complexity of our century” than mainstream Hollywood cinema.{{sfn|Mailer|1972b|pp=90,108}} Unsurprisingly, from the man who gave us the genre-bending history as novel/novel as history, the true life novel, and the novel biography,{{efn|''The Armies of the Night'', ''The Executioner’s Song'', and ''Marilyn'', respectively.}} existential acting collapses the cinema and the outside world, documentary and fiction, acting and existentialism, and masculinity and performance, the last of which Mailer explicitly connects, writing: “There is hardly a guy alive who is not an actor to the hilt—for the simplest of reasons. He cannot be tough all the time...[s]o he acts to fill the gaps.”{{sfn|Mailer|1972b|pp=90-1}} Thus, armed with the theory and methodology of existential acting, Mailer returns to the cinema as a filmmaker for the same reason he considers turning away from it after his{{pg|185|186}}

experience in the above passage: at the same time the camera exposes one’s frailties and the identities one attempts to disguise; it bolsters the masquerade of masculinity by imprinting its performance in celluloid. The same voice that undermines Mailer’s masculinity becomes his primary means of constructing it.

In his first documentary Mailer sees “something in his adenoids” in a moment of slippage that renders the aural a visual prop. The experience of seeing his voice disrupts Mailer’s viewing experience by first troubling the traditional assumption that film is a visual medium and then forcing Mailer to confront himself as both image and sound. Mladen Dolar provides a means of understanding the revolutionary and revelatory potential of sound, in the form of the voice, in relation to both identity and film, as he writes:

<blockquote>[T]he visible world presents relative stability, permanence, distinctiveness, and a location at a distance, the audible presents fluidity, passing, a certain inchoate, amorphous character and a lack of distance. The voice is elusive, always changing, becoming, elapsing, with unclear contours, as opposed to the relative permanence, solidity, durability of the seen.{{sfn|Dolar|2006|p=79}}</blockquote>

Here the visible is associated with stability, permanence, and distinctiveness—terms that are crucial to our understanding of cinema, but that mirror the ways we come to understand ourselves as selves. In film, the visible is assumed to guarantee presence, an assumption that stems from, among other things, the historical and philosophical privileging of the visual as a primary quality, and the problem of the voiceovers and voice-offs of sound film—which are often disembodied, absent, and coming from beyond the grave or before birth. Because the visual has historically been the privileged epistemological order through which we understand both film and identity, by focusing on sound, which is dynamic and playful, we can begin to dismantle both identity and film.{{efn|At this point in time, there is, of course, a well-established tradition of discussing sound and the voice on film—Pascal Bonitzer’s “The Silences of the Voice” (1975), Christian Metz’s “Aural Objects” (1980), Mary Anne Doane’s “The Voice in the Cinema” (1982), Michel Chion’s ''The Voice in Cinema'' (1982), and Silverman’s ''Acoustic Mirror'' (1988), just to name a few. It seems important for our purposes, however, to rehash the stakes of this discussion, especially in relation to deconstructing/reconstructing/constructing Mailer’s masculinity.}} As Mailer sees his voice, witnessing his insides (in the form of his adenoids) undermining his outsides, the visual and audible come together, undoing the binary oppositions between seeing and hearing, insides and outsides.

Dolar contrasts the visible to the audible, arguing that the latter is associated with a lack of distance, a lack of distance perhaps best embodied by the uterine envelope created by the mother’s voice. This lack of distance with{{pg|186|187}}

regard to the sound of the voice stems from the fact that the voice is simultaneously sent and delivered, thus folding back on itself and troubling the boundaries between self and other. This lack of distance is also precisely what Mailer experiences when he sees himself in his first documentary, at once spoken and heard. While Christian Metz dismisses seeing oneself on screen as an impossibility,{{efn|In ''Imaginary Signifier'', Metz writes that “there is one thing and one thing only that is never reflected in [the screen]: the spectator’s own body.” {{harvtxt|Metz|1982|p=45}}}} feminist film theory calls attention to the discomfort that comes from not being granted the distance that the visible demands. In “Film and the Masquerade,” Mary Anne Doane argues that the female spectator goes largely untheorized because the historical “imbrication of the cinematic image and the representation of the woman” leaves her too close to the image.{{sfn|Doane|1981|p=76}} Doane theorizes that in order to achieve the distance necessary to watch and appreciate film, female spectators assume a metaphorical feminine mask, which “in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance.”{{sfn|Doane|1981|p=81}} Doane then briefly considers why men do not have to masquerade as more masculine spectators, writing, “The very fact that we can speak of a woman ‘using’ her sex or ‘using’ her body for particular gains is highly significant—it is not that a man cannot use his body in this way but that he doesn’t have to.”{{sfn|Doane|1981|p=82}}

But using his body for particular gains is precisely what Mailer does, as exemplified in Diane Arbus’s 1963 photograph of Mailer. If, as Mailer quipped, “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby,” this hand grenade caught an image that exemplifies how Mailer flaunts his masculinity by holding it at a distance.{{sfn|Hagberg|2008|p=211}} In this photograph, we see Mailer is in his standard three-piece suit, sprawled out in a writerly looking high-backed chair. His right hand looks as though clasping an invisible cigarette, or pen, or as if gesturing to emphasize a point. His forehead is wrinkled in thought, and his blue eyes glow even in black and white. While his clothing, his chair, his furrowed brow, and his mouth, slightly agape in apparent mid-sentence, add up to an image we would expect of a great writer, his posture suggests otherwise; immediately, our attention is drawn to Mailer’s crotch. Thus, this image reveals both Mailer’s efforts to underscore his masculinity, placing his crotch front and center, and the vulnerability of this masculinity—in this moment, we wouldn’t need a grenade to cause Mailer a great deal of pain; a swift kick would suffice. The simultaneous power and vulnerability of Mailer’s crotch underscores his efforts to use the visibility of his body to counteract the invisibility of his voice, and his{{pg|187|188}}

hidden adenoids. We see Mailer engaged in a manly masquerade, as his proximity to the image allows him to manipulate it.

So male spectators need to masquerade as well—especially male spectators who find themselves closer to the image than they would like. The Jewish male is one such figure, as a result of a history of anti-Semitic visual representations of Jews in both scientific and popular media. Sander Gilman argues that such visual representations are internalized by contemporary Jewish-American writers, registering most prominently in repeated anxiety about sounding too Jewish.{{sfn|Gilman|1991|pp=10-37}} Mailer’s anxiety about his adenoids is decisively Jewish, both because the adenoids are located in the nose and because they give the Jewish voice its stereotypical nasal quality. Mailer’s attempt to work through this anxiety in his films is twofold. First, he gets on the other side of the camera in order to see rather than be seen, and when he is seen (as actor), it is under his own direction. Second, Mailer employs his voice in order to intervene, destabilize, and distance himself from the power of the image.

''Wild 90'', as it repeatedly calls attention to issues of seeing and visibility, provides the best examples of Mailer’s effort to seize control of his visual representation in order to produce a record of his masculinity. Mailer accomplishes this task not only by “writing,”{{efn|The word “writing” is in quotes in this sentence because while Mailer is given credit for writing the film, for example on the ''Internet Movie Database'', existential acting relies on improvisation and thus has no script, per se.}} editing, and directing the film, but also, by playing a boxer in league with mafiosi, who have the police under their control. In this film the Maf Boys, three men who spend the film holed up in a Brooklyn warehouse, watch over the New York Police Department, a position emphasized by their location many stories above the city street. The NYPD, however, asserts that the Maf Boys would not have lived past thirteen had the Irish and Jewish cops not been watching out for them—so a network of interlaced looks, and interlaced ethnicities, emerges. But perhaps the most striking look is Mailer’s own. As a character known as “the Prince,” Mailer is perpetually at the mirror, greasing up his hair and combing out its kinky curls. This position is crucial to Mailer’s management of his visual representation: from the mirror, much as in his position as director, Mailer can see both himself and the actors behind him; he can also control his image, making sure his mane and signature sneer are exactly as he wants them to appear. The metaphorical significance of Mailer’s mirror scenes almost goes without saying—at these times we are treated to moments of silence rare in his film (or writing, or political) career in which Mailer uses the visuality of film to construct and maintain the visibility of identity, to reg-{{pg|188|189}}

ister his transformation here from nice Jewish boy to badass boxer. Despite this love affair with his image, Mailer shatters the filmic mirror when, at the conclusion of ''Wild 90'', the Prince demands to speak to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, and informing the audience that the CIA{{efn|Mailer had a strong distaste for the CIA, an organization that he saw as the paragon of both surveillance culture and WASP culture. Mailer’s 1300-plus-page novel ''Harlot’s Ghost'' provides an extended though indirect glimpse into his dislike for the CIA and is almost agonizing to read because its narrator, Harry Hubbard, is a boring, WASPy, CIA agent. It’s also worth noting that Hubbard refers to the one Jewish agent in the CIA, Reed Arnold Rosen, as “adenoidal” {{harvtxt|Mailer|1991|p=61}}.}} is watching all of us. He then goes on to tell us, in his garbled, drunken voice that his favorite author is Norman Mailer—presumably, because he is both his creator and a substantial part of his self.

Mailer’s appearance, particularly in the mirror scenes of ''Wild 90'', is crucial to his efforts to make masculinity and unmake Jewishness, two concepts at odds because of the internalization of a long history of popular representations and stereotypes of the weak Jew. While Mailer combats this weakness in part through his tough guy exterior—carefully cultivated through hard-drinking, hard-talking, and hard-fighting in an effort to make himself out as a latter-day Hemingway—Mailer’s voice registers this construction as well. In the notes taken during my first screenings of ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'', I repeatedly try to describe the voice of the characters he portrays. In my notes on ''Beyond the Law'', I wrote that the poor sound quality of the film combines with Mailer’s voice to create the effect of almost incomprehensible yelling from Lt. Francis Xavier Pope for an hour and twenty-four minutes. My notes on Mailer’s gangster voice as the Prince of ''Wild 90'' remark that his accent makes him sound like a cross between Marlon Brando and Fred Flintstone with marbles in his mouth. In my second viewing, I crossed out this assessment and wrote that he sounded more like Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion from the ''Wizard of Oz''. I am not alone in trying to describe Mailer’s voice. Michael Mewshaw describes Mailer’s voice as “the Irish brogue of a whiskey priest” coming from the body of a man who “looked about as threatening as a teddy bear”{{sfn|Mewshaw|2002|p=14}}, and Jane O’Reilly notes that “words rumble and bubble and jump out, in a variety of accents: New York, faintly southern, all g’s dropped (as in ‘Ah’m talkin’) when he is particularly shy.”{{sfn|O'Reilly|1974|p=198}} {{efn|Salman Rushdie describes Bert Lahr’s lion voice is strikingly similar words, “all elongated vowel sounds (''Put ’emuuuuuuuup''),” and the Cowardly Lion’s personality as one that sounds a lot like Mailer’s: “transparent bravado and huge, operatic, tail-tugging, blubbing terror.” {{harvtxt|Rushdie|1992|p=48}}}} More recently, in an article about the New York Mailer retrospective, A.O. Scott describes Mailer’s voice as a “rapid, forceful stream of half-baked nostrums and brilliant ''aperçus'' delivered in that inimitable accent, an audible palimpsest of Mr. Mailer’s Brooklyn childhood, his Ivy League education and his World War II combat service in an Army unit composed mainly of Texans and Southerners.”

All of this is to say that the voices of Mailer’s characters (including the character “Norman Mailer,” who becomes a formal entity in ''The Armies of''{{pg|189|190}}

''the Night'', but who was roaming the streets of America and Europe at least since the publication of ''The Naked and the Dead'') are a response to the anxiety of sounding too Jewish. The adenoidal voice Mailer hears in his first documentary, the unsure voice of the Brooklyn Jew, transforms into a cacophony of accents—Southern, Irish, Italian, Brooklyn—which together make Mailer’s voice the voice of immigrant America. Paul Breines writes that discursive constructions of Jewish weakness arise from and refer to the rootlessness of the Diaspora.{{sfn|Breines|1990|p=195}} For Breines, tough Jewishness is a performance on the part of secular Jews that is largely associated with Zionism, and its creation first of tough Jewish pioneers, and then, after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, of tough Israeli soldiers.{{sfn|Breines|1990|p=195}} Mailer, however, described his relationship to Judaism in this way: “I am a Jew out of loyalty to the underdog. I would never say I was not a Jew, but I took no strength from the fact.{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=14}} With this in mind, Mailer’s voice is a tough Jewish voice, but one that revises Breines’ toughness by drawing strength from a composite of immigrant voices, rooted, if at all, in American soil rather than Israeli. Mailer brings these immigrant voices together to construct a hybrid masculinity that is not only part white Negro and part tough Jew, but that is also comprised of Italian-American, Irish-American, Southern, and Texan parts, among others. Thus, Mailer simultaneously makes and unmakes Jewish masculinity by borrowing from other masculinities in the process of making himself into a palimpsest.

Mailer’s essay, “The White Negro,” is the site most often returned to in order to discuss his contribution to the theories of tough Jewish discourse and of masculinity.{{efn|See Levine and Damon. Damon pithily writes that “The White Negro” “claims to be about how the white man envies the Black man’s sexuality and thus tries to emulate his style, but [its] subtext is about how the Jewish man envies and wants to emulate the gentile man’s sexuality, but can’t say so.” {{harvtxt|Damon|2000|p=149}}}} This essay, which argues that the hipster’s existential, psychopathic masculinity is particularly well-suited for the Cold War political climate, is infamous not only because it espouses Reichian connections between sex and violence, but also because it argues that “the Negro,” who “relinquish[es] the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body,” provides a model for how to live violently and sexually.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=341}} Both because of and despite its racist enlistment of African-American men, Mailer’s essay celebrates and identifies with black masculinity as a means of embracing otherness without admitting Jewishness. With its repeated references to the figure of “the psychopath,” who “murders—if he has the courage,” however, Mailer’s essay is also about criminality, which is a crucial source of his on-screen tough Jewish persona.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=347}} While this persona borrows its style and hipness from African Americans, it{{pg|190|191}}

almost literally ventriloquizes through the voices of Irish Americans and Italian Americans, particularly those of Hollywood cops and crooks.

Forging a criminal enterprise, and/or performing criminal masculinity, is a traditional means of assimilation for immigrant populations in America, which for the second wave of European immigrants begins with the Irish in the 1850s and is then passed on to Italian and Jewish immigrants two generations later.{{efn|A classic example appears in Sergio Leone’s Jewish gangster film, ''Once Upon a Time in America''—which stars the perpetually ethnicity-crossing Robert De Niro and for which Mailer flew to Rome 1976 in to work on the screenplay. {{harvtxt|Mewshaw|2002|p=14}} For a recent example, see Stern’s ''The Frozen Rabbi'', a comic whirlwind tour through the history of American Jewry that follows one family from the Russian Pale to Memphis, Tennessee, with a stop in New York, where one family member, Ruby “Kid” Karp, becomes a notorious gangster.}} While criminality provided immigrant gangsters with increased notoriety and power, immigrant groups who became police officers saw a similar rise in status—and much like criminals, in part because it was hoped that they could infiltrate the criminal scenes of their brethren, it was the Irish who were cops first, followed by Italians and Jews.{{sfn|Fried|1993|p=xv}} While this history suggests discrete ethnic groups who cross paths but not cultures, cinematic representations of the outlaw capitalism of mobsters often star Jewish immigrants in the role of Italian immigrants and thus demonstrate ethnic crossings similar to those in Mailer’s films. The results register in the voice; in ''Little Caesar''{{sfn|Elmer|1931}} Edward G. Robinson, né Emanuel Goldenberg, stars as the adenoidal Cesar Enrico Bandello, and in ''Scarface'',{{sfn|Hawks|1932}} Paul Muni, né Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, stars as Antonio Camonte whose Italian accent has a near Yiddish lilt.

In a 1965 letter to William F. Buckley, a man whose mid-century faux British accent made his voice almost as strange and remarkable as Mailer’s{{efn|Buckley is also both WASPy and a former CIA agent. See William F. Buckley, Jr., “Who Did What?”}} Mailer hands the crown of “most hated man in American life” over to Buckley. The letter responds to Buckley’s recent speech before the Holy Name Society, an annual gathering of Catholic police officers, in which Buckley criticized the news media for overemphasizing police brutality during the recent civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama.{{sfn|Tanenhouse|2005|}} When the ''Herald Tribune'' and civil rights activists caught wind of these remarks, and the rumors that the assembled police officers laughed and applauded upon hearing them, a media frenzy ensued which elicited a letter from Mailer, weighing in on Buckley’s speech by clarifying his own relationship to the boys in blue:

<blockquote>I’m not the cop-hater I’m reputed to be, and in fact police fascinate me. But this is because I think their natures are very complex, not simple at all, and what I would object to ...is that you made a one-for-one correspondence between the need to maintain law and order and the nature of the men who would main-{{pg|191|192}}

tain it. The policeman has I think an extraordinarily tortured psyche. He is perhaps more tortured than the criminal.{{sfn|Mailer|2008|p=8}}</blockquote>

Perhaps as a result of their tortured psyches, Mailer repeatedly turns to cops and crooks as the focus of and source of conflict in his oeuvre. For Mailer, cops are men in power who are repeatedly outwitted by clever, hypermasculine, criminals: think Stephen Rojack and Gary Gilmore, the respective heroes of ''An American Dream'' and ''The Executioner’s Song'', who commit numerous crimes in single volumes, and the Norman Mailer of ''The Armies of the Night'', arrested by U.S. Marshalls for crossing a police line at the Pentagon. There is also the Norman Mailer who stabbed his second wife, and the one who nearly lost an eye after fighting a group of hoodlums who insinuated that his dog was a “faggot.”{{sfn|Hitchens|2007|}} Mailer, as his art and life suggest, sees the tension between cops and criminals as one that is inside of everyone. In a discussion of ''Beyond the Law'' in an interview with Gilles Boulenger, Mailer reveals that the film “had a notion at the core of it that worked—which is that everybody has a cop or a criminal in them” and that, “when you put people together—one playing a cop and one playing a crook—you get the dynamism that comes from the fact that every cop in real life has a potential criminal in him and every criminal in real life, or almost every criminal in real life, has a potential cop within their soul.”{{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}

Mailer sees the conflict between cops and crooks as one that inhabits the film set as well. In “A Course on Film-Making,” he describes cameramen and union grips, who “usually dress like cops off duty and are built like cops (with the same heavy meat in the shoulders, same bellies oiled in beer), which is not surprising for they are also in surveillance upon a criminal activity: people are forging emotions under bright lights… [l]ike cops they see through every fake move and hardly care.”{{sfn|Mailer|1972a|p=133}} Here the crew, who are equated with cops, are set up in opposition to the actors whom they put under surveillance and, more indirectly, to the director, who for Mailer is always an outlaw resisting the tyranny of the image, striving to disrupt the conventions of polite cinema through a refusal to use a script, and insisting upon including as much verbal and auditory obscenity as humanly possible. Thus, even when Mailer plays a cop in ''Beyond the Law'', this portrayal becomes an effort similar to that of the director whose film tramples upon respectability. Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope inhabits the body of the cop in order{{pg|192|193}}

to mock him and to illustrate a psyche more tortured than that of the criminal.

In ''Beyond the Law'', as Mailer takes on the role of a cop, anxieties about Jewishness, being seen, and the voice come together. ''Beyond the Law'' tells the story of one night in a police precinct in which a number of criminals are interrogated, ranging from a motorcycle gang, to a man who murdered his wife with an axe, to the members of a sadomasochistic whipping club. The film takes us back and forth between the precinct, where we see the cops in action, and a bar, where we see the cops off-duty, having drinks. Toward the film’s conclusion, these spaces intersect as Lieutenant Pope brings one of the women from the whipping club, a stunning Syrian woman named Lee Ray Rogers, to the bar. Rogers’ tripartite name, cobbled together from pieces of Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray,{{efn|The name also refers to Republican luminary and soon to be Nixon Administration Secretary of State William P. Rogers, who would go on to negotiate an Arab-Israeli peace treaty in 1973.”}} suggests that she too will be an assassin of sorts, or at least that she will bring the little death of orgasm to Lieutenant Pope. Just before Rogers arrives, Pope (Mailer’s Irish-American cop, whose rank and name suggest that he is only slightly less than the Bishop of Rome) and Mickey Berk (Mickey Knox’s Jewish-American cop, feminized through a last name that is cockney rhyming slang for cunt),{{efn|See also entry for “Berk” on ''London Slang.com: “Rhyming Slang'', short for ‘Berkshire Hunt’, meaning ‘cunt’. Most people go around calling people ‘berks’ for years not realizing that it is slang for one of the strongest swear words in the English language.”}} have a heart to heart in the men’s room in which Pope remarks, “I used to have no respect for the Jewish cops until the Israelis showed the Arabs where to go. And then I said to myself, maybe Berk has more than even I thought.” Pope then mutters under his breath for a couple of minutes, and quietly says to himself, “The Irish never won a war."

Once Rogers arrives, Pope asks the other officers to leave them alone. An intimate conversation follows, during which the two imagine an S&M scene and Pope refers to his penis as “the avenger.” A difficult to obtain “blue” version of the film exists in which we presumably see Pope’s avenger in action. For our purposes, however, it is even more striking to see him ''voicing'' his potency and sexuality, while Mailer’s voice revealed him as soft in his first documentary, Pope tells us here that he is hard. Pope expresses the ethnic crossing that facilitates his hardness in this conversation as well, as he tells Rogers, “You bring out the Italian in me.” Ultimately, Pope’s blonde wife arrives at the bar, cramping his style, and commands him to end this conversation. Thus the film concludes with Pope at the nexus of several ethnicities: pitted against an Arab dominatrix and an emasculating ''shiksa'', the Irish Pope arms himself with an Italian libido, and metaphorically whips out his{{pg|193|194}}

avenger in the name of both the Jews, who showed the Arabs where to go, and the Irish who never won a war.

In “A Course in Filmmaking,” Mailer argues that after the advent of sound, film started to mimic theater, and that the work of film should be to get away from this mimicry in order to accomplish things that can only be accomplished on film. As films that are uniquely filmic, Mailer gives the example of ''The Maltese Falcon'', but also of the Marx Brothers’ films, in which the brothers “stampeded over every line of a script and tore off in enough directions to leave concepts fluttering like ticker tape on the mysterious nature of the movie art.”{{sfn|Mailer|1972a|p=129}} The Marx brothers are important ancestors in Mailer’s filmic genealogy, in part because they too are Jews who remix ethnicity on film, as Chico becomes Italian and Zeppo becomes the brothers’ WASPy foil. And like Mailer’s films, much of the chaos and anarchy that unfurls in the Marx Brothers’ films stems from sound, in the form of elaborate musical numbers, Groucho’s wordplay, Chico’s Italian accent and piano playing, Harpo’s horn-honking, and even his silence. For both the Marx Brothers and Mailer, the work of cinema is to unravel itself, to make and unmake a universe in the same space, to challenge conventions. Where the Marx brothers wreak havoc, for example, upon the university in ''Horse feathers'', and upon dictatorship in ''Duck Soup'', Mailer wreaks havoc upon language and good taste as he attempts to create the film with the most “repetitive pervasive obscenity of any film ever made” with ''Wild, 90'' and upon both his own voice and the human eardrum with the perpetual yelling of Lt. Pope in ''Beyond the Law''. Mailer even tells us, “''Wild 90'' seems close to nothing so much as the Marx Brothers doing improvisations on ''Little Caesar'' with the addition of a free run of obscenity equal to ''Naked Lunch'' or ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''”{{sfn|Mailer|1972b|p=90}} It is as though Mailer sees ''Wild 90'' as an almost unimaginable supplement to the Marx Brothers’ oeuvre—a vision of what their tough Jewish contribution to cinema would look like had they ever assumed the roles of mafiosi.

In Mailer’s universe, the borders between Mailer and his characters are always fragile. He tells us in the Boulenger interview that in the making of ''Beyond the Law'' he would torture the actors playing the crooks, who were all friends of his, by interrogating them about things they had done in their real lives.{{efn|The best example of this existential interrogation occurs as Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope interrogates Peter Rosoff, whom Mailer asserts was a closeted homosexual, accusing him of soliciting sex in a subway men’s room. {{harvtxt|Mailer|2006}}}} In his writing and his introductory remarks included on the French DVDs of his films, Mailer repeatedly tells us that the goal of existential acting is to create a fictional documentary.{{sfn|Mailer|2006|}} Here is an ex-{{pg|195|196}}

ample, taken from his discussion of the successes and failures of ''cinéma vérité'' in “A Course on Filmmaking”: “It was as if there was a law that a person could not be himself in front of a camera unless he pretended to be someone other than himself. By that logic, ''cinéma vérité'' would work if it photographed a performer in the midst of his performance.”{{sfn|Mailer|1972a|p=147}} Mailer’s films elaborate upon his ideas about existential filmmaking: it is only in the act of performing as a character (Lieutenant Pope) that the actor reveals himself (Norman Mailer). Pope/Mailer’s sarcastic comment about not respecting the Jews until they showed the Arabs their military might is a line almost directly out of Breines’ ''Tough Jews'', or vice versa, Pope/Mailer’s comment is part of the discourse surrounding the 1968 war that inspired ''Tough Jews''. Either way, with this line, Mailer introduces himself into the lineage of tough Jews but with his own spin. When Pope tells us that Lee Ray Rogers brings out the Italian in him, he speaks for Mailer as well. Because Jewish masculinity for Mailer is always borrowed from and channeled through other ethnic masculinities, Pope’s words are as good as Mailer’s saying that Rogers brings out the Jew in him, and Mailer’s (via Pope’s) tough Jew is always already fighting, whether he is pushing Arabs out of Palestine or fighting to defend his dog’s honor. Thus, much as Mailer helped to unmake cinema as he made it, Mailer makes Jewishness as he unmakes it—masculinity unravels as the film does the same, moving from real to reel.

== Notes ==
{{notelist}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Breines |first=Paul |date=1990 |title=''Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry.'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Basic Books |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Buckley |first=William F. |date=2005 |title= Who Did What? |url= |magazine=''National Review'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Damon |first=Maria |title=Triangulated Desire and Tactical Silences in the Beat Hipscape: Bob Kaufman and Others. |url= |journal=College Literature |volume=27.1 |issue= |date=Winter 2000 |pages=139-157 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dearborn |first=Mary V. |date=1999 |title=''Mailer: A Biography'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Doane |first=Mary Anne |date=1981 |title=Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator. |url= |location=''Screen 23'' |publisher= |pages=74-87 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dolar |first=Mladen |date=2006 |title=''A Voice and Nothing More'' |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher= MIT P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1968 |title=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? '' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fried |first=Albert |date=1993 |title=''The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Gilman |first=Sander |date=1991 |title=The Jewish Voice: Chicken Soup or the Penalties of Sounding too Jewish. |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hagberg |first=Gary |date=2008 |title=''Art and Ethical Criticism.'' |url= |location=Malden, MA |publisher=Wiley-Blackwell |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hitchens |first=Christopher |date=2007 |title=Remembering the Pint-Size Jewish Fireplug. |url= |magazine=''Slate'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Levine |first=Andrea |title=The Jewish White Negro: Norman Mailer’s Racialized Bodies. |url= |journal=''MELUS'' |volume=28.2 |issue= |date= |pages=59-81 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Elmer |first=Clifton |date=1931 |title=''Little Caesar.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968a |title='' The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'' |url= |location=New York |publisher= New American Library |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1|date=1968b |title=''Beyond the Law'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1|title=A Course in Film-Making. |url= |journal=''Existential Errands'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972a |pages=123-168 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1|date=1991 |title=''Harlot’s Ghost.'' |url= |location= |publisher=Random House, |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |authormask=1|first=Norman |date=2008 |title=In the Ring: Grappling with the Twentieth Century. |url= |magazine=''The New Yorker.'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1|date=2006 |title=Interview by Gilles Boulenger. |url= |work= |location=Cinémalta |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1|title=.Some Dirt in the Talk. |url= |journal=''Existential Errands.'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972b |pages=89-123 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |authormask=1|first=Norman |date=1959 |title=The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. |url= |magazine=''Advertisements for Myself'' |pages=337-358 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1|date= |title=''Wild 90'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Metz |first=Christian |date=1982 |title=''Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mewshaw |first=Michael |title=Vidal and Mailer |url= |journal=''South Central Review'' |volume=4-14 |issue= |date=2002 |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1970 |title=''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=O'Reilly |first=Jane |date=1974 |title=Diary of a Mailer Trailer. |url= |magazine=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' |pages=195-215 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Rushdie |first=Salman |date=1992 |title='' The Wizard of Oz'' |url= |location=London |publisher=BFI |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite AV media| last = Hawks| first = Howard| title = Scarface| date = 1932| type = Film| ref = harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Scott |first=A.O. |date=2007 |title=Norman Mailer Unbound and On Film: Revisiting His Bigger-Than-Life-Selves. |url= |magazine=''The New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Silverman |first=Kaja |date=1988 |title=''The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema.'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Sokolsky |first=George E. |date=1962 |title=These Days: The First Lady. |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stern |first=Steve |date=2010 |title=''The Frozen Rabbi'' |url= |location=Chapel Hill |publisher=Algonquin P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Stevens |first=Joe |date=2008 |title=The FBI’s-Year Campaign to Ferret Out Norman Mailer. |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Tanenhouse |first=Sam |date=2005 |title=TheBuckley Effect |url= |magazine=''New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Pennebaker |first= Dir D.A |date= |title=''Town Bloody Hall.'' |url= |work= |location=Pennebaker Hegedus Films |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite report |author=United States Federal Bureau of Investigation |date=1962–1975 |title=Memo to Staff |work=File on Norman Kingsley Mailer |publisher=Federal Bureau of Investigation |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:MAKING MASCULINITY AND UNMAKING JEWISHNESS: NORMAN MAILER’S VOICE IN
''WILD 90'' AND ''BEYOND THE LAW''}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law

2025-04-19T18:41:29Z

JKilchenmann: fix multiple Mailer works in 1968 and 1972

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in ''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law''}}
{{Working}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline |last=Cohen |first=Sarah Jo |abstract=A discussion of Mailer’s career, interrelating Mailer’s ethnicity with his corpus of work, with special attention to his cinematic work. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr05coh }}

{{dc|dc=N|orman Mailer’s sizable FBI file begins with his voice.}} The 165 pages of Mailer’s 171-page file available to the public cover fifteen years of observation and surveillance, and includes materials ranging from endless notes tracking Mailer’s passport applications and international travel, to FBI agents’ reviews of Miami and the Siege of Chicago (with meticulous notes about each mention of the FBI), and even a letter from a high school teacher asking J. Edgar Hoover for permission to teach ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{efn|In a letter dated March 18, 1964, also included in Mailer’s file, Hoover wrote back telling the teacher that this request was beyond his area of jurisdiction because the FBI “neither makes evaluations nor draws conclusions as to the character of integrity of any organization, publication, or individual,” and because Hoover has made it a habit “not to comment on any material not prepared by the FBI.”}} The file begins, however, with a clipping from ''The Washington Post'', a June 6, 1962, George Sokolsky column called “These Days,” that moved J. Edgar Hoover to leave a note for his staff reading, “Let me have memo on Mailer.”{{sfn|United States Federal Bureau of Investigation|1962–1975}} Sokolsky’s article responds to an ''Esquire'' piece Mailer wrote about then first lady Jackie Kennedy that describes Mrs. Kennedy’s voice as “a quiet parody of the sort of voice one hears on the radio late at night, dropped softly into the ear by girls who sell soft mattresses, depilatories, or creams to brighten the skin.”{{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}} Sokolsky takes offense at Mailer’s mockery of Mrs. Kennedy and scrutiny of her voice, responding, “[A] person’s voice is what it is. I never heard Norman Mailer’s voice but whatever the Lord gave him, baritone or tenor, soprano or bass, it is what it is, and he can thank the good Lord that he does not suffer from cerebral palsy or some such thing.”{{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}} Mailer’s voice, however, much like his persona, is not at all God-given and never “is what it is.” Rather, Mailer’s{{pg|183|184}}

voice is a deliberate construction pieced together from bits of others’ voices in order to mask the adenoidal voice of his childhood.

Mailer reflects briefly upon his voice in his chronicle of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'', written in the third person with himself as its main character. Part IV of ''Armies'' begins with an apology from Mailer for bringing the story of the March on the Pentagon to a climax and then launching into a diversion about his relationship to film and the cameras following him through the melee of the march. Mailer writes of his relationship to film: “he had on screen in this first documentary a fatal taint, a last remaining speck of the one personality he found absolutely insupportable—the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn. Something in his adenoids gave it away—he had the softness of a man early accustomed to mother-love.”{{sfn|Mailer|1968a|pg=152}} For Mailer, the paradoxical experience of seeing his voice undermines the masculinities he works to materialize in his career as a writer and public intellectual, which he goes on to enumerate: “warrior, presumptive general, ex-political candidate, embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling sweet wives, amiable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter.” As a result of feeling outed on film as a “nice Jewish boy,” “accustomed to mother love,” our presumptive general and champion of obscenity vows to “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself.”{{sfn|Mailer|1968a|pg=152}}

The problem of Mailer’s voice is intimately connected with both sexuality and masculinity. The adenoids, after all, are located in the nose, a stereotypical marker of Jewish otherness and degeneracy. We do not need Sander Gilman to tell us, although he does in the chapter of ''The Jew’s Body'' entitled “The Jewish Nose,” that the Jewish nose is the locus of redirected anxiety about the Jewish penis—both are body parts that develop and take shape at puberty—the latter of which is a threat to national purity through its potential to increase the Jewish population. The adenoidal voice signals a kind of impotence for Mailer, revealing him as accustomed to mother love, and functions as “the acoustic mirror in which the male subject hears all the repudiated elements of his infantile babble.”{{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}} The infantile babble here, the mother tongue of the mother’s voice, is Yiddish.{{efn|Mary V. Dearborn writes that Mailer picked up Yiddish at home from his parents, “enough so that many years later, in Germany, he was able to ask for directions in this language and be understood.” {{harvtxt|Dearborn|1999|p=14}}}} Kaja Silverman writes that the voice of the mother resonates in the male subject and that “the male subject frequently ‘refines’ his ‘own’ voice by projecting onto the{{pg|184|185}}

mother’s voice all that is unassimilable to the paternal position.”{{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}} Mailer is a case study in this relationship to the maternal voice; when Mailer first sees himself on film, he hears the adenoidal, Jewish, maternal voice within himself. Because the paternal position Mailer strives to create is distinctly not Jewish, or at least one that allies itself with Jewishness without performing it, the mother’s voice becomes unassimilable (or in his words, “unsupportable”) to his identity. Thus, while Mailer asserts that he will “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself,” he returns to film as both actor and director in order to refine his voice by expunging its maternal layers.

Norman Mailer’s film career, often dismissed as vulgar and/or irrelevant, was short but intense; he directed four films, two of which were released in 1968, ''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'', one in 1970, ''Maidstone'', and, after a long break, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' was released in 1987.{{efn|Mailer was also featured in several documentaries during these years, including Dick Fontaine’s ''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' (1968) and ''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.'' (1970); the former is a filmic companion to ''Armies'', documenting Mailer’s actions during the March on the Pentagon, and the latter produces a record of Mailer’s 1969 New York City mayoral campaign. Mailer was also documented in Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s ''Town Bloody Hall'', a film of the 1971 debate between Mailer and Germaine Greer about women’s liberation at Town Hall in New York City.}} Mailer’s first three films were largely influenced by John Cassavetes, although Mailer predictably argues that his mastery of what he calls “existential acting” makes him a much better filmmaker than Cassavetes.{{sfn|Mailer|2006|}} In his essay, “Some Dirt in the Talk,” Mailer defines existential acting by addressing each of the terms that comprise the phrase. He notes that existentialism and acting exist at two opposite “poles,” writing, ''“If existentialism is ultimately concerned with the attractions of the unknown, acting is one of the surviving rituals of invocation, repetition, and ceremony—of propitiation to the gods.”''{{sfn|Mailer|1972b|pg=104}}{{efn|It is quite possible that Mailer is thinking in part of Kenneth Anger here, the word “invocation” invoking Anger’s ''Invocation of My Demon Brother'' (1969), as well as the ritual and ceremony of highly-stylized films like ''Kustom Kar Kommandos'' (1965) and ''Scorpio Rising'' (1964). Incidentally, in the Boulenger interview, a copy of Anger’s book ''Hollywood Babylon'' can be see on the bookshelf over Mailer’s shoulder, almost like a cartoon devil egging him on.}} His theory of existential acting, then, strives to collapse these two poles, freeing acting from repetition and ceremony, and liberating his actors (and himself) from the propitiation of the gods. Existential acting, he argues, works because in our daily lives we always pretend, lie, and act, and works by more effectively representing the chaos and “complexity of our century” than mainstream Hollywood cinema.{{sfn|Mailer|1972b|pp=90,108}} Unsurprisingly, from the man who gave us the genre-bending history as novel/novel as history, the true life novel, and the novel biography,{{efn|''The Armies of the Night'', ''The Executioner’s Song'', and ''Marilyn'', respectively.}} existential acting collapses the cinema and the outside world, documentary and fiction, acting and existentialism, and masculinity and performance, the last of which Mailer explicitly connects, writing: “There is hardly a guy alive who is not an actor to the hilt—for the simplest of reasons. He cannot be tough all the time...[s]o he acts to fill the gaps.”{{sfn|Mailer|1972b|pg=90-1}} Thus, armed with the theory and methodology of existential acting, Mailer returns to the cinema as a filmmaker for the same reason he considers turning away from it after his{{pg|185|186}}

experience in the above passage: at the same time the camera exposes one’s frailties and the identities one attempts to disguise; it bolsters the masquerade of masculinity by imprinting its performance in celluloid. The same voice that undermines Mailer’s masculinity becomes his primary means of constructing it.

In his first documentary Mailer sees “something in his adenoids” in a moment of slippage that renders the aural a visual prop. The experience of seeing his voice disrupts Mailer’s viewing experience by first troubling the traditional assumption that film is a visual medium and then forcing Mailer to confront himself as both image and sound. Mladen Dolar provides a means of understanding the revolutionary and revelatory potential of sound, in the form of the voice, in relation to both identity and film, as he writes:

<blockquote>[T]he visible world presents relative stability, permanence, distinctiveness, and a location at a distance, the audible presents fluidity, passing, a certain inchoate, amorphous character and a lack of distance. The voice is elusive, always changing, becoming, elapsing, with unclear contours, as opposed to the relative permanence, solidity, durability of the seen.{{sfn|Dolar|2006|pg=79}}</blockquote>

Here the visible is associated with stability, permanence, and distinctiveness—terms that are crucial to our understanding of cinema, but that mirror the ways we come to understand ourselves as selves. In film, the visible is assumed to guarantee presence, an assumption that stems from, among other things, the historical and philosophical privileging of the visual as a primary quality, and the problem of the voiceovers and voice-offs of sound film—which are often disembodied, absent, and coming from beyond the grave or before birth. Because the visual has historically been the privileged epistemological order through which we understand both film and identity, by focusing on sound, which is dynamic and playful, we can begin to dismantle both identity and film.{{efn|At this point in time, there is, of course, a well-established tradition of discussing sound and the voice on film—Pascal Bonitzer’s “The Silences of the Voice” (1975), Christian Metz’s “Aural Objects” (1980), Mary Anne Doane’s “The Voice in the Cinema” (1982), Michel Chion’s ''The Voice in Cinema'' (1982), and Silverman’s ''Acoustic Mirror'' (1988), just to name a few. It seems important for our purposes, however, to rehash the stakes of this discussion, especially in relation to deconstructing/reconstructing/constructing Mailer’s masculinity.}} As Mailer sees his voice, witnessing his insides (in the form of his adenoids) undermining his outsides, the visual and audible come together, undoing the binary oppositions between seeing and hearing, insides and outsides.

Dolar contrasts the visible to the audible, arguing that the latter is associated with a lack of distance, a lack of distance perhaps best embodied by the uterine envelope created by the mother’s voice. This lack of distance with{{pg|186|187}}

regard to the sound of the voice stems from the fact that the voice is simultaneously sent and delivered, thus folding back on itself and troubling the boundaries between self and other. This lack of distance is also precisely what Mailer experiences when he sees himself in his first documentary, at once spoken and heard. While Christian Metz dismisses seeing oneself on screen as an impossibility,{{efn|In ''Imaginary Signifier'', Metz writes that “there is one thing and one thing only that is never reflected in [the screen]: the spectator’s own body.” {{harvtxt|Metz|1982|p=45}}}} feminist film theory calls attention to the discomfort that comes from not being granted the distance that the visible demands. In “Film and the Masquerade,” Mary Anne Doane argues that the female spectator goes largely untheorized because the historical “imbrication of the cinematic image and the representation of the woman” leaves her too close to the image.{{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=76}} Doane theorizes that in order to achieve the distance necessary to watch and appreciate film, female spectators assume a metaphorical feminine mask, which “in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance.”{{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=81}} Doane then briefly considers why men do not have to masquerade as more masculine spectators, writing, “The very fact that we can speak of a woman ‘using’ her sex or ‘using’ her body for particular gains is highly significant—it is not that a man cannot use his body in this way but that he doesn’t have to.”{{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=82}}

But using his body for particular gains is precisely what Mailer does, as exemplified in Diane Arbus’s 1963 photograph of Mailer. If, as Mailer quipped, “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby,” this hand grenade caught an image that exemplifies how Mailer flaunts his masculinity by holding it at a distance.{{sfn|Hagberg|2008|pg=211}} In this photograph, we see Mailer is in his standard three-piece suit, sprawled out in a writerly looking high-backed chair. His right hand looks as though clasping an invisible cigarette, or pen, or as if gesturing to emphasize a point. His forehead is wrinkled in thought, and his blue eyes glow even in black and white. While his clothing, his chair, his furrowed brow, and his mouth, slightly agape in apparent mid-sentence, add up to an image we would expect of a great writer, his posture suggests otherwise; immediately, our attention is drawn to Mailer’s crotch. Thus, this image reveals both Mailer’s efforts to underscore his masculinity, placing his crotch front and center, and the vulnerability of this masculinity—in this moment, we wouldn’t need a grenade to cause Mailer a great deal of pain; a swift kick would suffice. The simultaneous power and vulnerability of Mailer’s crotch underscores his efforts to use the visibility of his body to counteract the invisibility of his voice, and his{{pg|187|188}}

hidden adenoids. We see Mailer engaged in a manly masquerade, as his proximity to the image allows him to manipulate it.

So male spectators need to masquerade as well—especially male spectators who find themselves closer to the image than they would like. The Jewish male is one such figure, as a result of a history of anti-Semitic visual representations of Jews in both scientific and popular media. Sander Gilman argues that such visual representations are internalized by contemporary Jewish-American writers, registering most prominently in repeated anxiety about sounding too Jewish.{{sfn|Gilman|1991|pg=10-37}} Mailer’s anxiety about his adenoids is decisively Jewish, both because the adenoids are located in the nose and because they give the Jewish voice its stereotypical nasal quality. Mailer’s attempt to work through this anxiety in his films is twofold. First, he gets on the other side of the camera in order to see rather than be seen, and when he is seen (as actor), it is under his own direction. Second, Mailer employs his voice in order to intervene, destabilize, and distance himself from the power of the image.

''Wild 90'', as it repeatedly calls attention to issues of seeing and visibility, provides the best examples of Mailer’s effort to seize control of his visual representation in order to produce a record of his masculinity. Mailer accomplishes this task not only by “writing,”{{efn|The word “writing” is in quotes in this sentence because while Mailer is given credit for writing the film, for example on the ''Internet Movie Database'', existential acting relies on improvisation and thus has no script, per se.}} editing, and directing the film, but also, by playing a boxer in league with mafiosi, who have the police under their control. In this film the Maf Boys, three men who spend the film holed up in a Brooklyn warehouse, watch over the New York Police Department, a position emphasized by their location many stories above the city street. The NYPD, however, asserts that the Maf Boys would not have lived past thirteen had the Irish and Jewish cops not been watching out for them—so a network of interlaced looks, and interlaced ethnicities, emerges. But perhaps the most striking look is Mailer’s own. As a character known as “the Prince,” Mailer is perpetually at the mirror, greasing up his hair and combing out its kinky curls. This position is crucial to Mailer’s management of his visual representation: from the mirror, much as in his position as director, Mailer can see both himself and the actors behind him; he can also control his image, making sure his mane and signature sneer are exactly as he wants them to appear. The metaphorical significance of Mailer’s mirror scenes almost goes without saying—at these times we are treated to moments of silence rare in his film (or writing, or political) career in which Mailer uses the visuality of film to construct and maintain the visibility of identity, to reg-{{pg|188|189}}

ister his transformation here from nice Jewish boy to badass boxer. Despite this love affair with his image, Mailer shatters the filmic mirror when, at the conclusion of ''Wild 90'', the Prince demands to speak to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, and informing the audience that the CIA{{efn|Mailer had a strong distaste for the CIA, an organization that he saw as the paragon of both surveillance culture and WASP culture. Mailer’s 1300-plus-page novel ''Harlot’s Ghost'' provides an extended though indirect glimpse into his dislike for the CIA and is almost agonizing to read because its narrator, Harry Hubbard, is a boring, WASPy, CIA agent. It’s also worth noting that Hubbard refers to the one Jewish agent in the CIA, Reed Arnold Rosen, as “adenoidal” {{harvtxt|Mailer|1991|p=61}}.}} is watching all of us. He then goes on to tell us, in his garbled, drunken voice that his favorite author is Norman Mailer—presumably, because he is both his creator and a substantial part of his self.

Mailer’s appearance, particularly in the mirror scenes of ''Wild 90'', is crucial to his efforts to make masculinity and unmake Jewishness, two concepts at odds because of the internalization of a long history of popular representations and stereotypes of the weak Jew. While Mailer combats this weakness in part through his tough guy exterior—carefully cultivated through hard-drinking, hard-talking, and hard-fighting in an effort to make himself out as a latter-day Hemingway—Mailer’s voice registers this construction as well. In the notes taken during my first screenings of ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'', I repeatedly try to describe the voice of the characters he portrays. In my notes on ''Beyond the Law'', I wrote that the poor sound quality of the film combines with Mailer’s voice to create the effect of almost incomprehensible yelling from Lt. Francis Xavier Pope for an hour and twenty-four minutes. My notes on Mailer’s gangster voice as the Prince of ''Wild 90'' remark that his accent makes him sound like a cross between Marlon Brando and Fred Flintstone with marbles in his mouth. In my second viewing, I crossed out this assessment and wrote that he sounded more like Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion from the ''Wizard of Oz''. I am not alone in trying to describe Mailer’s voice. Michael Mewshaw describes Mailer’s voice as “the Irish brogue of a whiskey priest” coming from the body of a man who “looked about as threatening as a teddy bear”{{sfn|Mewshaw|2002|pg=14}}, and Jane O’Reilly notes that “words rumble and bubble and jump out, in a variety of accents: New York, faintly southern, all g’s dropped (as in ‘Ah’m talkin’) when he is particularly shy.”{{sfn|O'Reilly|1974|p=198}} {{efn|Salman Rushdie describes Bert Lahr’s lion voice is strikingly similar words, “all elongated vowel sounds (''Put ’emuuuuuuuup''),” and the Cowardly Lion’s personality as one that sounds a lot like Mailer’s: “transparent bravado and huge, operatic, tail-tugging, blubbing terror.” {{harvtxt|Rushdie|1992|p=48}}}} More recently, in an article about the New York Mailer retrospective, A.O. Scott describes Mailer’s voice as a “rapid, forceful stream of half-baked nostrums and brilliant ''aperçus'' delivered in that inimitable accent, an audible palimpsest of Mr. Mailer’s Brooklyn childhood, his Ivy League education and his World War II combat service in an Army unit composed mainly of Texans and Southerners.”

All of this is to say that the voices of Mailer’s characters (including the character “Norman Mailer,” who becomes a formal entity in ''The Armies of''{{pg|189|190}}

''the Night'', but who was roaming the streets of America and Europe at least since the publication of ''The Naked and the Dead'') are a response to the anxiety of sounding too Jewish. The adenoidal voice Mailer hears in his first documentary, the unsure voice of the Brooklyn Jew, transforms into a cacophony of accents—Southern, Irish, Italian, Brooklyn—which together make Mailer’s voice the voice of immigrant America. Paul Breines writes that discursive constructions of Jewish weakness arise from and refer to the rootlessness of the Diaspora.{{sfn|Breines|1990|p=195}} For Breines, tough Jewishness is a performance on the part of secular Jews that is largely associated with Zionism, and its creation first of tough Jewish pioneers, and then, after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, of tough Israeli soldiers.{{sfn|Breines|1990|p=195}} Mailer, however, described his relationship to Judaism in this way: “I am a Jew out of loyalty to the underdog. I would never say I was not a Jew, but I took no strength from the fact.{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|pg=14}} With this in mind, Mailer’s voice is a tough Jewish voice, but one that revises Breines’ toughness by drawing strength from a composite of immigrant voices, rooted, if at all, in American soil rather than Israeli. Mailer brings these immigrant voices together to construct a hybrid masculinity that is not only part white Negro and part tough Jew, but that is also comprised of Italian-American, Irish-American, Southern, and Texan parts, among others. Thus, Mailer simultaneously makes and unmakes Jewish masculinity by borrowing from other masculinities in the process of making himself into a palimpsest.

Mailer’s essay, “The White Negro,” is the site most often returned to in order to discuss his contribution to the theories of tough Jewish discourse and of masculinity.{{efn|See Levine and Damon. Damon pithily writes that “The White Negro” “claims to be about how the white man envies the Black man’s sexuality and thus tries to emulate his style, but [its] subtext is about how the Jewish man envies and wants to emulate the gentile man’s sexuality, but can’t say so.” {{harvtxt|Damon|2000|p=149}}}} This essay, which argues that the hipster’s existential, psychopathic masculinity is particularly well-suited for the Cold War political climate, is infamous not only because it espouses Reichian connections between sex and violence, but also because it argues that “the Negro,” who “relinquish[es] the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body,” provides a model for how to live violently and sexually.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=341}} Both because of and despite its racist enlistment of African-American men, Mailer’s essay celebrates and identifies with black masculinity as a means of embracing otherness without admitting Jewishness. With its repeated references to the figure of “the psychopath,” who “murders—if he has the courage,” however, Mailer’s essay is also about criminality, which is a crucial source of his on-screen tough Jewish persona.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=347}} While this persona borrows its style and hipness from African Americans, it{{pg|190|191}}

almost literally ventriloquizes through the voices of Irish Americans and Italian Americans, particularly those of Hollywood cops and crooks.

Forging a criminal enterprise, and/or performing criminal masculinity, is a traditional means of assimilation for immigrant populations in America, which for the second wave of European immigrants begins with the Irish in the 1850s and is then passed on to Italian and Jewish immigrants two generations later.{{efn|A classic example appears in Sergio Leone’s Jewish gangster film, ''Once Upon a Time in America''—which stars the perpetually ethnicity-crossing Robert De Niro and for which Mailer flew to Rome 1976 in to work on the screenplay. {{harvtxt|Mewshaw|2002|p=14}} For a recent example, see Stern’s ''The Frozen Rabbi'', a comic whirlwind tour through the history of American Jewry that follows one family from the Russian Pale to Memphis, Tennessee, with a stop in New York, where one family member, Ruby “Kid” Karp, becomes a notorious gangster.}} While criminality provided immigrant gangsters with increased notoriety and power, immigrant groups who became police officers saw a similar rise in status—and much like criminals, in part because it was hoped that they could infiltrate the criminal scenes of their brethren, it was the Irish who were cops first, followed by Italians and Jews.{{sfn|Fried|1993|pg=xv}} While this history suggests discrete ethnic groups who cross paths but not cultures, cinematic representations of the outlaw capitalism of mobsters often star Jewish immigrants in the role of Italian immigrants and thus demonstrate ethnic crossings similar to those in Mailer’s films. The results register in the voice; in ''Little Caesar''{{sfn|Elmer|1931}} Edward G. Robinson, né Emanuel Goldenberg, stars as the adenoidal Cesar Enrico Bandello, and in ''Scarface'',{{sfn|Hawks|1932}} Paul Muni, né Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, stars as Antonio Camonte whose Italian accent has a near Yiddish lilt.

In a 1965 letter to William F. Buckley, a man whose mid-century faux British accent made his voice almost as strange and remarkable as Mailer’s{{efn|Buckley is also both WASPy and a former CIA agent. See William F. Buckley, Jr., “Who Did What?”}} Mailer hands the crown of “most hated man in American life” over to Buckley. The letter responds to Buckley’s recent speech before the Holy Name Society, an annual gathering of Catholic police officers, in which Buckley criticized the news media for overemphasizing police brutality during the recent civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama.{{sfn|Tanenhouse|2005|}} When the ''Herald Tribune'' and civil rights activists caught wind of these remarks, and the rumors that the assembled police officers laughed and applauded upon hearing them, a media frenzy ensued which elicited a letter from Mailer, weighing in on Buckley’s speech by clarifying his own relationship to the boys in blue:

<blockquote>I’m not the cop-hater I’m reputed to be, and in fact police fascinate me. But this is because I think their natures are very complex, not simple at all, and what I would object to ...is that you made a one-for-one correspondence between the need to maintain law and order and the nature of the men who would main-{{pg|191|192}}

tain it. The policeman has I think an extraordinarily tortured psyche. He is perhaps more tortured than the criminal.{{sfn|Mailer|2008|p=8}}</blockquote>

Perhaps as a result of their tortured psyches, Mailer repeatedly turns to cops and crooks as the focus of and source of conflict in his oeuvre. For Mailer, cops are men in power who are repeatedly outwitted by clever, hypermasculine, criminals: think Stephen Rojack and Gary Gilmore, the respective heroes of ''An American Dream'' and ''The Executioner’s Song'', who commit numerous crimes in single volumes, and the Norman Mailer of ''The Armies of the Night'', arrested by U.S. Marshalls for crossing a police line at the Pentagon. There is also the Norman Mailer who stabbed his second wife, and the one who nearly lost an eye after fighting a group of hoodlums who insinuated that his dog was a “faggot.”{{sfn|Hitchens|2007|}} Mailer, as his art and life suggest, sees the tension between cops and criminals as one that is inside of everyone. In a discussion of ''Beyond the Law'' in an interview with Gilles Boulenger, Mailer reveals that the film “had a notion at the core of it that worked—which is that everybody has a cop or a criminal in them” and that, “when you put people together—one playing a cop and one playing a crook—you get the dynamism that comes from the fact that every cop in real life has a potential criminal in him and every criminal in real life, or almost every criminal in real life, has a potential cop within their soul.”{{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}

Mailer sees the conflict between cops and crooks as one that inhabits the film set as well. In “A Course on Film-Making,” he describes cameramen and union grips, who “usually dress like cops off duty and are built like cops (with the same heavy meat in the shoulders, same bellies oiled in beer), which is not surprising for they are also in surveillance upon a criminal activity: people are forging emotions under bright lights… [l]ike cops they see through every fake move and hardly care.”{{sfn|Mailer|1972a|p=133}} Here the crew, who are equated with cops, are set up in opposition to the actors whom they put under surveillance and, more indirectly, to the director, who for Mailer is always an outlaw resisting the tyranny of the image, striving to disrupt the conventions of polite cinema through a refusal to use a script, and insisting upon including as much verbal and auditory obscenity as humanly possible. Thus, even when Mailer plays a cop in ''Beyond the Law'', this portrayal becomes an effort similar to that of the director whose film tramples upon respectability. Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope inhabits the body of the cop in order{{pg|192|193}}

to mock him and to illustrate a psyche more tortured than that of the criminal.

In ''Beyond the Law'', as Mailer takes on the role of a cop, anxieties about Jewishness, being seen, and the voice come together. ''Beyond the Law'' tells the story of one night in a police precinct in which a number of criminals are interrogated, ranging from a motorcycle gang, to a man who murdered his wife with an axe, to the members of a sadomasochistic whipping club. The film takes us back and forth between the precinct, where we see the cops in action, and a bar, where we see the cops off-duty, having drinks. Toward the film’s conclusion, these spaces intersect as Lieutenant Pope brings one of the women from the whipping club, a stunning Syrian woman named Lee Ray Rogers, to the bar. Rogers’ tripartite name, cobbled together from pieces of Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray,{{efn|The name also refers to Republican luminary and soon to be Nixon Administration Secretary of State William P. Rogers, who would go on to negotiate an Arab-Israeli peace treaty in 1973.”}} suggests that she too will be an assassin of sorts, or at least that she will bring the little death of orgasm to Lieutenant Pope. Just before Rogers arrives, Pope (Mailer’s Irish-American cop, whose rank and name suggest that he is only slightly less than the Bishop of Rome) and Mickey Berk (Mickey Knox’s Jewish-American cop, feminized through a last name that is cockney rhyming slang for cunt),{{efn|See also entry for “Berk” on ''London Slang.com: “Rhyming Slang'', short for ‘Berkshire Hunt’, meaning ‘cunt’. Most people go around calling people ‘berks’ for years not realizing that it is slang for one of the strongest swear words in the English language.”}} have a heart to heart in the men’s room in which Pope remarks, “I used to have no respect for the Jewish cops until the Israelis showed the Arabs where to go. And then I said to myself, maybe Berk has more than even I thought.” Pope then mutters under his breath for a couple of minutes, and quietly says to himself, “The Irish never won a war."

Once Rogers arrives, Pope asks the other officers to leave them alone. An intimate conversation follows, during which the two imagine an S&M scene and Pope refers to his penis as “the avenger.” A difficult to obtain “blue” version of the film exists in which we presumably see Pope’s avenger in action. For our purposes, however, it is even more striking to see him ''voicing'' his potency and sexuality, while Mailer’s voice revealed him as soft in his first documentary, Pope tells us here that he is hard. Pope expresses the ethnic crossing that facilitates his hardness in this conversation as well, as he tells Rogers, “You bring out the Italian in me.” Ultimately, Pope’s blonde wife arrives at the bar, cramping his style, and commands him to end this conversation. Thus the film concludes with Pope at the nexus of several ethnicities: pitted against an Arab dominatrix and an emasculating ''shiksa'', the Irish Pope arms himself with an Italian libido, and metaphorically whips out his{{pg|193|194}}

avenger in the name of both the Jews, who showed the Arabs where to go, and the Irish who never won a war.

In “A Course in Filmmaking,” Mailer argues that after the advent of sound, film started to mimic theater, and that the work of film should be to get away from this mimicry in order to accomplish things that can only be accomplished on film. As films that are uniquely filmic, Mailer gives the example of ''The Maltese Falcon'', but also of the Marx Brothers’ films, in which the brothers “stampeded over every line of a script and tore off in enough directions to leave concepts fluttering like ticker tape on the mysterious nature of the movie art.”{{sfn|Mailer|1972a|p=129}} The Marx brothers are important ancestors in Mailer’s filmic genealogy, in part because they too are Jews who remix ethnicity on film, as Chico becomes Italian and Zeppo becomes the brothers’ WASPy foil. And like Mailer’s films, much of the chaos and anarchy that unfurls in the Marx Brothers’ films stems from sound, in the form of elaborate musical numbers, Groucho’s wordplay, Chico’s Italian accent and piano playing, Harpo’s horn-honking, and even his silence. For both the Marx Brothers and Mailer, the work of cinema is to unravel itself, to make and unmake a universe in the same space, to challenge conventions. Where the Marx brothers wreak havoc, for example, upon the university in ''Horse feathers'', and upon dictatorship in ''Duck Soup'', Mailer wreaks havoc upon language and good taste as he attempts to create the film with the most “repetitive pervasive obscenity of any film ever made” with ''Wild, 90'' and upon both his own voice and the human eardrum with the perpetual yelling of Lt. Pope in ''Beyond the Law''. Mailer even tells us, “''Wild 90'' seems close to nothing so much as the Marx Brothers doing improvisations on ''Little Caesar'' with the addition of a free run of obscenity equal to ''Naked Lunch'' or ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''”{{sfn|Mailer|1972b|p=90}} It is as though Mailer sees ''Wild 90'' as an almost unimaginable supplement to the Marx Brothers’ oeuvre—a vision of what their tough Jewish contribution to cinema would look like had they ever assumed the roles of mafiosi.

In Mailer’s universe, the borders between Mailer and his characters are always fragile. He tells us in the Boulenger interview that in the making of ''Beyond the Law'' he would torture the actors playing the crooks, who were all friends of his, by interrogating them about things they had done in their real lives.{{efn|The best example of this existential interrogation occurs as Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope interrogates Peter Rosoff, whom Mailer asserts was a closeted homosexual, accusing him of soliciting sex in a subway men’s room. {{harvtxt|Mailer|2006}}}} In his writing and his introductory remarks included on the French DVDs of his films, Mailer repeatedly tells us that the goal of existential acting is to create a fictional documentary.{{sfn|Mailer|2006|}} Here is an ex-{{pg|195|196}}

ample, taken from his discussion of the successes and failures of ''cinéma vérité'' in “A Course on Filmmaking”: “It was as if there was a law that a person could not be himself in front of a camera unless he pretended to be someone other than himself. By that logic, ''cinéma vérité'' would work if it photographed a performer in the midst of his performance.”{{sfn|Mailer|1972a|p=147}} Mailer’s films elaborate upon his ideas about existential filmmaking: it is only in the act of performing as a character (Lieutenant Pope) that the actor reveals himself (Norman Mailer). Pope/Mailer’s sarcastic comment about not respecting the Jews until they showed the Arabs their military might is a line almost directly out of Breines’ ''Tough Jews'', or vice versa, Pope/Mailer’s comment is part of the discourse surrounding the 1968 war that inspired ''Tough Jews''. Either way, with this line, Mailer introduces himself into the lineage of tough Jews but with his own spin. When Pope tells us that Lee Ray Rogers brings out the Italian in him, he speaks for Mailer as well. Because Jewish masculinity for Mailer is always borrowed from and channeled through other ethnic masculinities, Pope’s words are as good as Mailer’s saying that Rogers brings out the Jew in him, and Mailer’s (via Pope’s) tough Jew is always already fighting, whether he is pushing Arabs out of Palestine or fighting to defend his dog’s honor. Thus, much as Mailer helped to unmake cinema as he made it, Mailer makes Jewishness as he unmakes it—masculinity unravels as the film does the same, moving from real to reel.

== Notes ==
{{notelist}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Breines |first=Paul |date=1990 |title=''Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry.'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Basic Books |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Buckley |first=William F. |date=2005 |title= Who Did What? |url= |magazine=''National Review'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Damon |first=Maria |title=Triangulated Desire and Tactical Silences in the Beat Hipscape: Bob Kaufman and Others. |url= |journal=College Literature |volume=27.1 |issue= |date=Winter 2000 |pages=139-157 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dearborn |first=Mary V. |date=1999 |title=''Mailer: A Biography'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Doane |first=Mary Anne |date=1981 |title=Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator. |url= |location=''Screen 23'' |publisher= |pages=74-87 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dolar |first=Mladen |date=2006 |title=''A Voice and Nothing More'' |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher= MIT P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1968 |title=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? '' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fried |first=Albert |date=1993 |title=''The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Gilman |first=Sander |date=1991 |title=The Jewish Voice: Chicken Soup or the Penalties of Sounding too Jewish. |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hagberg |first=Gary |date=2008 |title=''Art and Ethical Criticism.'' |url= |location=Malden, MA |publisher=Wiley-Blackwell |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hitchens |first=Christopher |date=2007 |title=Remembering the Pint-Size Jewish Fireplug. |url= |magazine=''Slate'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Levine |first=Andrea |title=The Jewish White Negro: Norman Mailer’s Racialized Bodies. |url= |journal=''MELUS'' |volume=28.2 |issue= |date= |pages=59-81 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Elmer |first=Clifton |date=1931 |title=''Little Caesar.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968a |title='' The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'' |url= |location=New York |publisher= New American Library |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1|date=1968b |title=''Beyond the Law'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1|title=A Course in Film-Making. |url= |journal=''Existential Errands'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972a |pages=123-168 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1|date=1991 |title=''Harlot’s Ghost.'' |url= |location= |publisher=Random House, |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |authormask=1|first=Norman |date=2008 |title=In the Ring: Grappling with the Twentieth Century. |url= |magazine=''The New Yorker.'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1|date=2006 |title=Interview by Gilles Boulenger. |url= |work= |location=Cinémalta |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1|title=.Some Dirt in the Talk. |url= |journal=''Existential Errands.'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972b |pages=89-123 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |authormask=1|first=Norman |date=1959 |title=The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. |url= |magazine=''Advertisements for Myself'' |pages=337-358 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1|date= |title=''Wild 90'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Metz |first=Christian |date=1982 |title=''Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mewshaw |first=Michael |title=Vidal and Mailer |url= |journal=''South Central Review'' |volume=4-14 |issue= |date=2002 |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1970 |title=''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=O'Reilly |first=Jane |date=1974 |title=Diary of a Mailer Trailer. |url= |magazine=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' |pages=195-215 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Rushdie |first=Salman |date=1992 |title='' The Wizard of Oz'' |url= |location=London |publisher=BFI |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite AV media| last = Hawks| first = Howard| title = Scarface| date = 1932| type = Film| ref = harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Scott |first=A.O. |date=2007 |title=Norman Mailer Unbound and On Film: Revisiting His Bigger-Than-Life-Selves. |url= |magazine=''The New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Silverman |first=Kaja |date=1988 |title=''The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema.'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Sokolsky |first=George E. |date=1962 |title=These Days: The First Lady. |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stern |first=Steve |date=2010 |title=''The Frozen Rabbi'' |url= |location=Chapel Hill |publisher=Algonquin P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Stevens |first=Joe |date=2008 |title=The FBI’s-Year Campaign to Ferret Out Norman Mailer. |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Tanenhouse |first=Sam |date=2005 |title=TheBuckley Effect |url= |magazine=''New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Pennebaker |first= Dir D.A |date= |title=''Town Bloody Hall.'' |url= |work= |location=Pennebaker Hegedus Films |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite report |author=United States Federal Bureau of Investigation |date=1962–1975 |title=Memo to Staff |work=File on Norman Kingsley Mailer |publisher=Federal Bureau of Investigation |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:MAKING MASCULINITY AND UNMAKING JEWISHNESS: NORMAN MAILER’S VOICE IN
''WILD 90'' AND ''BEYOND THE LAW''}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Jive-Ass Aficionado: Why Are We in Vietnam? and Hemingway's Moral Code

2025-04-16T12:11:43Z

JKilchenmann: fix bottom of page 194

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Jive-Ass Aficionado: ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' and Hemingway's Moral Code}}
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{{byline| last=Plath |first=James |abstract=An analysis of the influence of Hemingway on Norman Mailer’s ''Why Are We in Vietnam?{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}''It is Mailer and D.J.’s adoption of the Hipster mind-set and way of talking that sets them apart from others, even more so than the hunter’s code of honor. And being an insider—someone who knows what the outside world can only imagine—is perhaps the most crucial element of ''aficion'', as Hemingway detailed it. |url=. . .}}

{{dc|dc=I|n ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' Norman Mailer alludes}} to James Joyce twice (126, 149){{sfn|Mailer|1967}}, and certainly his 1967 anti-war novel has a Joycean feel. It incorporates the same sort of monologic stream-of-consciousness narrative and
language play as we saw in ''Ulysses'', all tinged with the “color” that put "Ulysses" on trial in America for obscenity. But Mailer’s novel is also richly evocative of that other great modernist writer, Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway was conspicuously singled-out with a few adjectives when Mailer told an interviewer six years earlier that if he has “one ambition above all others, it is to write a novel which Dostoevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even old moldering Hemingway might come to read” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=76}}.A close reading reveals
that ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} may actually be that novel, but I’ll leave it to future critics to explore how it would have appealed to the sensibilities of the other writers mentioned. I’m going to focus on Hemingway, because apart from echoes of Joyce’s style, his influence here seems most prevalent.

As Laura Adams observes, “three of the most powerful influences on Mailer’s scheme of things have been war and Ernest Hemingway and the intersection of the two.” {{sfn|Adams|1976|p=173}} Mailer told an interviewer that Hemingway’s death made him feel “a little weaker” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=71}}, no doubt because he had felt a connection. Like Hemingway, Mailer wrote about boxing, he
wrote about bullfighting, he talked tough, he hung out with tough friends, he went to war, he wrote about war, he backed the underdog, he infuriated feminists, he was suspicious of governmental structures, and he seemed to{{pg|194|195}}
take special delight in writing fiction that shocked readers or showcased his “insider” knowledge. “Hemingway and Fitzgerald are important imaginative figures in my life,” Mailer told the ''Washington Post Book World'' in 1971, explaining that “in Hemingway and Fitzgerald, it’s the sensuous evocation of things. The effect on the gut is closer to poetry” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=189}}.

''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} Mailer seems to have borrowed a number of
things from Hemingway, including the narrative structure for the novel,
Hemingway’s “iceberg theory” of omission, the attempt to make the reader
actually experience the fiction in his “gut,” and thematic elements that reflect the code and code heroes that Robert Penn Warren and Philip Young recognized during the early years of Hemingway scholarship.

In the spring of 1924 Hemingway had written the lower-case in our time,
which consisted of eighteen vignettes drawn from the young writer’s journalistic observations of political upheaval, war, and bullfighting, published in an edition of only 170 copies. For ''In Our Time,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} which was released by a major publisher in a first edition of 1,335 copies, he elevated two of those vignettes to stories and used the other sixteen as interlocutory chapters inserted in front of each of the longer new stories that he had crafted, most of which involved a coming-of-age protagonist named Nick Adams. To solve the problem of having an extra vignette, Hemingway broke the last story—“Big Two-Hearted River”—into Parts I and II. Interestingly, as Michael Reynolds reminds, Hemingway later said he always intended the vignettes to function as “chapter headings,” explaining, “‘You get the close up very quietly but absolutely solid and the real thing but very close, and then through it all between every story comes the rhythm of the in our time chapters’”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=233}}. As Hemingway further clarified for critic Edmund Wilson, his intent was to “give the picture of the whole between examining it in detail.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1981|p=128}}

That’s exactly how ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} is structured with similar effects that it has on the reader. Just as Hemingway’s short stories focused onNick and the personal lives of people “in his time,”while the vignettes served as newspaper-headline reminders of the violent, larger world that was affecting individual psyches, so, too, Mailer’s highly personalized and detailed narrative of sixteen-year-old D.J.’s hunting trip with his father, his father’s business associates, and his best friend Tex in the rugged Brooks Range of Alaska is intercut with “Intro Beeps” that serve the same function and add “rhythm” as did Hemingway’s vignettes. The chapters in ''Why Are We in''{{pg |195|196}}
''Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} focus on the story of the hunting trip, while the Intro Beeps are digressively vocal ''tour de forces'' that give Mailer the chance to evoke a broader world by allowing D.J. the freedom to rant about things outside the constraints of narrative. For one thing, the Intro Beeps feature the narrator as an eighteen-year-old, so there is a broader prospective already involved. D.J. at eighteen is wiser than D.J. at sixteen, who is recalled in the main narrative. In the Intro Beeps D.J. thinks and “speaks” in an even more pronounced stream-of-consciousness while at a dinner party his parents throw for him the night before he and Tex are scheduled to ship out to fight in Vietnam. It is in these numbered Intro Beeps where D.J., unfettered by storytelling, can rant and ramble about more general and abstract topics like the teachings of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher who warned that the media and the constant bombardment of pop culture messages would have a deleterious effect on the human condition (Mailer, ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} p=8).
It is these big-picture concerns that surface mostly in the Intro Beeps and do indeed remind the reader of a world outside the hunting narrative of the novel, just as listening to a radio dee-jay makes one aware of the source and also other listeners—a “broadcast” that is simultaneously reaching a larger world. And that in itself can be unsettling. “As D.J. suggests,” one critic observes, “society acts as a kind of succubus upon the unconscious of Americans so that ‘you never know what vision has been humping you through the night.’”{{sfn|Wenke|1987|p=123}}
Although the white noise of media forms a powerful current that runs
through the whole of D.J.’s Intro Beeps, the young narrator also weaves in his musings about bullfighting, machismo, existential dread, and Freudian theories on the centrality of sex and sexual issues. It is also in these Intro Beeps where Mailer teases readers by having D.J. insist, as early as Beep 4, that he may not be a white, young, and virile genius from Texas after all—maybe he’s really the voice of Black America:
<blockquote>I, D.J., am trapped in a Harlem head which has gone so crazy that I think I am sitting at a banquet in the Dallas ass white-ass manse remembering Alaska am in fact a figment of a Spade gone ape in the mind from outrageous frustrates wasting him and so now living in an imaginary white brain. . . .{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=58}}</blockquote>{{pg|196|pg 197}}
As Adams notes, “Although D.J. can ‘see right through shit,’{{sfn|Adams|1976|p=49}} he is not emancipated (he is only a ‘presumptive philosopher’{{sfn|Adams|1976|p=93}}, and the reader has no alternative but to confront the narrative’s white noise” {{sfn|Adams|1976|p=127}}. Hemingway famously remarked, “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it”{{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=128}}. Though D.J. has enough “radar” to make connections between corporate power, “yes men,” sexual acts, hunting, power-brokering, commercialism, and politics, he seems as affected by society’s white noise as he hopes his own “broadcasts” will be on readers, listeners, anyone within psychic earshot. And his voice deliberately shifts so many times that it is hard for anyone to get a “fix” on him. Hemingway’s ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}}, not coincidentally, produced a similar effect. Michael Reynolds puts it best: “Eliot used so many voices in ''The Wasteland'' that it was hard to say when he was speaking. When Hemingway finished ''in our time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}}, he achieved something of the same effect.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=125}}. The same is true with D.J., whose narrative voice encompasses a disc jockey’s Hipster talk and bemused take on society, philosophical riffs from a deep thinker, more standard narration, and anger-fueled rants that suggest a disturbed side we suspect will come out in full flower once D.J. finds himself in Vietnam: “That’s how they talk in the East, up in those bone Yankee ass Jew circumcised prick Wall Street palaces—take it from D.J.—he got psychic transistors in his ear (one more gift of the dying griz) which wingding on all-out pickup each set of transcontinental dialogues from the hearts of the prissy-assed and the prigged. Fungatz, radatz, and back to piss” (Mailer, ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} p=151). Yet, the more he gets close to his father or describes the hunt in detail, the more D.J. settles into a less provocative, more evocative narration that comes closer to a standard issue voice, if there is such a thing:
<blockquote>On and on they go for half an hour, talking so close that D.J. can even get familiar with Rusty’s breath which is all right. It got a hint of middle-aged fatigue of twenty years of doing all the little things body did not want to do, that flat sour of the slightly used up, and there’s a hint of garlic or onion, and tobacco, and twenty years of booze gives a little permanent rot to the odor coming off the lining of the stomach. . . . {{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=133}}</blockquote>{{pg|197|198}}
That the multiple voices and structure of ''Why Are We in Vietnam''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}? derive from ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} seems even more likely when one considers Mailer’s ending. Curiously, like Hemingway, Mailer also breaks his final narrative installment—Chapters Ten and Eleven—into two, although there is no logical reason for doing so. The tenth chapter ends, “And the boys slept” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=197}}; the eleventh begins, “And woke up in three hours. And it was black, and the fire near to out” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=199}}, in what is most probably a reference to Hemingway’s narrative divisions for “Big-Two Hearted River”—inexplicable to the reading public unless, of course, one considers Hemingway’s desire to incorporate all of the vignettes from ''in our time''. Here, Mailer apparently has a little joke at Hemingway’s expense, breaking up the narrative but then actually drawing attention to the break by juxtaposing the two chapters with no Intro Beep between them, using conjunctions to show they should or could have been one, and positioning the final Intro Beep at the very end of the novel, the way that Hemingway ended his book. By so doing, Mailer engages in an intertextual dialogue with his literary “papa,” as he does with other literary forebears in the interlocutory sections.

It is in the Intro Beeps where Mailer situates his attempts at creating a
new American fictional voice by invoking the book that Hemingway said
begat modern American fiction—Mark Twain’s ''Huckleberry Finn'' {{sfn|Hemingway|1935|p=23}}—which D.J. talks about in Intro Beep 1. The next
major, irreverent young voice in American fiction was undoubtedly Holden
Caulfield, J.D. Salinger’s hero from ''The Catcher in the Rye,'' to whom D.J. refers in Intro Beep 2, along with “Call me Ishmael” Melville. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=26}} With these references, Mailer obviously was drawing attention to young D.J. as a new American Adam with a new and distinctive voice that, like his predecessors, questions or indicts current society for its misguided thinking and behavior.

Just as Hemingway opted for irony in his title—Philip Young suggests the
likelihood that ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} is a “sardonic allusion to a well-known phrase
from the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer: ‘Give peace in our
time, O Lord’” (5)—Mailer took the title of an address that President Lyndon Johnson gave at Johns Hopkins University in the spring of 1965 (“Why We Are in Vietnam”), in which Johnson presented his case for American involvement, then turned Johnson’s explanatory title into a question . . .which, of course, it was becoming by the spring of 1966 when Mailer began ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} Why ''was'' America in Vietnam, and more importantly,{{pg|198|199}}
why would there be, at the time Mailer was inspired to write this novel, still such flag-waving support for Johnson’s war?

As historian John Hellman reports, it begins earlier, during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, whose “well-publicized interest in the Special Forces made them extensions of the commander-in-chief, just as the Hunters of Kentucky and the Rough Riders had once magnified the respective images of Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt” {{sfn|Hellman|1986|p=44}}. Hellman identified the Green beret as a “contemporary reincarnation of the western hero” who “personified the combined virtues of civilization and savagery without any of their respective limitations” {{sfn|Hellman|1986|pp=45-46}}—which helps to explain why the bestselling novel to come out of the Vietnam War era wasn’t any of the realistic accounts that generated support for the anti-war movement, but rather Robin Moore’s ''The Green Berets,'' published in 1965. This flag-waving novel that lionized the Special Forces reached Number 5 on the bestseller list in hardcover, and when it appeared in paperback that same year, “buyers at drugstore racks made it what ''80 Years of Best-Sellers'' calls‘ the phenomenon of the year, with 1,200,000 printed in only two months,’” Hellman writes. It inspired former Green Beret Barry Sadler to record his “Ballad of the Green Berets,” which vaulted to Number 1 on the Billboard charts and “reportedly induced so many enlistments of young men hoping to become Green Berets that the Selective Service was able to suspend draft calls during the first four months of 1966” {{sfn|Hellman|1986|p=53}}.

If Mailer found such early support for the war maddening, in this antiwar novel he again takes his cue from Hemingway, whose famous “iceberg theory” dictated, “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them” {{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=192}}. Hemingway felt that the writing becomes more powerful by omitting things you know, and the quintessential examples of the theory in practice are to be found in the short story “Hills Like White Elephants,” in which a couple avoids talk of a pregnancy and abortion, and the final story from ''In Our Time.''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|}} Of “Big Two-Hearted River, Pts. I & II,”Hemingway wrote, “The Story was about coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war in it” {{sfn|Hemingway|1964|p=76}}. Nick is a young veteran who not only finds no hero’s welcome; his favorite wilderness fishing area looks like a war zone, blackened by fire. And that{{pg|199|200}}
external devastation mirrors the interior landscape of his war-ravaged soul. No mention of the war is necessary.

Mailer accomplishes nearly the same thing by titling his book with a blunt
question and then appearing to avoid it for the length of the entire narrative. “Vietnam” is mentioned only once in the book . . . and on the final page, in the final sentence. It is almost as if the character of D.J. took on a life of his own and steamrolled in whatever direction his voice could take him, and to whatever end. The mention of the word is, in fact, so shocking by the time we hear it that it almost has the feel of authorial intrusion. And Mailer was well aware of the gap that could be created between a strong fictional character living in the text and the author himself. As he wrote in an essay on “Miller and Hemingway”:

<blockquote> [I]f we take ''The Sun Also Rises''{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|}} as the purest example of a book whose protagonist created the precise air of a time and a place, even there we come to the realization that Hemingway at the time he wrote it could not have been equal to Jake Barnes—he had created a consciousness wiser, drier, purer, more classic, more sophisticated and more graceful than his own. He was still
gauche in relation to his creation. {{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=91}}</blockquote>

Partly that is because Hemingway, through his narrative personae, was
determined not to describe “or depict life—or criticize it—but to actually
make it alive. So that . . . you actually experience the thing” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=153}}. Laura Adams was the first to see a similar technique at work in ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}, although she stopped short of drawing the connection to Hemingway in identifying the “radical promise” of Mailer’s novel, which is that the reader will not only receive an adequate account of the way things are in America (“know what it’s all about”), but also experience at the level of sensibility remission from the cultural plague that is “an ultimate disease against which all other diseases are in design to protect us” {{sfn|Adams|1976|p=124}}. Adams concludes, in language that makes us think of Hemingway’s goals, “The radicalized or ‘shamanized’ reader, whose silence has been rewarded, participates in Mailer’s attempt to reintegrate the old, now suppressed, human circuitry with the baneful new.” {{sfn|Adams|1976|p=124}} And this happens, as it does in Hemingway, through detailed description and a compelling new narrative voice. As one critic astutely observes, D.J. makes us experience the{{pg|200|201}}
narrative more viscerally “through language that is a free and manic association of puns, obscenities, hip slang, jive-talking rhyme, technologese, and mutated psychological jargon”{{sfn|Wenke|1987|p=123}}. D.J.’s voice is such a dominant and constant presence that the very act of listening to him makes us feel as if we are indeed “experiencing” D.J. and his concerns, rather than simply
reading about them. Like Hemingway’s Nick Adams, D.J. is also bursting with existential dread—though for neither young man is it a philosophical position. Rather, it is a near-paralyzing condition that afflicts them both, despite Mailer’s hero being more flippant about it. Hemingway’s young Adams was so shocked
after he suddenly “realized that some day he must die. It made him feel quite
sick” {{sfn|Hemingway|1972|p=14}}. Nick is the first of many Hemingway alter egos who experiences the pangs of existential dread, which Jake Barnes succinctly summarized: “It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=34}} D. J., meanwhile, is “up tight with the concept of dread”:
<blockquote>ever read ''The Concept of Dread'' by Fyodor Kierkegaard? No, well
neither has D.J. but now he wants to know how many of you assholes even knew, forgive me, Good Lord, that Fyodor Kierkegaard has a real name, ''Sören'' Kierkegaard. Contemplate that. You ass. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=34}}</blockquote>
D.J. too has a moment in which he recognizes his mortality, and “D.J.
breathes death—first time in his life—and the sides of the trail slam onto his
heart like the jaws of a vise . . . like attack of vertigo when stepping into dark and smelling pig shit, that’s what death smells to him.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=136}} With Harry, Hemingway’s dying hero from “Snows of Kilimanjaro,” he sensed death’s presence and “he could smell its breath” {{sfn|Hemingway|2003b|p=54}}. But of all the things that D.J. and the Hemingway heroes share in common, it’s an ostensible cure for dread—a moral code for doing things precisely and with
passion—that gives them a sense of importance as well as being, and offers
both respite from those dread-full nights and the courage to confront the
possibility of death by day.
As Barry Leeds notes, “The story of the hunting trip embodies certain
mythic elements (notably the initiation into manhood of D.J. and Tex) and
proceeds along a line of progressively more crucial conflicts between man {{pg|201|202}}
and nature.”{{sfn|Leeds|1969|p=181}} But the conflicts also manifest themselves as an alpha male
competition and a clash of values over the right and wrong ways of doing
things—what Hemingway dubbed ''“aficion”'' in ''The Sun Also Rises:'' ''“Aficion'' means passion. An ''aficionado'' is one who is passionate about the bullfights. All the good bull-fighters stayed at Montoya’s hotel; that is, those with ''aficion'' stayed there. The commercial bull-fighters stayed once, perhaps, and then did not come back” {{sfn|Leeds|1969|p=131}}. In ''The Sun Also Rises,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} aficion is linked to bullfighting, but Hemingway scholars have extended the term to apply to the
Hemingway code hero and code aspirant who live according to principles
that elevate them above others. As Robert Penn Warren observes,
<blockquote>Hemingway’s characters are usually tough men, experienced in
the hard worlds they inhabit, and not obviously given to emotional display or sensitive shrinking. . . . His heroes are not squealers, welchers, compromisers, or cowards. . . .They represent some notion of a code, some notion of honor, that makes a man a man, and that distinguishes him from people who merely follow their random impulses and who are, by consequence, “messy.” {{sfn|Warren|1974|p=79}}</blockquote>
For the Hemingway hero, this meant high standards and an equally high
skill level, whether it is keeping his lines “straighter than anyone” as Santiago did in ''The Old Man and the Sea'' {{sfn|Hemingway|1952|p=32}}, or knowing “how to
blow any sort of bridge that you could name,” as with Robert Jordan in ''For
Whom the Bell Tolls'' {{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=4}}. And in the matter of hunting, it means precise, accurate shots that make for clean and humane kills.
Someone familiar with Hemingway will find it difficult to read ''Why We Are in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} without thinking of ''Green Hills of Africa,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1935}} Hemingway’s fictionalized account of his much-anticipated 1934 safari with his wife, Pauline, and Key West best-friend Charles Thompson—a safari which, according to
biographer Michael Reynolds, “degenerated badly,” turning into an alpha-male contest of measurements between Hemingway and Thompson {{sfn|Reynolds|1989|pp=162-65}}. But more than that, it was a contrast between Poppa’s (Hemingway’s) ''aficion'' and Karl’s (Thompson’s) apparent indifference to or ignorance of the higher values.
Poppa’s values are established early in the novel. In addition to insisting
that guns be kept clean and in perfect working order and becoming angry if
they’re not, {{sfn|Hemingway|1935|p=146}} he also has a keen sense of the “rules” of {{pg|202|203}}
hunting.“God damn them,”he says of Karl and his guides and bearers.“What
the hell did he have to blow that[salt]lick to hell for the first morning and gut shoot a lousy bull and chase him all over the son-of-a-bitching-country spooking it to holy bloody hell”—too much shooting at the wrong place, which spoils the hunting for miles, and then a bad shot that makes the animal suffer
{{sfn|Hemingway|1935|p=148}}. D.J. has a similar reaction when he watches his friend squeeze off a bad shot on a wolf: “Tex took him down with a shot into the gut and at first he could have been there dead, the animal fell and for an instant the hills clapped
together” and “D.J. was on with the blood, he was half-sick having watched
what Tex had done, like his own girl had been fucked in front of him and better, since he had had private plans to show Tex what real shooting might be.”
{{sfn|Mailer|1967|pp=68-69}} Hunting is linked to manhood in both Hemingway’s and Mailer’s novels, and though “Rusty’s got cunt in him”
{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=120}}, D.J. is “the only one not to shoot at the female grizzer.” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=121}}
In ''Green Hills,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1935}} Poppa’s superior skills and knowledge are demonstrated
later, when he insists on going after kudu at dusk, leaving the guide who insisted, “Hunt tomorrow” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=164}}. Then, confronting the kudu he
knew would be there, Poppa “saw the bead centered exactly where it should
be just below the top of the shoulder and squeezed off.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=165}} And when he thought it ran off into the forest they pursued and he shot again, only to realize that he had felled the first one with a clean shot and a second one as
well, he was even more ecstatic that he hadn’t just wounded the first animal.
Both had trophy racks, and there was much elation . . . until they got back
to camp and saw that Karl had somehow bagged a bigger one {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=205}}. The hunt was pure competition, not recreation, and that’s the way the hunting trip plays out in Mailer’s novel.
Like Pop, the Great White Hunter in ''Green Hills''{{sfn|Hemingway|1935}}, and Wilson in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber{{sfn|Hemingway|2003a|pp=5-28}},”Big Luke is the big expert on hunting in his particular stretch of wilderness, and his derision or validation of those who hire his services somehow matters. It does to D.J., who himself has already pronounced similar judgment on the “medium-grade and high-grade asshole” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=50}} that compete in his corporate culture. Even Rusty, the corporate “father” as well as D.J.’s, is in it hoping to bag a big-enough bear for Big Luke to say that he got off “a fair shot” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=51}}—just a little show of approval, which is all, one suspects, that D.J. ever wanted from his father.{{pg|203|204}}
The closest D.J. comes to that approval is when he and Rusty break off
from the rest of the group as Hemingway’s hero did—“‘Son, let’s split from
Luke the Fink cause he ain’t going to get your ass or mine near a grizzer’ {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=123}}. Alone and apart from the main competition, they become “real good,
man, tight as combat buddies” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=128}}. Rusty tells D.J. how much he learned
about hunting from his father and passes on this bit of advice, which ironically D.J. already knows: “‘the only time a good man with a good rifle is in trouble is when he steps from sunlight into shadow, cause there’s two or
three seconds when you can’t see’” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=132}}. Together they decide to let an old
caribou pass without shooting at him and stick to the grizzly they’re trying
to bag—and the bear, which is “about as frightening as a stone-black seven foot three-hundred-pound Nigger,” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=135}} provides D.J.’s chance to shine, perhaps because he knows how a “bear” of this metaphorical nature thinks, him being a “black-ass cripple Spade” from Harlem, and all {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=208}}. In the matter of black culture, white noise, and an elevated form of hunting that respects nature, D.J. has ''aficion''. There are “those who know and those who do not
know when a very bad grizz is near to you (a final division of humanity)
and D.J. knew, and D.J. was in love with himself because he did not wish to
scream or plead, he just wished to encounter Mr. D., big-ass grizz.” {sfn|Mailer|1967|p=140}}

When a grizzly bear charges them and both men fire, wounding it, their
disparate level of ''aficion'' is also made clear. Rusty’s impulse is to blame the absent guide for “‘sticking us around the chimney’” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=142}}. D.J. is more tuned in to nature and the dynamics of the natural world, and he realizes that “no man cell in him can now forget that if the center of things is insane, it is insane with force” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=143}}. Although Rusty is hesitant to pursue the wounded
grizzly into thick brush, as Francis Macomber was reluctant to pursue the
lion early in “The Short Happy Life,”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003a}} D.J.’s self-encouragement—“That’s
it”—echoes what Wilson told Macomber who seemed suddenly cheerful and
determined to face the lion. “‘After all, what can they do to you?’” Macomber
says, and Wilson responds, “‘That’s it. . . . Worst one can do is kill you.’”
{{sfn|Hemingway|2003a|p=25}} D.J. would rather face God than“ look into the contempt and contumely of that State of Texas personified by Gottfried
Tex Hyde Jr.” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=143}}.

Another interesting Hemingway-Mailer crossover occurs when both men shoot at the grizzly and only D.J. has the nerve to walk close to make sure he’s dead. Yet, Rusty (“wetting his pants, doubtless”) takes credit for the kill shot, ultimately choosing the respect of the other hunters over the respect of his {{pg|204|205}}
son, none of which is lost on D.J. After the grizzly is felled by both men
shooting and Rusty takes the credit, he forever alienates his son: “Final end
of love of one son for one father.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=147}} That is different from a similar scene
in ''Green Hills''{{sfn|Hemingway|1935}} in which Poor Old Mama and Poppa shoot at a lion, and while
the “killing of the lion had been confused and unsatisfactory,” Poppa
nonetheless gives the credit to his wife, even after seeing that the bullet dug
out of the animal came from his gun.{{sfn|Hemingway|1986|pp=36-37}}. As Foster notes,
<blockquote>D.J. breaks spiritually with his father when, out of habits of competitive vanity and self-justification, his father claims the grizzly bear that D.J. has mortally wounded, violating not only the father-son bond as reinforced by the hunt (stalking their dangerous quarry D.J. sees himself and his father as ‘war buddies’) but also the sacred blood bond between killer and prey. {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=20}}</blockquote>
Would D.J. have gone off to war a different man had his father given him
the credit?
Mailer says in the introduction to ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} that he had intended to write about a murderous Charles Manson-style clan in Provincetown, but began with a chapter on hunting bear in Alaska as “a prelude,”
with the boys “still young, still mean rather than uncontrollably murderous”
so that “the hunting might serve as a bridge to get them ready for more.”
{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=10}} As Foster summarizes,

<blockquote>High on pot, the prose of the Marquis de Sade and William Burroughs, and the cheerfully psychotic inspiration that he may be the voice of a ‘Harlem spade’ imprisoned in the body of the son of a white Dallas tycoon, he tells the story of how he got that way. It is an initiation story (new style) as An ''American Dream'' was a new-style story of sacrifice and redemption. {{sfn|Foster|1968|pp=19-20}}</blockquote>

How D.J. got that way explains how America got where it is, and why, by novel’s end, a boy who has enough aficion to know right from wrong in the matter of hunting etiquette seems suddenly hot to board that plane for “Vietnam, hot damn” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=208}}. Unless, of course, he is the voice of an ironist who asks which is worse, Harlem guiding Dallas or vice versa? The Hipster or the Redneck?{{pg|205|206}}
Ultimately, it is Mailer and D.J.’s adoption of the Hipster mind-set and
way of talking that sets them apart from others, even more so than the
hunter’s code of honor. And being an insider—someone who knows what
the outside world can only imagine—is perhaps the most crucial element
of ''aficion'', as Hemingway detailed it. “Jake achieves prominence in the group
because he is the aficionado,” Linda Wagner-Martin observes. And with Barnes as narrator {{sfn|Hemingway|1926}}, “Hemingway tries to use that mocking, quasi-humorous tone that he chooses for his ''Esquire'' columns during the 1930s, for ""Green Hills of Africa""{{sfn|Hemingway|1935}}, and for some of his stories” {{sfn|Hemingway|1935|p=10}}. In ""The Sun Also Rises""{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}}, the Pamplona hotel owner who has ''aficion'' and who boards bullfighters that share his ''aficion'', puts his hand on Jake Barnes’ shoulder and smiles. Jake writes,
<blockquote>He always smiled as though bull-fighting were a very special secret between the two of us; a rather shocking but really very deep secret that we knew about. He always smiled as though there were something lewd about the secret to outsiders, but that it was something that we understood. It would not do to expose it to people who would not understand. {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=131}}</blockquote>
Likewise, in ''Green Hills of Africa'', Poppa’s prowess and hunting ''aficion'' earns him a special tribal handshake “using the thumb which evidently denoted
extreme emotion” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=167}}; later, he asks what it means, and Pop explains, “It’s on the order of blood brotherhood but a little less formal,” and quips, “You’re getting to be a hell of a fellow” when he hears that the Massai have accepted Poppa into their circle {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=206}}.
“Hip makes for a livelier vocabulary, a more stylish way of carrying oneself, more and better orgasms,” writes one critic. {{sfn|Dupree|1972|p=101}} The Hipster, which D.J. embraces, is a culture whose Mandarin language is understood only by members of an exclusive group, the same as with Hemingway’s heroes. “The Hipster is, of course, only one of many possible realizations of the ‘new consciousness’ of which Mailer is the prophet,” Foster concludes {{sfn|Foster|1968|p=26}} and prophets are always insiders. By the end of ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}; it has become clear that D.J. is indeed an insider with a unique and prophetic voice. He’s also a true aficionado. But the disturbing question (and the force behind what power the novel possesses) is, as Mailer was fully{{pg|206|207}}
aware, of ''what?'' More and better orgasms? As Hemingway’s war-wounded
hero quips at the end of ''The Sun Also Rises''{{sfn|Hemingway|1986}},“Isn’t it pretty to think so?” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=247}}.

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}

* {{cite book |last= Adams|first= Laura|date=1976 |title=Existential Battles: The Growth of Normal Mailer.|location= Athens: Ohio UP |publisher=Print |pages= |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Dupree |first= F.W.|date=1972 |title=“The American Norman Mailer.”Norman Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays.|location= Englewood Cliffs, N.J.|publisher=Prentice Hall|editor= Ed Leo Braudy |pages= 96-103|ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Foster |first= Richard|date=1968 |title=Norman Mailer |location= Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press. Print |publisher=Unversity of Minnesota Pamphlets of American Writers No. 73 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Hellman |first= John|date=1986 |title=American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam|location= New York |publisher=Columbia UP, Print. |pages= |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest|date=1986 |title=Conversations with Ernest Hemingway. |location= Jackson: UP of Mississippi|editor = Ed Matthew J. Bruccoli |publisher=|ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine|last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1932 |title=''Death in the Afternoon''|location= New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons. Print|ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine|date=1981 |last=Hemingway| first= Ernest |author-mask=1 ||title=''Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters'' |editor = Ed. Carlos Baker |location= New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine| last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1940 |title=''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' |location= New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons, 2003. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine| last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1935 |title=''Green Hills of Africa'' |location= New York |publisher= Scribner Classics, 1998. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1925 |title=''In Our Time'' |location= New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine| last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1964 |title=''A Moveable Feast'' |location= New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons, Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1952 |title=''The Old Man and the Sea'' |location= New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons, 2003. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=2003a|title="The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." ''The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.'' |location= New York |publisher= Charles Scribner's Sons|pages=5-28.Print|ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=2003b|title="The Snows of Kilimanjaro." ''The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.'' |location= New York |publisher= Charles Scribner's Son's |pages=39-56. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1926 |title=''The Sun Also Rises'' |location= New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons, 1954. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1972|title="Three Shots." ''The Nick Adams Stories.'' |location= New York |publisher= Charles Scribner's Sons |pages=13-15. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Leeds |first= Barry H|date=1969 |title=The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer |location= New York: New York UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Mailer |first= Norman|date=1988 |title=Conversations with Norman Mailer|editor= J. Michael Lennon |location= Jackson: UP of Mississippi. Print|ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer|first= Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1982|title=''Pieces and Pontifications'' |location= Boston|publisher=Little, Brown and Company, Print. |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer|first= Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1967|title=''Why are we in Vietnam?'' |location= New York |publisher=G.P. Putnam's Sons, Print | |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Reynolds |first= Michael|date=1989 |title=''Hemingway: The Paris Years |location= Oxford |publisher=Basil Blackwell, Print|ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Wagner-Martin |first= Linda|date=1987 |title=''New Essays on'' The Sun Also Rises|location= Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP, Print.|ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Warren |first= Robert Penn|date=1974 |title="Ernest Hemingway." ''Ernest Hemingway: Five Decades of Criticism|editor= Linda Welshimer Wagner|location= East Lansing; Michigan State UP |pages=79 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Wenke |first= Joseph|date=1987 |title=Mailer's America |location= Hanover N.H. UP of New England, Print. |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Young |first= Philip|date=1959 |title=''Ernest Hemingway.'' |location= Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press. Print. |publisher=University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, No. 1. |ref=harv}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Jive-Ass Aficionado: Why Are We in Vietnam? and Hemingway's Moral Code

2025-04-16T12:08:58Z

JKilchenmann: dupree=1972

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Jive-Ass Aficionado: ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' and Hemingway's Moral Code}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline| last=Plath |first=James |abstract=An analysis of the influence of Hemingway on Norman Mailer’s ''Why Are We in Vietnam?{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}''It is Mailer and D.J.’s adoption of the Hipster mind-set and way of talking that sets them apart from others, even more so than the hunter’s code of honor. And being an insider—someone who knows what the outside world can only imagine—is perhaps the most crucial element of ''aficion'', as Hemingway detailed it. |url=. . .}}

{{dc|dc=I|n ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' Norman Mailer alludes}} to James Joyce twice (126, 149){{sfn|Mailer|1967}}, and certainly his 1967 anti-war novel has a Joycean feel. It incorporates the same sort of monologic stream-of-consciousness narrative and
language play as we saw in ''Ulysses'', all tinged with the “color” that put "Ulysses" on trial in America for obscenity. But Mailer’s novel is also richly evocative of that other great modernist writer, Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway was conspicuously singled-out with a few adjectives when Mailer told an interviewer six years earlier that if he has “one ambition above all others, it is to write a novel which Dostoevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even old moldering Hemingway might come to read” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=76}}.A close reading reveals
that ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} may actually be that novel, but I’ll leave it to future critics to explore how it would have appealed to the sensibilities of the other writers mentioned. I’m going to focus on Hemingway, because apart from echoes of Joyce’s style, his influence here seems most prevalent.

As Laura Adams observes, “three of the most powerful influences on Mailer’s scheme of things have been war and Ernest Hemingway and the intersection of the two.” {{sfn|Adams|1976|p=173}} Mailer told an interviewer that Hemingway’s death made him feel “a little weaker” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=71}}, no doubt because he had felt a connection. Like Hemingway, Mailer wrote about boxing, he
wrote about bullfighting, he talked tough, he hung out with tough friends, he went to war, he wrote about war, he backed the underdog, he infuriated feminist#{{pg|194|195}}
take special delight in writing fiction that shocked readers or showcased his “insider” knowledge. “Hemingway and Fitzgerald are important imaginative figures in my life,” Mailer told the ''Washington Post Book World'' in 1971, explaining that “in Hemingway and Fitzgerald, it’s the sensuous evocation of things. The effect on the gut is closer to poetry” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=189}}.

''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} Mailer seems to have borrowed a number of
things from Hemingway, including the narrative structure for the novel,
Hemingway’s “iceberg theory” of omission, the attempt to make the reader
actually experience the fiction in his “gut,” and thematic elements that reflect the code and code heroes that Robert Penn Warren and Philip Young recognized during the early years of Hemingway scholarship.

In the spring of 1924 Hemingway had written the lower-case in our time,
which consisted of eighteen vignettes drawn from the young writer’s journalistic observations of political upheaval, war, and bullfighting, published in an edition of only 170 copies. For ''In Our Time,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} which was released by a major publisher in a first edition of 1,335 copies, he elevated two of those vignettes to stories and used the other sixteen as interlocutory chapters inserted in front of each of the longer new stories that he had crafted, most of which involved a coming-of-age protagonist named Nick Adams. To solve the problem of having an extra vignette, Hemingway broke the last story—“Big Two-Hearted River”—into Parts I and II. Interestingly, as Michael Reynolds reminds, Hemingway later said he always intended the vignettes to function as “chapter headings,” explaining, “‘You get the close up very quietly but absolutely solid and the real thing but very close, and then through it all between every story comes the rhythm of the in our time chapters’”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=233}}. As Hemingway further clarified for critic Edmund Wilson, his intent was to “give the picture of the whole between examining it in detail.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1981|p=128}}

That’s exactly how ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} is structured with similar effects that it has on the reader. Just as Hemingway’s short stories focused onNick and the personal lives of people “in his time,”while the vignettes served as newspaper-headline reminders of the violent, larger world that was affecting individual psyches, so, too, Mailer’s highly personalized and detailed narrative of sixteen-year-old D.J.’s hunting trip with his father, his father’s business associates, and his best friend Tex in the rugged Brooks Range of Alaska is intercut with “Intro Beeps” that serve the same function and add “rhythm” as did Hemingway’s vignettes. The chapters in ''Why Are We in''{{pg |195|196}}
''Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} focus on the story of the hunting trip, while the Intro Beeps are digressively vocal ''tour de forces'' that give Mailer the chance to evoke a broader world by allowing D.J. the freedom to rant about things outside the constraints of narrative. For one thing, the Intro Beeps feature the narrator as an eighteen-year-old, so there is a broader prospective already involved. D.J. at eighteen is wiser than D.J. at sixteen, who is recalled in the main narrative. In the Intro Beeps D.J. thinks and “speaks” in an even more pronounced stream-of-consciousness while at a dinner party his parents throw for him the night before he and Tex are scheduled to ship out to fight in Vietnam. It is in these numbered Intro Beeps where D.J., unfettered by storytelling, can rant and ramble about more general and abstract topics like the teachings of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher who warned that the media and the constant bombardment of pop culture messages would have a deleterious effect on the human condition (Mailer, ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} p=8).
It is these big-picture concerns that surface mostly in the Intro Beeps and do indeed remind the reader of a world outside the hunting narrative of the novel, just as listening to a radio dee-jay makes one aware of the source and also other listeners—a “broadcast” that is simultaneously reaching a larger world. And that in itself can be unsettling. “As D.J. suggests,” one critic observes, “society acts as a kind of succubus upon the unconscious of Americans so that ‘you never know what vision has been humping you through the night.’”{{sfn|Wenke|1987|p=123}}
Although the white noise of media forms a powerful current that runs
through the whole of D.J.’s Intro Beeps, the young narrator also weaves in his musings about bullfighting, machismo, existential dread, and Freudian theories on the centrality of sex and sexual issues. It is also in these Intro Beeps where Mailer teases readers by having D.J. insist, as early as Beep 4, that he may not be a white, young, and virile genius from Texas after all—maybe he’s really the voice of Black America:
<blockquote>I, D.J., am trapped in a Harlem head which has gone so crazy that I think I am sitting at a banquet in the Dallas ass white-ass manse remembering Alaska am in fact a figment of a Spade gone ape in the mind from outrageous frustrates wasting him and so now living in an imaginary white brain. . . .{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=58}}</blockquote>{{pg|196|pg 197}}
As Adams notes, “Although D.J. can ‘see right through shit,’{{sfn|Adams|1976|p=49}} he is not emancipated (he is only a ‘presumptive philosopher’{{sfn|Adams|1976|p=93}}, and the reader has no alternative but to confront the narrative’s white noise” {{sfn|Adams|1976|p=127}}. Hemingway famously remarked, “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it”{{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=128}}. Though D.J. has enough “radar” to make connections between corporate power, “yes men,” sexual acts, hunting, power-brokering, commercialism, and politics, he seems as affected by society’s white noise as he hopes his own “broadcasts” will be on readers, listeners, anyone within psychic earshot. And his voice deliberately shifts so many times that it is hard for anyone to get a “fix” on him. Hemingway’s ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}}, not coincidentally, produced a similar effect. Michael Reynolds puts it best: “Eliot used so many voices in ''The Wasteland'' that it was hard to say when he was speaking. When Hemingway finished ''in our time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}}, he achieved something of the same effect.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=125}}. The same is true with D.J., whose narrative voice encompasses a disc jockey’s Hipster talk and bemused take on society, philosophical riffs from a deep thinker, more standard narration, and anger-fueled rants that suggest a disturbed side we suspect will come out in full flower once D.J. finds himself in Vietnam: “That’s how they talk in the East, up in those bone Yankee ass Jew circumcised prick Wall Street palaces—take it from D.J.—he got psychic transistors in his ear (one more gift of the dying griz) which wingding on all-out pickup each set of transcontinental dialogues from the hearts of the prissy-assed and the prigged. Fungatz, radatz, and back to piss” (Mailer, ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} p=151). Yet, the more he gets close to his father or describes the hunt in detail, the more D.J. settles into a less provocative, more evocative narration that comes closer to a standard issue voice, if there is such a thing:
<blockquote>On and on they go for half an hour, talking so close that D.J. can even get familiar with Rusty’s breath which is all right. It got a hint of middle-aged fatigue of twenty years of doing all the little things body did not want to do, that flat sour of the slightly used up, and there’s a hint of garlic or onion, and tobacco, and twenty years of booze gives a little permanent rot to the odor coming off the lining of the stomach. . . . {{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=133}}</blockquote>{{pg|197|198}}
That the multiple voices and structure of ''Why Are We in Vietnam''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}? derive from ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} seems even more likely when one considers Mailer’s ending. Curiously, like Hemingway, Mailer also breaks his final narrative installment—Chapters Ten and Eleven—into two, although there is no logical reason for doing so. The tenth chapter ends, “And the boys slept” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=197}}; the eleventh begins, “And woke up in three hours. And it was black, and the fire near to out” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=199}}, in what is most probably a reference to Hemingway’s narrative divisions for “Big-Two Hearted River”—inexplicable to the reading public unless, of course, one considers Hemingway’s desire to incorporate all of the vignettes from ''in our time''. Here, Mailer apparently has a little joke at Hemingway’s expense, breaking up the narrative but then actually drawing attention to the break by juxtaposing the two chapters with no Intro Beep between them, using conjunctions to show they should or could have been one, and positioning the final Intro Beep at the very end of the novel, the way that Hemingway ended his book. By so doing, Mailer engages in an intertextual dialogue with his literary “papa,” as he does with other literary forebears in the interlocutory sections.

It is in the Intro Beeps where Mailer situates his attempts at creating a
new American fictional voice by invoking the book that Hemingway said
begat modern American fiction—Mark Twain’s ''Huckleberry Finn'' {{sfn|Hemingway|1935|p=23}}—which D.J. talks about in Intro Beep 1. The next
major, irreverent young voice in American fiction was undoubtedly Holden
Caulfield, J.D. Salinger’s hero from ''The Catcher in the Rye,'' to whom D.J. refers in Intro Beep 2, along with “Call me Ishmael” Melville. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=26}} With these references, Mailer obviously was drawing attention to young D.J. as a new American Adam with a new and distinctive voice that, like his predecessors, questions or indicts current society for its misguided thinking and behavior.

Just as Hemingway opted for irony in his title—Philip Young suggests the
likelihood that ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} is a “sardonic allusion to a well-known phrase
from the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer: ‘Give peace in our
time, O Lord’” (5)—Mailer took the title of an address that President Lyndon Johnson gave at Johns Hopkins University in the spring of 1965 (“Why We Are in Vietnam”), in which Johnson presented his case for American involvement, then turned Johnson’s explanatory title into a question . . .which, of course, it was becoming by the spring of 1966 when Mailer began ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} Why ''was'' America in Vietnam, and more importantly,{{pg|198|199}}
why would there be, at the time Mailer was inspired to write this novel, still such flag-waving support for Johnson’s war?

As historian John Hellman reports, it begins earlier, during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, whose “well-publicized interest in the Special Forces made them extensions of the commander-in-chief, just as the Hunters of Kentucky and the Rough Riders had once magnified the respective images of Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt” {{sfn|Hellman|1986|p=44}}. Hellman identified the Green beret as a “contemporary reincarnation of the western hero” who “personified the combined virtues of civilization and savagery without any of their respective limitations” {{sfn|Hellman|1986|pp=45-46}}—which helps to explain why the bestselling novel to come out of the Vietnam War era wasn’t any of the realistic accounts that generated support for the anti-war movement, but rather Robin Moore’s ''The Green Berets,'' published in 1965. This flag-waving novel that lionized the Special Forces reached Number 5 on the bestseller list in hardcover, and when it appeared in paperback that same year, “buyers at drugstore racks made it what ''80 Years of Best-Sellers'' calls‘ the phenomenon of the year, with 1,200,000 printed in only two months,’” Hellman writes. It inspired former Green Beret Barry Sadler to record his “Ballad of the Green Berets,” which vaulted to Number 1 on the Billboard charts and “reportedly induced so many enlistments of young men hoping to become Green Berets that the Selective Service was able to suspend draft calls during the first four months of 1966” {{sfn|Hellman|1986|p=53}}.

If Mailer found such early support for the war maddening, in this antiwar novel he again takes his cue from Hemingway, whose famous “iceberg theory” dictated, “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them” {{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=192}}. Hemingway felt that the writing becomes more powerful by omitting things you know, and the quintessential examples of the theory in practice are to be found in the short story “Hills Like White Elephants,” in which a couple avoids talk of a pregnancy and abortion, and the final story from ''In Our Time.''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|}} Of “Big Two-Hearted River, Pts. I & II,”Hemingway wrote, “The Story was about coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war in it” {{sfn|Hemingway|1964|p=76}}. Nick is a young veteran who not only finds no hero’s welcome; his favorite wilderness fishing area looks like a war zone, blackened by fire. And that{{pg|199|200}}
external devastation mirrors the interior landscape of his war-ravaged soul. No mention of the war is necessary.

Mailer accomplishes nearly the same thing by titling his book with a blunt
question and then appearing to avoid it for the length of the entire narrative. “Vietnam” is mentioned only once in the book . . . and on the final page, in the final sentence. It is almost as if the character of D.J. took on a life of his own and steamrolled in whatever direction his voice could take him, and to whatever end. The mention of the word is, in fact, so shocking by the time we hear it that it almost has the feel of authorial intrusion. And Mailer was well aware of the gap that could be created between a strong fictional character living in the text and the author himself. As he wrote in an essay on “Miller and Hemingway”:

<blockquote> [I]f we take ''The Sun Also Rises''{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|}} as the purest example of a book whose protagonist created the precise air of a time and a place, even there we come to the realization that Hemingway at the time he wrote it could not have been equal to Jake Barnes—he had created a consciousness wiser, drier, purer, more classic, more sophisticated and more graceful than his own. He was still
gauche in relation to his creation. {{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=91}}</blockquote>

Partly that is because Hemingway, through his narrative personae, was
determined not to describe “or depict life—or criticize it—but to actually
make it alive. So that . . . you actually experience the thing” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=153}}. Laura Adams was the first to see a similar technique at work in ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}, although she stopped short of drawing the connection to Hemingway in identifying the “radical promise” of Mailer’s novel, which is that the reader will not only receive an adequate account of the way things are in America (“know what it’s all about”), but also experience at the level of sensibility remission from the cultural plague that is “an ultimate disease against which all other diseases are in design to protect us” {{sfn|Adams|1976|p=124}}. Adams concludes, in language that makes us think of Hemingway’s goals, “The radicalized or ‘shamanized’ reader, whose silence has been rewarded, participates in Mailer’s attempt to reintegrate the old, now suppressed, human circuitry with the baneful new.” {{sfn|Adams|1976|p=124}} And this happens, as it does in Hemingway, through detailed description and a compelling new narrative voice. As one critic astutely observes, D.J. makes us experience the{{pg|200|201}}
narrative more viscerally “through language that is a free and manic association of puns, obscenities, hip slang, jive-talking rhyme, technologese, and mutated psychological jargon”{{sfn|Wenke|1987|p=123}}. D.J.’s voice is such a dominant and constant presence that the very act of listening to him makes us feel as if we are indeed “experiencing” D.J. and his concerns, rather than simply
reading about them. Like Hemingway’s Nick Adams, D.J. is also bursting with existential dread—though for neither young man is it a philosophical position. Rather, it is a near-paralyzing condition that afflicts them both, despite Mailer’s hero being more flippant about it. Hemingway’s young Adams was so shocked
after he suddenly “realized that some day he must die. It made him feel quite
sick” {{sfn|Hemingway|1972|p=14}}. Nick is the first of many Hemingway alter egos who experiences the pangs of existential dread, which Jake Barnes succinctly summarized: “It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=34}} D. J., meanwhile, is “up tight with the concept of dread”:
<blockquote>ever read ''The Concept of Dread'' by Fyodor Kierkegaard? No, well
neither has D.J. but now he wants to know how many of you assholes even knew, forgive me, Good Lord, that Fyodor Kierkegaard has a real name, ''Sören'' Kierkegaard. Contemplate that. You ass. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=34}}</blockquote>
D.J. too has a moment in which he recognizes his mortality, and “D.J.
breathes death—first time in his life—and the sides of the trail slam onto his
heart like the jaws of a vise . . . like attack of vertigo when stepping into dark and smelling pig shit, that’s what death smells to him.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=136}} With Harry, Hemingway’s dying hero from “Snows of Kilimanjaro,” he sensed death’s presence and “he could smell its breath” {{sfn|Hemingway|2003b|p=54}}. But of all the things that D.J. and the Hemingway heroes share in common, it’s an ostensible cure for dread—a moral code for doing things precisely and with
passion—that gives them a sense of importance as well as being, and offers
both respite from those dread-full nights and the courage to confront the
possibility of death by day.
As Barry Leeds notes, “The story of the hunting trip embodies certain
mythic elements (notably the initiation into manhood of D.J. and Tex) and
proceeds along a line of progressively more crucial conflicts between man {{pg|201|202}}
and nature.”{{sfn|Leeds|1969|p=181}} But the conflicts also manifest themselves as an alpha male
competition and a clash of values over the right and wrong ways of doing
things—what Hemingway dubbed ''“aficion”'' in ''The Sun Also Rises:'' ''“Aficion'' means passion. An ''aficionado'' is one who is passionate about the bullfights. All the good bull-fighters stayed at Montoya’s hotel; that is, those with ''aficion'' stayed there. The commercial bull-fighters stayed once, perhaps, and then did not come back” {{sfn|Leeds|1969|p=131}}. In ''The Sun Also Rises,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} aficion is linked to bullfighting, but Hemingway scholars have extended the term to apply to the
Hemingway code hero and code aspirant who live according to principles
that elevate them above others. As Robert Penn Warren observes,
<blockquote>Hemingway’s characters are usually tough men, experienced in
the hard worlds they inhabit, and not obviously given to emotional display or sensitive shrinking. . . . His heroes are not squealers, welchers, compromisers, or cowards. . . .They represent some notion of a code, some notion of honor, that makes a man a man, and that distinguishes him from people who merely follow their random impulses and who are, by consequence, “messy.” {{sfn|Warren|1974|p=79}}</blockquote>
For the Hemingway hero, this meant high standards and an equally high
skill level, whether it is keeping his lines “straighter than anyone” as Santiago did in ''The Old Man and the Sea'' {{sfn|Hemingway|1952|p=32}}, or knowing “how to
blow any sort of bridge that you could name,” as with Robert Jordan in ''For
Whom the Bell Tolls'' {{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=4}}. And in the matter of hunting, it means precise, accurate shots that make for clean and humane kills.
Someone familiar with Hemingway will find it difficult to read ''Why We Are in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} without thinking of ''Green Hills of Africa,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1935}} Hemingway’s fictionalized account of his much-anticipated 1934 safari with his wife, Pauline, and Key West best-friend Charles Thompson—a safari which, according to
biographer Michael Reynolds, “degenerated badly,” turning into an alpha-male contest of measurements between Hemingway and Thompson {{sfn|Reynolds|1989|pp=162-65}}. But more than that, it was a contrast between Poppa’s (Hemingway’s) ''aficion'' and Karl’s (Thompson’s) apparent indifference to or ignorance of the higher values.
Poppa’s values are established early in the novel. In addition to insisting
that guns be kept clean and in perfect working order and becoming angry if
they’re not, {{sfn|Hemingway|1935|p=146}} he also has a keen sense of the “rules” of {{pg|202|203}}
hunting.“God damn them,”he says of Karl and his guides and bearers.“What
the hell did he have to blow that[salt]lick to hell for the first morning and gut shoot a lousy bull and chase him all over the son-of-a-bitching-country spooking it to holy bloody hell”—too much shooting at the wrong place, which spoils the hunting for miles, and then a bad shot that makes the animal suffer
{{sfn|Hemingway|1935|p=148}}. D.J. has a similar reaction when he watches his friend squeeze off a bad shot on a wolf: “Tex took him down with a shot into the gut and at first he could have been there dead, the animal fell and for an instant the hills clapped
together” and “D.J. was on with the blood, he was half-sick having watched
what Tex had done, like his own girl had been fucked in front of him and better, since he had had private plans to show Tex what real shooting might be.”
{{sfn|Mailer|1967|pp=68-69}} Hunting is linked to manhood in both Hemingway’s and Mailer’s novels, and though “Rusty’s got cunt in him”
{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=120}}, D.J. is “the only one not to shoot at the female grizzer.” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=121}}
In ''Green Hills,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1935}} Poppa’s superior skills and knowledge are demonstrated
later, when he insists on going after kudu at dusk, leaving the guide who insisted, “Hunt tomorrow” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=164}}. Then, confronting the kudu he
knew would be there, Poppa “saw the bead centered exactly where it should
be just below the top of the shoulder and squeezed off.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=165}} And when he thought it ran off into the forest they pursued and he shot again, only to realize that he had felled the first one with a clean shot and a second one as
well, he was even more ecstatic that he hadn’t just wounded the first animal.
Both had trophy racks, and there was much elation . . . until they got back
to camp and saw that Karl had somehow bagged a bigger one {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=205}}. The hunt was pure competition, not recreation, and that’s the way the hunting trip plays out in Mailer’s novel.
Like Pop, the Great White Hunter in ''Green Hills''{{sfn|Hemingway|1935}}, and Wilson in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber{{sfn|Hemingway|2003a|pp=5-28}},”Big Luke is the big expert on hunting in his particular stretch of wilderness, and his derision or validation of those who hire his services somehow matters. It does to D.J., who himself has already pronounced similar judgment on the “medium-grade and high-grade asshole” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=50}} that compete in his corporate culture. Even Rusty, the corporate “father” as well as D.J.’s, is in it hoping to bag a big-enough bear for Big Luke to say that he got off “a fair shot” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=51}}—just a little show of approval, which is all, one suspects, that D.J. ever wanted from his father.{{pg|203|204}}
The closest D.J. comes to that approval is when he and Rusty break off
from the rest of the group as Hemingway’s hero did—“‘Son, let’s split from
Luke the Fink cause he ain’t going to get your ass or mine near a grizzer’ {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=123}}. Alone and apart from the main competition, they become “real good,
man, tight as combat buddies” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=128}}. Rusty tells D.J. how much he learned
about hunting from his father and passes on this bit of advice, which ironically D.J. already knows: “‘the only time a good man with a good rifle is in trouble is when he steps from sunlight into shadow, cause there’s two or
three seconds when you can’t see’” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=132}}. Together they decide to let an old
caribou pass without shooting at him and stick to the grizzly they’re trying
to bag—and the bear, which is “about as frightening as a stone-black seven foot three-hundred-pound Nigger,” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=135}} provides D.J.’s chance to shine, perhaps because he knows how a “bear” of this metaphorical nature thinks, him being a “black-ass cripple Spade” from Harlem, and all {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=208}}. In the matter of black culture, white noise, and an elevated form of hunting that respects nature, D.J. has ''aficion''. There are “those who know and those who do not
know when a very bad grizz is near to you (a final division of humanity)
and D.J. knew, and D.J. was in love with himself because he did not wish to
scream or plead, he just wished to encounter Mr. D., big-ass grizz.” {sfn|Mailer|1967|p=140}}

When a grizzly bear charges them and both men fire, wounding it, their
disparate level of ''aficion'' is also made clear. Rusty’s impulse is to blame the absent guide for “‘sticking us around the chimney’” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=142}}. D.J. is more tuned in to nature and the dynamics of the natural world, and he realizes that “no man cell in him can now forget that if the center of things is insane, it is insane with force” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=143}}. Although Rusty is hesitant to pursue the wounded
grizzly into thick brush, as Francis Macomber was reluctant to pursue the
lion early in “The Short Happy Life,”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003a}} D.J.’s self-encouragement—“That’s
it”—echoes what Wilson told Macomber who seemed suddenly cheerful and
determined to face the lion. “‘After all, what can they do to you?’” Macomber
says, and Wilson responds, “‘That’s it. . . . Worst one can do is kill you.’”
{{sfn|Hemingway|2003a|p=25}} D.J. would rather face God than“ look into the contempt and contumely of that State of Texas personified by Gottfried
Tex Hyde Jr.” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=143}}.

Another interesting Hemingway-Mailer crossover occurs when both men shoot at the grizzly and only D.J. has the nerve to walk close to make sure he’s dead. Yet, Rusty (“wetting his pants, doubtless”) takes credit for the kill shot, ultimately choosing the respect of the other hunters over the respect of his {{pg|204|205}}
son, none of which is lost on D.J. After the grizzly is felled by both men
shooting and Rusty takes the credit, he forever alienates his son: “Final end
of love of one son for one father.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=147}} That is different from a similar scene
in ''Green Hills''{{sfn|Hemingway|1935}} in which Poor Old Mama and Poppa shoot at a lion, and while
the “killing of the lion had been confused and unsatisfactory,” Poppa
nonetheless gives the credit to his wife, even after seeing that the bullet dug
out of the animal came from his gun.{{sfn|Hemingway|1986|pp=36-37}}. As Foster notes,
<blockquote>D.J. breaks spiritually with his father when, out of habits of competitive vanity and self-justification, his father claims the grizzly bear that D.J. has mortally wounded, violating not only the father-son bond as reinforced by the hunt (stalking their dangerous quarry D.J. sees himself and his father as ‘war buddies’) but also the sacred blood bond between killer and prey. {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=20}}</blockquote>
Would D.J. have gone off to war a different man had his father given him
the credit?
Mailer says in the introduction to ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} that he had intended to write about a murderous Charles Manson-style clan in Provincetown, but began with a chapter on hunting bear in Alaska as “a prelude,”
with the boys “still young, still mean rather than uncontrollably murderous”
so that “the hunting might serve as a bridge to get them ready for more.”
{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=10}} As Foster summarizes,

<blockquote>High on pot, the prose of the Marquis de Sade and William Burroughs, and the cheerfully psychotic inspiration that he may be the voice of a ‘Harlem spade’ imprisoned in the body of the son of a white Dallas tycoon, he tells the story of how he got that way. It is an initiation story (new style) as An ''American Dream'' was a new-style story of sacrifice and redemption. {{sfn|Foster|1968|pp=19-20}}</blockquote>

How D.J. got that way explains how America got where it is, and why, by novel’s end, a boy who has enough aficion to know right from wrong in the matter of hunting etiquette seems suddenly hot to board that plane for “Vietnam, hot damn” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=208}}. Unless, of course, he is the voice of an ironist who asks which is worse, Harlem guiding Dallas or vice versa? The Hipster or the Redneck?{{pg|205|206}}
Ultimately, it is Mailer and D.J.’s adoption of the Hipster mind-set and
way of talking that sets them apart from others, even more so than the
hunter’s code of honor. And being an insider—someone who knows what
the outside world can only imagine—is perhaps the most crucial element
of ''aficion'', as Hemingway detailed it. “Jake achieves prominence in the group
because he is the aficionado,” Linda Wagner-Martin observes. And with Barnes as narrator {{sfn|Hemingway|1926}}, “Hemingway tries to use that mocking, quasi-humorous tone that he chooses for his ''Esquire'' columns during the 1930s, for ""Green Hills of Africa""{{sfn|Hemingway|1935}}, and for some of his stories” {{sfn|Hemingway|1935|p=10}}. In ""The Sun Also Rises""{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}}, the Pamplona hotel owner who has ''aficion'' and who boards bullfighters that share his ''aficion'', puts his hand on Jake Barnes’ shoulder and smiles. Jake writes,
<blockquote>He always smiled as though bull-fighting were a very special secret between the two of us; a rather shocking but really very deep secret that we knew about. He always smiled as though there were something lewd about the secret to outsiders, but that it was something that we understood. It would not do to expose it to people who would not understand. {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=131}}</blockquote>
Likewise, in ''Green Hills of Africa'', Poppa’s prowess and hunting ''aficion'' earns him a special tribal handshake “using the thumb which evidently denoted
extreme emotion” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=167}}; later, he asks what it means, and Pop explains, “It’s on the order of blood brotherhood but a little less formal,” and quips, “You’re getting to be a hell of a fellow” when he hears that the Massai have accepted Poppa into their circle {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=206}}.
“Hip makes for a livelier vocabulary, a more stylish way of carrying oneself, more and better orgasms,” writes one critic. {{sfn|Dupree|1972|p=101}} The Hipster, which D.J. embraces, is a culture whose Mandarin language is understood only by members of an exclusive group, the same as with Hemingway’s heroes. “The Hipster is, of course, only one of many possible realizations of the ‘new consciousness’ of which Mailer is the prophet,” Foster concludes {{sfn|Foster|1968|p=26}} and prophets are always insiders. By the end of ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}; it has become clear that D.J. is indeed an insider with a unique and prophetic voice. He’s also a true aficionado. But the disturbing question (and the force behind what power the novel possesses) is, as Mailer was fully{{pg|206|207}}
aware, of ''what?'' More and better orgasms? As Hemingway’s war-wounded
hero quips at the end of ''The Sun Also Rises''{{sfn|Hemingway|1986}},“Isn’t it pretty to think so?” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=247}}.

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}

* {{cite book |last= Adams|first= Laura|date=1976 |title=Existential Battles: The Growth of Normal Mailer.|location= Athens: Ohio UP |publisher=Print |pages= |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Dupree |first= F.W.|date=1972 |title=“The American Norman Mailer.”Norman Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays.|location= Englewood Cliffs, N.J.|publisher=Prentice Hall|editor= Ed Leo Braudy |pages= 96-103|ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Foster |first= Richard|date=1968 |title=Norman Mailer |location= Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press. Print |publisher=Unversity of Minnesota Pamphlets of American Writers No. 73 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Hellman |first= John|date=1986 |title=American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam|location= New York |publisher=Columbia UP, Print. |pages= |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest|date=1986 |title=Conversations with Ernest Hemingway. |location= Jackson: UP of Mississippi|editor = Ed Matthew J. Bruccoli |publisher=|ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine|last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1932 |title=''Death in the Afternoon''|location= New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons. Print|ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine|date=1981 |last=Hemingway| first= Ernest |author-mask=1 ||title=''Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters'' |editor = Ed. Carlos Baker |location= New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine| last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1940 |title=''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' |location= New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons, 2003. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine| last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1935 |title=''Green Hills of Africa'' |location= New York |publisher= Scribner Classics, 1998. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1925 |title=''In Our Time'' |location= New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine| last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1964 |title=''A Moveable Feast'' |location= New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons, Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1952 |title=''The Old Man and the Sea'' |location= New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons, 2003. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=2003a|title="The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." ''The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.'' |location= New York |publisher= Charles Scribner's Sons|pages=5-28.Print|ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=2003b|title="The Snows of Kilimanjaro." ''The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.'' |location= New York |publisher= Charles Scribner's Son's |pages=39-56. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1926 |title=''The Sun Also Rises'' |location= New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons, 1954. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1972|title="Three Shots." ''The Nick Adams Stories.'' |location= New York |publisher= Charles Scribner's Sons |pages=13-15. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Leeds |first= Barry H|date=1969 |title=The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer |location= New York: New York UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Mailer |first= Norman|date=1988 |title=Conversations with Norman Mailer|editor= J. Michael Lennon |location= Jackson: UP of Mississippi. Print|ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer|first= Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1982|title=''Pieces and Pontifications'' |location= Boston|publisher=Little, Brown and Company, Print. |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer|first= Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1967|title=''Why are we in Vietnam?'' |location= New York |publisher=G.P. Putnam's Sons, Print | |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Reynolds |first= Michael|date=1989 |title=''Hemingway: The Paris Years |location= Oxford |publisher=Basil Blackwell, Print|ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Wagner-Martin |first= Linda|date=1987 |title=''New Essays on'' The Sun Also Rises|location= Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP, Print.|ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Warren |first= Robert Penn|date=1974 |title="Ernest Hemingway." ''Ernest Hemingway: Five Decades of Criticism|editor= Linda Welshimer Wagner|location= East Lansing; Michigan State UP |pages=79 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Wenke |first= Joseph|date=1987 |title=Mailer's America |location= Hanover N.H. UP of New England, Print. |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Young |first= Philip|date=1959 |title=''Ernest Hemingway.'' |location= Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press. Print. |publisher=University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, No. 1. |ref=harv}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Jive-Ass Aficionado: Why Are We in Vietnam? and Hemingway's Moral Code

2025-04-16T12:07:58Z

JKilchenmann: more citation fixes

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Jive-Ass Aficionado: ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' and Hemingway's Moral Code}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline| last=Plath |first=James |abstract=An analysis of the influence of Hemingway on Norman Mailer’s ''Why Are We in Vietnam?{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}''It is Mailer and D.J.’s adoption of the Hipster mind-set and way of talking that sets them apart from others, even more so than the hunter’s code of honor. And being an insider—someone who knows what the outside world can only imagine—is perhaps the most crucial element of ''aficion'', as Hemingway detailed it. |url=. . .}}

{{dc|dc=I|n ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' Norman Mailer alludes}} to James Joyce twice (126, 149){{sfn|Mailer|1967}}, and certainly his 1967 anti-war novel has a Joycean feel. It incorporates the same sort of monologic stream-of-consciousness narrative and
language play as we saw in ''Ulysses'', all tinged with the “color” that put "Ulysses" on trial in America for obscenity. But Mailer’s novel is also richly evocative of that other great modernist writer, Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway was conspicuously singled-out with a few adjectives when Mailer told an interviewer six years earlier that if he has “one ambition above all others, it is to write a novel which Dostoevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even old moldering Hemingway might come to read” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=76}}.A close reading reveals
that ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} may actually be that novel, but I’ll leave it to future critics to explore how it would have appealed to the sensibilities of the other writers mentioned. I’m going to focus on Hemingway, because apart from echoes of Joyce’s style, his influence here seems most prevalent.

As Laura Adams observes, “three of the most powerful influences on Mailer’s scheme of things have been war and Ernest Hemingway and the intersection of the two.” {{sfn|Adams|1976|p=173}} Mailer told an interviewer that Hemingway’s death made him feel “a little weaker” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=71}}, no doubt because he had felt a connection. Like Hemingway, Mailer wrote about boxing, he
wrote about bullfighting, he talked tough, he hung out with tough friends, he went to war, he wrote about war, he backed the underdog, he infuriated feminist#{{pg|194|195}}
take special delight in writing fiction that shocked readers or showcased his “insider” knowledge. “Hemingway and Fitzgerald are important imaginative figures in my life,” Mailer told the ''Washington Post Book World'' in 1971, explaining that “in Hemingway and Fitzgerald, it’s the sensuous evocation of things. The effect on the gut is closer to poetry” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=189}}.

''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} Mailer seems to have borrowed a number of
things from Hemingway, including the narrative structure for the novel,
Hemingway’s “iceberg theory” of omission, the attempt to make the reader
actually experience the fiction in his “gut,” and thematic elements that reflect the code and code heroes that Robert Penn Warren and Philip Young recognized during the early years of Hemingway scholarship.

In the spring of 1924 Hemingway had written the lower-case in our time,
which consisted of eighteen vignettes drawn from the young writer’s journalistic observations of political upheaval, war, and bullfighting, published in an edition of only 170 copies. For ''In Our Time,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} which was released by a major publisher in a first edition of 1,335 copies, he elevated two of those vignettes to stories and used the other sixteen as interlocutory chapters inserted in front of each of the longer new stories that he had crafted, most of which involved a coming-of-age protagonist named Nick Adams. To solve the problem of having an extra vignette, Hemingway broke the last story—“Big Two-Hearted River”—into Parts I and II. Interestingly, as Michael Reynolds reminds, Hemingway later said he always intended the vignettes to function as “chapter headings,” explaining, “‘You get the close up very quietly but absolutely solid and the real thing but very close, and then through it all between every story comes the rhythm of the in our time chapters’”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=233}}. As Hemingway further clarified for critic Edmund Wilson, his intent was to “give the picture of the whole between examining it in detail.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1981|p=128}}

That’s exactly how ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} is structured with similar effects that it has on the reader. Just as Hemingway’s short stories focused onNick and the personal lives of people “in his time,”while the vignettes served as newspaper-headline reminders of the violent, larger world that was affecting individual psyches, so, too, Mailer’s highly personalized and detailed narrative of sixteen-year-old D.J.’s hunting trip with his father, his father’s business associates, and his best friend Tex in the rugged Brooks Range of Alaska is intercut with “Intro Beeps” that serve the same function and add “rhythm” as did Hemingway’s vignettes. The chapters in ''Why Are We in''{{pg |195|196}}
''Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} focus on the story of the hunting trip, while the Intro Beeps are digressively vocal ''tour de forces'' that give Mailer the chance to evoke a broader world by allowing D.J. the freedom to rant about things outside the constraints of narrative. For one thing, the Intro Beeps feature the narrator as an eighteen-year-old, so there is a broader prospective already involved. D.J. at eighteen is wiser than D.J. at sixteen, who is recalled in the main narrative. In the Intro Beeps D.J. thinks and “speaks” in an even more pronounced stream-of-consciousness while at a dinner party his parents throw for him the night before he and Tex are scheduled to ship out to fight in Vietnam. It is in these numbered Intro Beeps where D.J., unfettered by storytelling, can rant and ramble about more general and abstract topics like the teachings of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher who warned that the media and the constant bombardment of pop culture messages would have a deleterious effect on the human condition (Mailer, ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} p=8).
It is these big-picture concerns that surface mostly in the Intro Beeps and do indeed remind the reader of a world outside the hunting narrative of the novel, just as listening to a radio dee-jay makes one aware of the source and also other listeners—a “broadcast” that is simultaneously reaching a larger world. And that in itself can be unsettling. “As D.J. suggests,” one critic observes, “society acts as a kind of succubus upon the unconscious of Americans so that ‘you never know what vision has been humping you through the night.’”{{sfn|Wenke|1987|p=123}}
Although the white noise of media forms a powerful current that runs
through the whole of D.J.’s Intro Beeps, the young narrator also weaves in his musings about bullfighting, machismo, existential dread, and Freudian theories on the centrality of sex and sexual issues. It is also in these Intro Beeps where Mailer teases readers by having D.J. insist, as early as Beep 4, that he may not be a white, young, and virile genius from Texas after all—maybe he’s really the voice of Black America:
<blockquote>I, D.J., am trapped in a Harlem head which has gone so crazy that I think I am sitting at a banquet in the Dallas ass white-ass manse remembering Alaska am in fact a figment of a Spade gone ape in the mind from outrageous frustrates wasting him and so now living in an imaginary white brain. . . .{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=58}}</blockquote>{{pg|196|pg 197}}
As Adams notes, “Although D.J. can ‘see right through shit,’{{sfn|Adams|1976|p=49}} he is not emancipated (he is only a ‘presumptive philosopher’{{sfn|Adams|1976|p=93}}, and the reader has no alternative but to confront the narrative’s white noise” {{sfn|Adams|1976|p=127}}. Hemingway famously remarked, “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it”{{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=128}}. Though D.J. has enough “radar” to make connections between corporate power, “yes men,” sexual acts, hunting, power-brokering, commercialism, and politics, he seems as affected by society’s white noise as he hopes his own “broadcasts” will be on readers, listeners, anyone within psychic earshot. And his voice deliberately shifts so many times that it is hard for anyone to get a “fix” on him. Hemingway’s ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}}, not coincidentally, produced a similar effect. Michael Reynolds puts it best: “Eliot used so many voices in ''The Wasteland'' that it was hard to say when he was speaking. When Hemingway finished ''in our time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}}, he achieved something of the same effect.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=125}}. The same is true with D.J., whose narrative voice encompasses a disc jockey’s Hipster talk and bemused take on society, philosophical riffs from a deep thinker, more standard narration, and anger-fueled rants that suggest a disturbed side we suspect will come out in full flower once D.J. finds himself in Vietnam: “That’s how they talk in the East, up in those bone Yankee ass Jew circumcised prick Wall Street palaces—take it from D.J.—he got psychic transistors in his ear (one more gift of the dying griz) which wingding on all-out pickup each set of transcontinental dialogues from the hearts of the prissy-assed and the prigged. Fungatz, radatz, and back to piss” (Mailer, ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} p=151). Yet, the more he gets close to his father or describes the hunt in detail, the more D.J. settles into a less provocative, more evocative narration that comes closer to a standard issue voice, if there is such a thing:
<blockquote>On and on they go for half an hour, talking so close that D.J. can even get familiar with Rusty’s breath which is all right. It got a hint of middle-aged fatigue of twenty years of doing all the little things body did not want to do, that flat sour of the slightly used up, and there’s a hint of garlic or onion, and tobacco, and twenty years of booze gives a little permanent rot to the odor coming off the lining of the stomach. . . . {{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=133}}</blockquote>{{pg|197|198}}
That the multiple voices and structure of ''Why Are We in Vietnam''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}? derive from ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} seems even more likely when one considers Mailer’s ending. Curiously, like Hemingway, Mailer also breaks his final narrative installment—Chapters Ten and Eleven—into two, although there is no logical reason for doing so. The tenth chapter ends, “And the boys slept” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=197}}; the eleventh begins, “And woke up in three hours. And it was black, and the fire near to out” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=199}}, in what is most probably a reference to Hemingway’s narrative divisions for “Big-Two Hearted River”—inexplicable to the reading public unless, of course, one considers Hemingway’s desire to incorporate all of the vignettes from ''in our time''. Here, Mailer apparently has a little joke at Hemingway’s expense, breaking up the narrative but then actually drawing attention to the break by juxtaposing the two chapters with no Intro Beep between them, using conjunctions to show they should or could have been one, and positioning the final Intro Beep at the very end of the novel, the way that Hemingway ended his book. By so doing, Mailer engages in an intertextual dialogue with his literary “papa,” as he does with other literary forebears in the interlocutory sections.

It is in the Intro Beeps where Mailer situates his attempts at creating a
new American fictional voice by invoking the book that Hemingway said
begat modern American fiction—Mark Twain’s ''Huckleberry Finn'' {{sfn|Hemingway|1935|p=23}}—which D.J. talks about in Intro Beep 1. The next
major, irreverent young voice in American fiction was undoubtedly Holden
Caulfield, J.D. Salinger’s hero from ''The Catcher in the Rye,'' to whom D.J. refers in Intro Beep 2, along with “Call me Ishmael” Melville. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=26}} With these references, Mailer obviously was drawing attention to young D.J. as a new American Adam with a new and distinctive voice that, like his predecessors, questions or indicts current society for its misguided thinking and behavior.

Just as Hemingway opted for irony in his title—Philip Young suggests the
likelihood that ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} is a “sardonic allusion to a well-known phrase
from the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer: ‘Give peace in our
time, O Lord’” (5)—Mailer took the title of an address that President Lyndon Johnson gave at Johns Hopkins University in the spring of 1965 (“Why We Are in Vietnam”), in which Johnson presented his case for American involvement, then turned Johnson’s explanatory title into a question . . .which, of course, it was becoming by the spring of 1966 when Mailer began ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} Why ''was'' America in Vietnam, and more importantly,{{pg|198|199}}
why would there be, at the time Mailer was inspired to write this novel, still such flag-waving support for Johnson’s war?

As historian John Hellman reports, it begins earlier, during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, whose “well-publicized interest in the Special Forces made them extensions of the commander-in-chief, just as the Hunters of Kentucky and the Rough Riders had once magnified the respective images of Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt” {{sfn|Hellman|1986|p=44}}. Hellman identified the Green beret as a “contemporary reincarnation of the western hero” who “personified the combined virtues of civilization and savagery without any of their respective limitations” {{sfn|Hellman|1986|pp=45-46}}—which helps to explain why the bestselling novel to come out of the Vietnam War era wasn’t any of the realistic accounts that generated support for the anti-war movement, but rather Robin Moore’s ''The Green Berets,'' published in 1965. This flag-waving novel that lionized the Special Forces reached Number 5 on the bestseller list in hardcover, and when it appeared in paperback that same year, “buyers at drugstore racks made it what ''80 Years of Best-Sellers'' calls‘ the phenomenon of the year, with 1,200,000 printed in only two months,’” Hellman writes. It inspired former Green Beret Barry Sadler to record his “Ballad of the Green Berets,” which vaulted to Number 1 on the Billboard charts and “reportedly induced so many enlistments of young men hoping to become Green Berets that the Selective Service was able to suspend draft calls during the first four months of 1966” {{sfn|Hellman|1986|p=53}}.

If Mailer found such early support for the war maddening, in this antiwar novel he again takes his cue from Hemingway, whose famous “iceberg theory” dictated, “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them” {{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=192}}. Hemingway felt that the writing becomes more powerful by omitting things you know, and the quintessential examples of the theory in practice are to be found in the short story “Hills Like White Elephants,” in which a couple avoids talk of a pregnancy and abortion, and the final story from ''In Our Time.''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|}} Of “Big Two-Hearted River, Pts. I & II,”Hemingway wrote, “The Story was about coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war in it” {{sfn|Hemingway|1964|p=76}}. Nick is a young veteran who not only finds no hero’s welcome; his favorite wilderness fishing area looks like a war zone, blackened by fire. And that{{pg|199|200}}
external devastation mirrors the interior landscape of his war-ravaged soul. No mention of the war is necessary.

Mailer accomplishes nearly the same thing by titling his book with a blunt
question and then appearing to avoid it for the length of the entire narrative. “Vietnam” is mentioned only once in the book . . . and on the final page, in the final sentence. It is almost as if the character of D.J. took on a life of his own and steamrolled in whatever direction his voice could take him, and to whatever end. The mention of the word is, in fact, so shocking by the time we hear it that it almost has the feel of authorial intrusion. And Mailer was well aware of the gap that could be created between a strong fictional character living in the text and the author himself. As he wrote in an essay on “Miller and Hemingway”:

<blockquote> [I]f we take ''The Sun Also Rises''{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|}} as the purest example of a book whose protagonist created the precise air of a time and a place, even there we come to the realization that Hemingway at the time he wrote it could not have been equal to Jake Barnes—he had created a consciousness wiser, drier, purer, more classic, more sophisticated and more graceful than his own. He was still
gauche in relation to his creation. {{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=91}}</blockquote>

Partly that is because Hemingway, through his narrative personae, was
determined not to describe “or depict life—or criticize it—but to actually
make it alive. So that . . . you actually experience the thing” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=153}}. Laura Adams was the first to see a similar technique at work in ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}, although she stopped short of drawing the connection to Hemingway in identifying the “radical promise” of Mailer’s novel, which is that the reader will not only receive an adequate account of the way things are in America (“know what it’s all about”), but also experience at the level of sensibility remission from the cultural plague that is “an ultimate disease against which all other diseases are in design to protect us” {{sfn|Adams|1976|p=124}}. Adams concludes, in language that makes us think of Hemingway’s goals, “The radicalized or ‘shamanized’ reader, whose silence has been rewarded, participates in Mailer’s attempt to reintegrate the old, now suppressed, human circuitry with the baneful new.” {{sfn|Adams|1976|p=124}} And this happens, as it does in Hemingway, through detailed description and a compelling new narrative voice. As one critic astutely observes, D.J. makes us experience the{{pg|200|201}}
narrative more viscerally “through language that is a free and manic association of puns, obscenities, hip slang, jive-talking rhyme, technologese, and mutated psychological jargon”{{sfn|Wenke|1987|p=123}}. D.J.’s voice is such a dominant and constant presence that the very act of listening to him makes us feel as if we are indeed “experiencing” D.J. and his concerns, rather than simply
reading about them. Like Hemingway’s Nick Adams, D.J. is also bursting with existential dread—though for neither young man is it a philosophical position. Rather, it is a near-paralyzing condition that afflicts them both, despite Mailer’s hero being more flippant about it. Hemingway’s young Adams was so shocked
after he suddenly “realized that some day he must die. It made him feel quite
sick” {{sfn|Hemingway|1972|p=14}}. Nick is the first of many Hemingway alter egos who experiences the pangs of existential dread, which Jake Barnes succinctly summarized: “It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=34}} D. J., meanwhile, is “up tight with the concept of dread”:
<blockquote>ever read ''The Concept of Dread'' by Fyodor Kierkegaard? No, well
neither has D.J. but now he wants to know how many of you assholes even knew, forgive me, Good Lord, that Fyodor Kierkegaard has a real name, ''Sören'' Kierkegaard. Contemplate that. You ass. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=34}}</blockquote>
D.J. too has a moment in which he recognizes his mortality, and “D.J.
breathes death—first time in his life—and the sides of the trail slam onto his
heart like the jaws of a vise . . . like attack of vertigo when stepping into dark and smelling pig shit, that’s what death smells to him.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=136}} With Harry, Hemingway’s dying hero from “Snows of Kilimanjaro,” he sensed death’s presence and “he could smell its breath” {{sfn|Hemingway|2003b|p=54}}. But of all the things that D.J. and the Hemingway heroes share in common, it’s an ostensible cure for dread—a moral code for doing things precisely and with
passion—that gives them a sense of importance as well as being, and offers
both respite from those dread-full nights and the courage to confront the
possibility of death by day.
As Barry Leeds notes, “The story of the hunting trip embodies certain
mythic elements (notably the initiation into manhood of D.J. and Tex) and
proceeds along a line of progressively more crucial conflicts between man {{pg|201|202}}
and nature.”{{sfn|Leeds|1969|p=181}} But the conflicts also manifest themselves as an alpha male
competition and a clash of values over the right and wrong ways of doing
things—what Hemingway dubbed ''“aficion”'' in ''The Sun Also Rises:'' ''“Aficion'' means passion. An ''aficionado'' is one who is passionate about the bullfights. All the good bull-fighters stayed at Montoya’s hotel; that is, those with ''aficion'' stayed there. The commercial bull-fighters stayed once, perhaps, and then did not come back” {{sfn|Leeds|1969|p=131}}. In ''The Sun Also Rises,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} aficion is linked to bullfighting, but Hemingway scholars have extended the term to apply to the
Hemingway code hero and code aspirant who live according to principles
that elevate them above others. As Robert Penn Warren observes,
<blockquote>Hemingway’s characters are usually tough men, experienced in
the hard worlds they inhabit, and not obviously given to emotional display or sensitive shrinking. . . . His heroes are not squealers, welchers, compromisers, or cowards. . . .They represent some notion of a code, some notion of honor, that makes a man a man, and that distinguishes him from people who merely follow their random impulses and who are, by consequence, “messy.” {{sfn|Warren|1974|p=79}}</blockquote>
For the Hemingway hero, this meant high standards and an equally high
skill level, whether it is keeping his lines “straighter than anyone” as Santiago did in ''The Old Man and the Sea'' {{sfn|Hemingway|1952|p=32}}, or knowing “how to
blow any sort of bridge that you could name,” as with Robert Jordan in ''For
Whom the Bell Tolls'' {{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=4}}. And in the matter of hunting, it means precise, accurate shots that make for clean and humane kills.
Someone familiar with Hemingway will find it difficult to read ''Why We Are in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} without thinking of ''Green Hills of Africa,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1935}} Hemingway’s fictionalized account of his much-anticipated 1934 safari with his wife, Pauline, and Key West best-friend Charles Thompson—a safari which, according to
biographer Michael Reynolds, “degenerated badly,” turning into an alpha-male contest of measurements between Hemingway and Thompson {{sfn|Reynolds|1989|pp=162-65}}. But more than that, it was a contrast between Poppa’s (Hemingway’s) ''aficion'' and Karl’s (Thompson’s) apparent indifference to or ignorance of the higher values.
Poppa’s values are established early in the novel. In addition to insisting
that guns be kept clean and in perfect working order and becoming angry if
they’re not, {{sfn|Hemingway|1935|p=146}} he also has a keen sense of the “rules” of {{pg|202|203}}
hunting.“God damn them,”he says of Karl and his guides and bearers.“What
the hell did he have to blow that[salt]lick to hell for the first morning and gut shoot a lousy bull and chase him all over the son-of-a-bitching-country spooking it to holy bloody hell”—too much shooting at the wrong place, which spoils the hunting for miles, and then a bad shot that makes the animal suffer
{{sfn|Hemingway|1935|p=148}}. D.J. has a similar reaction when he watches his friend squeeze off a bad shot on a wolf: “Tex took him down with a shot into the gut and at first he could have been there dead, the animal fell and for an instant the hills clapped
together” and “D.J. was on with the blood, he was half-sick having watched
what Tex had done, like his own girl had been fucked in front of him and better, since he had had private plans to show Tex what real shooting might be.”
{{sfn|Mailer|1967|pp=68-69}} Hunting is linked to manhood in both Hemingway’s and Mailer’s novels, and though “Rusty’s got cunt in him”
{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=120}}, D.J. is “the only one not to shoot at the female grizzer.” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=121}}
In ''Green Hills,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1935}} Poppa’s superior skills and knowledge are demonstrated
later, when he insists on going after kudu at dusk, leaving the guide who insisted, “Hunt tomorrow” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=164}}. Then, confronting the kudu he
knew would be there, Poppa “saw the bead centered exactly where it should
be just below the top of the shoulder and squeezed off.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=165}} And when he thought it ran off into the forest they pursued and he shot again, only to realize that he had felled the first one with a clean shot and a second one as
well, he was even more ecstatic that he hadn’t just wounded the first animal.
Both had trophy racks, and there was much elation . . . until they got back
to camp and saw that Karl had somehow bagged a bigger one {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=205}}. The hunt was pure competition, not recreation, and that’s the way the hunting trip plays out in Mailer’s novel.
Like Pop, the Great White Hunter in ''Green Hills''{{sfn|Hemingway|1935}}, and Wilson in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber{{sfn|Hemingway|2003a|pp=5-28}},”Big Luke is the big expert on hunting in his particular stretch of wilderness, and his derision or validation of those who hire his services somehow matters. It does to D.J., who himself has already pronounced similar judgment on the “medium-grade and high-grade asshole” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=50}} that compete in his corporate culture. Even Rusty, the corporate “father” as well as D.J.’s, is in it hoping to bag a big-enough bear for Big Luke to say that he got off “a fair shot” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=51}}—just a little show of approval, which is all, one suspects, that D.J. ever wanted from his father.{{pg|203|204}}
The closest D.J. comes to that approval is when he and Rusty break off
from the rest of the group as Hemingway’s hero did—“‘Son, let’s split from
Luke the Fink cause he ain’t going to get your ass or mine near a grizzer’ {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=123}}. Alone and apart from the main competition, they become “real good,
man, tight as combat buddies” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=128}}. Rusty tells D.J. how much he learned
about hunting from his father and passes on this bit of advice, which ironically D.J. already knows: “‘the only time a good man with a good rifle is in trouble is when he steps from sunlight into shadow, cause there’s two or
three seconds when you can’t see’” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=132}}. Together they decide to let an old
caribou pass without shooting at him and stick to the grizzly they’re trying
to bag—and the bear, which is “about as frightening as a stone-black seven foot three-hundred-pound Nigger,” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=135}} provides D.J.’s chance to shine, perhaps because he knows how a “bear” of this metaphorical nature thinks, him being a “black-ass cripple Spade” from Harlem, and all {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=208}}. In the matter of black culture, white noise, and an elevated form of hunting that respects nature, D.J. has ''aficion''. There are “those who know and those who do not
know when a very bad grizz is near to you (a final division of humanity)
and D.J. knew, and D.J. was in love with himself because he did not wish to
scream or plead, he just wished to encounter Mr. D., big-ass grizz.” {sfn|Mailer|1967|p=140}}

When a grizzly bear charges them and both men fire, wounding it, their
disparate level of ''aficion'' is also made clear. Rusty’s impulse is to blame the absent guide for “‘sticking us around the chimney’” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=142}}. D.J. is more tuned in to nature and the dynamics of the natural world, and he realizes that “no man cell in him can now forget that if the center of things is insane, it is insane with force” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=143}}. Although Rusty is hesitant to pursue the wounded
grizzly into thick brush, as Francis Macomber was reluctant to pursue the
lion early in “The Short Happy Life,”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003a}} D.J.’s self-encouragement—“That’s
it”—echoes what Wilson told Macomber who seemed suddenly cheerful and
determined to face the lion. “‘After all, what can they do to you?’” Macomber
says, and Wilson responds, “‘That’s it. . . . Worst one can do is kill you.’”
{{sfn|Hemingway|2003a|p=25}} D.J. would rather face God than“ look into the contempt and contumely of that State of Texas personified by Gottfried
Tex Hyde Jr.” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=143}}.

Another interesting Hemingway-Mailer crossover occurs when both men shoot at the grizzly and only D.J. has the nerve to walk close to make sure he’s dead. Yet, Rusty (“wetting his pants, doubtless”) takes credit for the kill shot, ultimately choosing the respect of the other hunters over the respect of his {{pg|204|205}}
son, none of which is lost on D.J. After the grizzly is felled by both men
shooting and Rusty takes the credit, he forever alienates his son: “Final end
of love of one son for one father.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=147}} That is different from a similar scene
in ''Green Hills''{{sfn|Hemingway|1935}} in which Poor Old Mama and Poppa shoot at a lion, and while
the “killing of the lion had been confused and unsatisfactory,” Poppa
nonetheless gives the credit to his wife, even after seeing that the bullet dug
out of the animal came from his gun.{{sfn|Hemingway|1986|pp=36-37}}. As Foster notes,
<blockquote>D.J. breaks spiritually with his father when, out of habits of competitive vanity and self-justification, his father claims the grizzly bear that D.J. has mortally wounded, violating not only the father-son bond as reinforced by the hunt (stalking their dangerous quarry D.J. sees himself and his father as ‘war buddies’) but also the sacred blood bond between killer and prey. {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=20}}</blockquote>
Would D.J. have gone off to war a different man had his father given him
the credit?
Mailer says in the introduction to ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} that he had intended to write about a murderous Charles Manson-style clan in Provincetown, but began with a chapter on hunting bear in Alaska as “a prelude,”
with the boys “still young, still mean rather than uncontrollably murderous”
so that “the hunting might serve as a bridge to get them ready for more.”
{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=10}} As Foster summarizes,

<blockquote>High on pot, the prose of the Marquis de Sade and William Burroughs, and the cheerfully psychotic inspiration that he may be the voice of a ‘Harlem spade’ imprisoned in the body of the son of a white Dallas tycoon, he tells the story of how he got that way. It is an initiation story (new style) as An ''American Dream'' was a new-style story of sacrifice and redemption. {{sfn|Foster|1968|pp=19-20}}</blockquote>

How D.J. got that way explains how America got where it is, and why, by novel’s end, a boy who has enough aficion to know right from wrong in the matter of hunting etiquette seems suddenly hot to board that plane for “Vietnam, hot damn” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=208}}. Unless, of course, he is the voice of an ironist who asks which is worse, Harlem guiding Dallas or vice versa? The Hipster or the Redneck?{{pg|205|206}}
Ultimately, it is Mailer and D.J.’s adoption of the Hipster mind-set and
way of talking that sets them apart from others, even more so than the
hunter’s code of honor. And being an insider—someone who knows what
the outside world can only imagine—is perhaps the most crucial element
of ''aficion'', as Hemingway detailed it. “Jake achieves prominence in the group
because he is the aficionado,” Linda Wagner-Martin observes. And with Barnes as narrator {{sfn|Hemingway|1926}}, “Hemingway tries to use that mocking, quasi-humorous tone that he chooses for his ''Esquire'' columns during the 1930s, for ""Green Hills of Africa""{{sfn|Hemingway|1935}}, and for some of his stories” {{sfn|Hemingway|1935|p=10}}. In ""The Sun Also Rises""{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}}, the Pamplona hotel owner who has ''aficion'' and who boards bullfighters that share his ''aficion'', puts his hand on Jake Barnes’ shoulder and smiles. Jake writes,
<blockquote>He always smiled as though bull-fighting were a very special secret between the two of us; a rather shocking but really very deep secret that we knew about. He always smiled as though there were something lewd about the secret to outsiders, but that it was something that we understood. It would not do to expose it to people who would not understand. {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=131}}</blockquote>
Likewise, in ''Green Hills of Africa'', Poppa’s prowess and hunting ''aficion'' earns him a special tribal handshake “using the thumb which evidently denoted
extreme emotion” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=167}}; later, he asks what it means, and Pop explains, “It’s on the order of blood brotherhood but a little less formal,” and quips, “You’re getting to be a hell of a fellow” when he hears that the Massai have accepted Poppa into their circle {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=206}}.
“Hip makes for a livelier vocabulary, a more stylish way of carrying oneself, more and better orgasms,” writes one critic. {{sfn|Dupree|1976|p=101}} The Hipster, which D.J. embraces, is a culture whose Mandarin language is understood only by members of an exclusive group, the same as with Hemingway’s heroes. “The Hipster is, of course, only one of many possible realizations of the ‘new consciousness’ of which Mailer is the prophet,” Foster concludes {{sfn|Foster|1968|p=26}} and prophets are always insiders. By the end of ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}; it has become clear that D.J. is indeed an insider with a unique and prophetic voice. He’s also a true aficionado. But the disturbing question (and the force behind what power the novel possesses) is, as Mailer was fully{{pg|206|207}}
aware, of ''what?'' More and better orgasms? As Hemingway’s war-wounded
hero quips at the end of ''The Sun Also Rises''{{sfn|Hemingway|1986}},“Isn’t it pretty to think so?” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=247}}.

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}

* {{cite book |last= Adams|first= Laura|date=1976 |title=Existential Battles: The Growth of Normal Mailer.|location= Athens: Ohio UP |publisher=Print |pages= |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Dupree |first= F.W.|date=1972 |title=“The American Norman Mailer.”Norman Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays.|location= Englewood Cliffs, N.J.|publisher=Prentice Hall|editor= Ed Leo Braudy |pages= 96-103|ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Foster |first= Richard|date=1968 |title=Norman Mailer |location= Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press. Print |publisher=Unversity of Minnesota Pamphlets of American Writers No. 73 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Hellman |first= John|date=1986 |title=American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam|location= New York |publisher=Columbia UP, Print. |pages= |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest|date=1986 |title=Conversations with Ernest Hemingway. |location= Jackson: UP of Mississippi|editor = Ed Matthew J. Bruccoli |publisher=|ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine|last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1932 |title=''Death in the Afternoon''|location= New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons. Print|ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine|date=1981 |last=Hemingway| first= Ernest |author-mask=1 ||title=''Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters'' |editor = Ed. Carlos Baker |location= New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine| last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1940 |title=''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' |location= New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons, 2003. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine| last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1935 |title=''Green Hills of Africa'' |location= New York |publisher= Scribner Classics, 1998. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1925 |title=''In Our Time'' |location= New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine| last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1964 |title=''A Moveable Feast'' |location= New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons, Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1952 |title=''The Old Man and the Sea'' |location= New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons, 2003. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=2003a|title="The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." ''The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.'' |location= New York |publisher= Charles Scribner's Sons|pages=5-28.Print|ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=2003b|title="The Snows of Kilimanjaro." ''The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.'' |location= New York |publisher= Charles Scribner's Son's |pages=39-56. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1926 |title=''The Sun Also Rises'' |location= New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons, 1954. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1972|title="Three Shots." ''The Nick Adams Stories.'' |location= New York |publisher= Charles Scribner's Sons |pages=13-15. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Leeds |first= Barry H|date=1969 |title=The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer |location= New York: New York UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Mailer |first= Norman|date=1988 |title=Conversations with Norman Mailer|editor= J. Michael Lennon |location= Jackson: UP of Mississippi. Print|ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer|first= Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1982|title=''Pieces and Pontifications'' |location= Boston|publisher=Little, Brown and Company, Print. |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer|first= Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1967|title=''Why are we in Vietnam?'' |location= New York |publisher=G.P. Putnam's Sons, Print | |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Reynolds |first= Michael|date=1989 |title=''Hemingway: The Paris Years |location= Oxford |publisher=Basil Blackwell, Print|ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Wagner-Martin |first= Linda|date=1987 |title=''New Essays on'' The Sun Also Rises|location= Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP, Print.|ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Warren |first= Robert Penn|date=1974 |title="Ernest Hemingway." ''Ernest Hemingway: Five Decades of Criticism|editor= Linda Welshimer Wagner|location= East Lansing; Michigan State UP |pages=79 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Wenke |first= Joseph|date=1987 |title=Mailer's America |location= Hanover N.H. UP of New England, Print. |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Young |first= Philip|date=1959 |title=''Ernest Hemingway.'' |location= Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press. Print. |publisher=University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, No. 1. |ref=harv}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Jive-Ass Aficionado: Why Are We in Vietnam? and Hemingway's Moral Code

2025-04-16T12:03:18Z

JKilchenmann: citation cleanup

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Jive-Ass Aficionado: ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' and Hemingway's Moral Code}}
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{{byline| last=Plath |first=James |abstract=An analysis of the influence of Hemingway on Norman Mailer’s ''Why Are We in Vietnam?{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}''It is Mailer and D.J.’s adoption of the Hipster mind-set and way of talking that sets them apart from others, even more so than the hunter’s code of honor. And being an insider—someone who knows what the outside world can only imagine—is perhaps the most crucial element of ''aficion'', as Hemingway detailed it. |url=. . .}}

{{dc|dc=I|n ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' Norman Mailer alludes}} to James Joyce twice (126, 149){{sfn|Mailer|1967}}, and certainly his 1967 anti-war novel has a Joycean feel. It incorporates the same sort of monologic stream-of-consciousness narrative and
language play as we saw in ''Ulysses'', all tinged with the “color” that put "Ulysses" on trial in America for obscenity. But Mailer’s novel is also richly evocative of that other great modernist writer, Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway was conspicuously singled-out with a few adjectives when Mailer told an interviewer six years earlier that if he has “one ambition above all others, it is to write a novel which Dostoevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even old moldering Hemingway might come to read” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=76}}.A close reading reveals
that ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} may actually be that novel, but I’ll leave it to future critics to explore how it would have appealed to the sensibilities of the other writers mentioned. I’m going to focus on Hemingway, because apart from echoes of Joyce’s style, his influence here seems most prevalent.

As Laura Adams observes, “three of the most powerful influences on Mailer’s scheme of things have been war and Ernest Hemingway and the intersection of the two.” {{sfn|Adams|1976|p=173}} Mailer told an interviewer that Hemingway’s death made him feel “a little weaker” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=71}}, no doubt because he had felt a connection. Like Hemingway, Mailer wrote about boxing, he
wrote about bullfighting, he talked tough, he hung out with tough friends, he went to war, he wrote about war, he backed the underdog, he infuriated feminist#{{pg|194|195}}
take special delight in writing fiction that shocked readers or showcased his “insider” knowledge. “Hemingway and Fitzgerald are important imaginative figures in my life,” Mailer told the ''Washington Post Book World'' in 1971, explaining that “in Hemingway and Fitzgerald, it’s the sensuous evocation of things. The effect on the gut is closer to poetry” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=189}}.

''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} Mailer seems to have borrowed a number of
things from Hemingway, including the narrative structure for the novel,
Hemingway’s “iceberg theory” of omission, the attempt to make the reader
actually experience the fiction in his “gut,” and thematic elements that reflect the code and code heroes that Robert Penn Warren and Philip Young recognized during the early years of Hemingway scholarship.

In the spring of 1924 Hemingway had written the lower-case in our time,
which consisted of eighteen vignettes drawn from the young writer’s journalistic observations of political upheaval, war, and bullfighting, published in an edition of only 170 copies. For ''In Our Time,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} which was released by a major publisher in a first edition of 1,335 copies, he elevated two of those vignettes to stories and used the other sixteen as interlocutory chapters inserted in front of each of the longer new stories that he had crafted, most of which involved a coming-of-age protagonist named Nick Adams. To solve the problem of having an extra vignette, Hemingway broke the last story—“Big Two-Hearted River”—into Parts I and II. Interestingly, as Michael Reynolds reminds, Hemingway later said he always intended the vignettes to function as “chapter headings,” explaining, “‘You get the close up very quietly but absolutely solid and the real thing but very close, and then through it all between every story comes the rhythm of the in our time chapters’”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=233}}. As Hemingway further clarified for critic Edmund Wilson, his intent was to “give the picture of the whole between examining it in detail.”{{sfn|Mailer|1981|p=128}}

That’s exactly how ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} is structured with similar effects that it has on the reader. Just as Hemingway’s short stories focused onNick and the personal lives of people “in his time,”while the vignettes served as newspaper-headline reminders of the violent, larger world that was affecting individual psyches, so, too, Mailer’s highly personalized and detailed narrative of sixteen-year-old D.J.’s hunting trip with his father, his father’s business associates, and his best friend Tex in the rugged Brooks Range of Alaska is intercut with “Intro Beeps” that serve the same function and add “rhythm” as did Hemingway’s vignettes. The chapters in ''Why Are We in''{{pg |195|196}}
''Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} focus on the story of the hunting trip, while the Intro Beeps are digressively vocal ''tour de forces'' that give Mailer the chance to evoke a broader world by allowing D.J. the freedom to rant about things outside the constraints of narrative. For one thing, the Intro Beeps feature the narrator as an eighteen-year-old, so there is a broader prospective already involved. D.J. at eighteen is wiser than D.J. at sixteen, who is recalled in the main narrative. In the Intro Beeps D.J. thinks and “speaks” in an even more pronounced stream-of-consciousness while at a dinner party his parents throw for him the night before he and Tex are scheduled to ship out to fight in Vietnam. It is in these numbered Intro Beeps where D.J., unfettered by storytelling, can rant and ramble about more general and abstract topics like the teachings of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher who warned that the media and the constant bombardment of pop culture messages would have a deleterious effect on the human condition (Mailer, ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} p=8).
It is these big-picture concerns that surface mostly in the Intro Beeps and do indeed remind the reader of a world outside the hunting narrative of the novel, just as listening to a radio dee-jay makes one aware of the source and also other listeners—a “broadcast” that is simultaneously reaching a larger world. And that in itself can be unsettling. “As D.J. suggests,” one critic observes, “society acts as a kind of succubus upon the unconscious of Americans so that ‘you never know what vision has been humping you through the night.’”{{sfn|Wenke|1987|p=123}}
Although the white noise of media forms a powerful current that runs
through the whole of D.J.’s Intro Beeps, the young narrator also weaves in his musings about bullfighting, machismo, existential dread, and Freudian theories on the centrality of sex and sexual issues. It is also in these Intro Beeps where Mailer teases readers by having D.J. insist, as early as Beep 4, that he may not be a white, young, and virile genius from Texas after all—maybe he’s really the voice of Black America:
<blockquote>I, D.J., am trapped in a Harlem head which has gone so crazy that I think I am sitting at a banquet in the Dallas ass white-ass manse remembering Alaska am in fact a figment of a Spade gone ape in the mind from outrageous frustrates wasting him and so now living in an imaginary white brain. . . .{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=58}}</blockquote>{{pg|196|pg 197}}
As Adams notes, “Although D.J. can ‘see right through shit,’{{sfn|Adams|1976|p=49}} he is not emancipated (he is only a ‘presumptive philosopher’{{sfn|Adams|1976|p=93}}, and the reader has no alternative but to confront the narrative’s white noise” {{sfn|Adams|1976|p=127}}. Hemingway famously remarked, “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it”{{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=128}}. Though D.J. has enough “radar” to make connections between corporate power, “yes men,” sexual acts, hunting, power-brokering, commercialism, and politics, he seems as affected by society’s white noise as he hopes his own “broadcasts” will be on readers, listeners, anyone within psychic earshot. And his voice deliberately shifts so many times that it is hard for anyone to get a “fix” on him. Hemingway’s ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}}, not coincidentally, produced a similar effect. Michael Reynolds puts it best: “Eliot used so many voices in ''The Wasteland'' that it was hard to say when he was speaking. When Hemingway finished ''in our time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}}, he achieved something of the same effect.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=125}}. The same is true with D.J., whose narrative voice encompasses a disc jockey’s Hipster talk and bemused take on society, philosophical riffs from a deep thinker, more standard narration, and anger-fueled rants that suggest a disturbed side we suspect will come out in full flower once D.J. finds himself in Vietnam: “That’s how they talk in the East, up in those bone Yankee ass Jew circumcised prick Wall Street palaces—take it from D.J.—he got psychic transistors in his ear (one more gift of the dying griz) which wingding on all-out pickup each set of transcontinental dialogues from the hearts of the prissy-assed and the prigged. Fungatz, radatz, and back to piss” (Mailer, ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} p=151). Yet, the more he gets close to his father or describes the hunt in detail, the more D.J. settles into a less provocative, more evocative narration that comes closer to a standard issue voice, if there is such a thing:
<blockquote>On and on they go for half an hour, talking so close that D.J. can even get familiar with Rusty’s breath which is all right. It got a hint of middle-aged fatigue of twenty years of doing all the little things body did not want to do, that flat sour of the slightly used up, and there’s a hint of garlic or onion, and tobacco, and twenty years of booze gives a little permanent rot to the odor coming off the lining of the stomach. . . . {{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=133}}</blockquote>{{pg|197|198}}
That the multiple voices and structure of ''Why Are We in Vietnam''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}? derive from ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} seems even more likely when one considers Mailer’s ending. Curiously, like Hemingway, Mailer also breaks his final narrative installment—Chapters Ten and Eleven—into two, although there is no logical reason for doing so. The tenth chapter ends, “And the boys slept” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=197}}; the eleventh begins, “And woke up in three hours. And it was black, and the fire near to out” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=199}}, in what is most probably a reference to Hemingway’s narrative divisions for “Big-Two Hearted River”—inexplicable to the reading public unless, of course, one considers Hemingway’s desire to incorporate all of the vignettes from ''in our time''. Here, Mailer apparently has a little joke at Hemingway’s expense, breaking up the narrative but then actually drawing attention to the break by juxtaposing the two chapters with no Intro Beep between them, using conjunctions to show they should or could have been one, and positioning the final Intro Beep at the very end of the novel, the way that Hemingway ended his book. By so doing, Mailer engages in an intertextual dialogue with his literary “papa,” as he does with other literary forebears in the interlocutory sections.

It is in the Intro Beeps where Mailer situates his attempts at creating a
new American fictional voice by invoking the book that Hemingway said
begat modern American fiction—Mark Twain’s ''Huckleberry Finn'' {{sfn|Hemingway|1935|p=23}}—which D.J. talks about in Intro Beep 1. The next
major, irreverent young voice in American fiction was undoubtedly Holden
Caulfield, J.D. Salinger’s hero from ''The Catcher in the Rye,'' to whom D.J. refers in Intro Beep 2, along with “Call me Ishmael” Melville. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=26}} With these references, Mailer obviously was drawing attention to young D.J. as a new American Adam with a new and distinctive voice that, like his predecessors, questions or indicts current society for its misguided thinking and behavior.

Just as Hemingway opted for irony in his title—Philip Young suggests the
likelihood that ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} is a “sardonic allusion to a well-known phrase
from the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer: ‘Give peace in our
time, O Lord’” (5)—Mailer took the title of an address that President Lyndon Johnson gave at Johns Hopkins University in the spring of 1965 (“Why We Are in Vietnam”), in which Johnson presented his case for American involvement, then turned Johnson’s explanatory title into a question . . .which, of course, it was becoming by the spring of 1966 when Mailer began ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} Why ''was'' America in Vietnam, and more importantly,{{pg|198|199}}
why would there be, at the time Mailer was inspired to write this novel, still such flag-waving support for Johnson’s war?

As historian John Hellman reports, it begins earlier, during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, whose “well-publicized interest in the Special Forces made them extensions of the commander-in-chief, just as the Hunters of Kentucky and the Rough Riders had once magnified the respective images of Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt” {{sfn|Hellman|1986|p=44}}. Hellman identified the Green beret as a “contemporary reincarnation of the western hero” who “personified the combined virtues of civilization and savagery without any of their respective limitations” {{sfn|Hellman|1986|pp=45-46}}—which helps to explain why the bestselling novel to come out of the Vietnam War era wasn’t any of the realistic accounts that generated support for the anti-war movement, but rather Robin Moore’s ''The Green Berets,'' published in 1965. This flag-waving novel that lionized the Special Forces reached Number 5 on the bestseller list in hardcover, and when it appeared in paperback that same year, “buyers at drugstore racks made it what ''80 Years of Best-Sellers'' calls‘ the phenomenon of the year, with 1,200,000 printed in only two months,’” Hellman writes. It inspired former Green Beret Barry Sadler to record his “Ballad of the Green Berets,” which vaulted to Number 1 on the Billboard charts and “reportedly induced so many enlistments of young men hoping to become Green Berets that the Selective Service was able to suspend draft calls during the first four months of 1966” {{sfn|Hellman|1986|p=53}}.

If Mailer found such early support for the war maddening, in this antiwar novel he again takes his cue from Hemingway, whose famous “iceberg theory” dictated, “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them” {{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=192}}. Hemingway felt that the writing becomes more powerful by omitting things you know, and the quintessential examples of the theory in practice are to be found in the short story “Hills Like White Elephants,” in which a couple avoids talk of a pregnancy and abortion, and the final story from ''In Our Time.''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|}} Of “Big Two-Hearted River, Pts. I & II,”Hemingway wrote, “The Story was about coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war in it” {{sfn|Hemingway|1964|p=76}}. Nick is a young veteran who not only finds no hero’s welcome; his favorite wilderness fishing area looks like a war zone, blackened by fire. And that{{pg|199|200}}
external devastation mirrors the interior landscape of his war-ravaged soul. No mention of the war is necessary.

Mailer accomplishes nearly the same thing by titling his book with a blunt
question and then appearing to avoid it for the length of the entire narrative. “Vietnam” is mentioned only once in the book . . . and on the final page, in the final sentence. It is almost as if the character of D.J. took on a life of his own and steamrolled in whatever direction his voice could take him, and to whatever end. The mention of the word is, in fact, so shocking by the time we hear it that it almost has the feel of authorial intrusion. And Mailer was well aware of the gap that could be created between a strong fictional character living in the text and the author himself. As he wrote in an essay on “Miller and Hemingway”:

<blockquote> [I]f we take ''The Sun Also Rises''{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|}} as the purest example of a book whose protagonist created the precise air of a time and a place, even there we come to the realization that Hemingway at the time he wrote it could not have been equal to Jake Barnes—he had created a consciousness wiser, drier, purer, more classic, more sophisticated and more graceful than his own. He was still
gauche in relation to his creation. {{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=91}}</blockquote>

Partly that is because Hemingway, through his narrative personae, was
determined not to describe “or depict life—or criticize it—but to actually
make it alive. So that . . . you actually experience the thing” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=153}}. Laura Adams was the first to see a similar technique at work in ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}, although she stopped short of drawing the connection to Hemingway in identifying the “radical promise” of Mailer’s novel, which is that the reader will not only receive an adequate account of the way things are in America (“know what it’s all about”), but also experience at the level of sensibility remission from the cultural plague that is “an ultimate disease against which all other diseases are in design to protect us” {{sfn|Adams|1976|p=124}}. Adams concludes, in language that makes us think of Hemingway’s goals, “The radicalized or ‘shamanized’ reader, whose silence has been rewarded, participates in Mailer’s attempt to reintegrate the old, now suppressed, human circuitry with the baneful new.” {{sfn|Adams|1976|p=124}} And this happens, as it does in Hemingway, through detailed description and a compelling new narrative voice. As one critic astutely observes, D.J. makes us experience the{{pg|200|201}}
narrative more viscerally “through language that is a free and manic association of puns, obscenities, hip slang, jive-talking rhyme, technologese, and mutated psychological jargon”{{sfn|Wenke|1987|p=123}}. D.J.’s voice is such a dominant and constant presence that the very act of listening to him makes us feel as if we are indeed “experiencing” D.J. and his concerns, rather than simply
reading about them. Like Hemingway’s Nick Adams, D.J. is also bursting with existential dread—though for neither young man is it a philosophical position. Rather, it is a near-paralyzing condition that afflicts them both, despite Mailer’s hero being more flippant about it. Hemingway’s young Adams was so shocked
after he suddenly “realized that some day he must die. It made him feel quite
sick” {{sfn|Hemingway|1972|p=14}}. Nick is the first of many Hemingway alter egos who experiences the pangs of existential dread, which Jake Barnes succinctly summarized: “It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=34}} D. J., meanwhile, is “up tight with the concept of dread”:
<blockquote>ever read ''The Concept of Dread'' by Fyodor Kierkegaard? No, well
neither has D.J. but now he wants to know how many of you assholes even knew, forgive me, Good Lord, that Fyodor Kierkegaard has a real name, ''Sören'' Kierkegaard. Contemplate that. You ass. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=34}}</blockquote>
D.J. too has a moment in which he recognizes his mortality, and “D.J.
breathes death—first time in his life—and the sides of the trail slam onto his
heart like the jaws of a vise . . . like attack of vertigo when stepping into dark and smelling pig shit, that’s what death smells to him.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=136}} With Harry, Hemingway’s dying hero from “Snows of Kilimanjaro,” he sensed death’s presence and “he could smell its breath” {{sfn|Hemingway|2003b|p=54}}. But of all the things that D.J. and the Hemingway heroes share in common, it’s an ostensible cure for dread—a moral code for doing things precisely and with
passion—that gives them a sense of importance as well as being, and offers
both respite from those dread-full nights and the courage to confront the
possibility of death by day.
As Barry Leeds notes, “The story of the hunting trip embodies certain
mythic elements (notably the initiation into manhood of D.J. and Tex) and
proceeds along a line of progressively more crucial conflicts between man {{pg|201|202}}
and nature.”{{sfn|Leeds|1969|p=181}} But the conflicts also manifest themselves as an alpha male
competition and a clash of values over the right and wrong ways of doing
things—what Hemingway dubbed ''“aficion”'' in ''The Sun Also Rises:'' ''“Aficion'' means passion. An ''aficionado'' is one who is passionate about the bullfights. All the good bull-fighters stayed at Montoya’s hotel; that is, those with ''aficion'' stayed there. The commercial bull-fighters stayed once, perhaps, and then did not come back” {{sfn|Leeds|1969|p=131}}. In ''The Sun Also Rises,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} aficion is linked to bullfighting, but Hemingway scholars have extended the term to apply to the
Hemingway code hero and code aspirant who live according to principles
that elevate them above others. As Robert Penn Warren observes,
<blockquote>Hemingway’s characters are usually tough men, experienced in
the hard worlds they inhabit, and not obviously given to emotional display or sensitive shrinking. . . . His heroes are not squealers, welchers, compromisers, or cowards. . . .They represent some notion of a code, some notion of honor, that makes a man a man, and that distinguishes him from people who merely follow their random impulses and who are, by consequence, “messy.” {{sfn|Warren|1974|p=79}}</blockquote>
For the Hemingway hero, this meant high standards and an equally high
skill level, whether it is keeping his lines “straighter than anyone” as Santiago did in ''The Old Man and the Sea'' {{sfn|Hemingway|1952|p=32}}, or knowing “how to
blow any sort of bridge that you could name,” as with Robert Jordan in ''For
Whom the Bell Tolls'' {{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=4}}. And in the matter of hunting, it means precise, accurate shots that make for clean and humane kills.
Someone familiar with Hemingway will find it difficult to read ''Why We Are in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} without thinking of ''Green Hills of Africa,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1935}} Hemingway’s fictionalized account of his much-anticipated 1934 safari with his wife, Pauline, and Key West best-friend Charles Thompson—a safari which, according to
biographer Michael Reynolds, “degenerated badly,” turning into an alpha-male contest of measurements between Hemingway and Thompson {{sfn|Reynolds|1989|pp=162-65}}. But more than that, it was a contrast between Poppa’s (Hemingway’s) ''aficion'' and Karl’s (Thompson’s) apparent indifference to or ignorance of the higher values.
Poppa’s values are established early in the novel. In addition to insisting
that guns be kept clean and in perfect working order and becoming angry if
they’re not, {{sfn|Hemingway|1935|p=146}} he also has a keen sense of the “rules” of {{pg|202|203}}
hunting.“God damn them,”he says of Karl and his guides and bearers.“What
the hell did he have to blow that[salt]lick to hell for the first morning and gut shoot a lousy bull and chase him all over the son-of-a-bitching-country spooking it to holy bloody hell”—too much shooting at the wrong place, which spoils the hunting for miles, and then a bad shot that makes the animal suffer
{{sfn|Hemingway|1935|p=148}}. D.J. has a similar reaction when he watches his friend squeeze off a bad shot on a wolf: “Tex took him down with a shot into the gut and at first he could have been there dead, the animal fell and for an instant the hills clapped
together” and “D.J. was on with the blood, he was half-sick having watched
what Tex had done, like his own girl had been fucked in front of him and better, since he had had private plans to show Tex what real shooting might be.”
{{sfn|Mailer|1967|pp=68-69}} Hunting is linked to manhood in both Hemingway’s and Mailer’s novels, and though “Rusty’s got cunt in him”
{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=120}}, D.J. is “the only one not to shoot at the female grizzer.” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=121}}
In ''Green Hills,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1935}} Poppa’s superior skills and knowledge are demonstrated
later, when he insists on going after kudu at dusk, leaving the guide who insisted, “Hunt tomorrow” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=164}}. Then, confronting the kudu he
knew would be there, Poppa “saw the bead centered exactly where it should
be just below the top of the shoulder and squeezed off.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=165}} And when he thought it ran off into the forest they pursued and he shot again, only to realize that he had felled the first one with a clean shot and a second one as
well, he was even more ecstatic that he hadn’t just wounded the first animal.
Both had trophy racks, and there was much elation . . . until they got back
to camp and saw that Karl had somehow bagged a bigger one {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=205}}. The hunt was pure competition, not recreation, and that’s the way the hunting trip plays out in Mailer’s novel.
Like Pop, the Great White Hunter in ''Green Hills''{{sfn|Hemingway|1935}}, and Wilson in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber{{sfn|Hemingway|2003a|pp=5-28}},”Big Luke is the big expert on hunting in his particular stretch of wilderness, and his derision or validation of those who hire his services somehow matters. It does to D.J., who himself has already pronounced similar judgment on the “medium-grade and high-grade asshole” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=50}} that compete in his corporate culture. Even Rusty, the corporate “father” as well as D.J.’s, is in it hoping to bag a big-enough bear for Big Luke to say that he got off “a fair shot” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=51}}—just a little show of approval, which is all, one suspects, that D.J. ever wanted from his father.{{pg|203|204}}
The closest D.J. comes to that approval is when he and Rusty break off
from the rest of the group as Hemingway’s hero did—“‘Son, let’s split from
Luke the Fink cause he ain’t going to get your ass or mine near a grizzer’ {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=123}}. Alone and apart from the main competition, they become “real good,
man, tight as combat buddies” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=128}}. Rusty tells D.J. how much he learned
about hunting from his father and passes on this bit of advice, which ironically D.J. already knows: “‘the only time a good man with a good rifle is in trouble is when he steps from sunlight into shadow, cause there’s two or
three seconds when you can’t see’” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=132}}. Together they decide to let an old
caribou pass without shooting at him and stick to the grizzly they’re trying
to bag—and the bear, which is “about as frightening as a stone-black seven foot three-hundred-pound Nigger,” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=135}} provides D.J.’s chance to shine, perhaps because he knows how a “bear” of this metaphorical nature thinks, him being a “black-ass cripple Spade” from Harlem, and all {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=208}}. In the matter of black culture, white noise, and an elevated form of hunting that respects nature, D.J. has ''aficion''. There are “those who know and those who do not
know when a very bad grizz is near to you (a final division of humanity)
and D.J. knew, and D.J. was in love with himself because he did not wish to
scream or plead, he just wished to encounter Mr. D., big-ass grizz.” {sfn|Mailer|1967|p=140}}

When a grizzly bear charges them and both men fire, wounding it, their
disparate level of ''aficion'' is also made clear. Rusty’s impulse is to blame the absent guide for “‘sticking us around the chimney’” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=142}}. D.J. is more tuned in to nature and the dynamics of the natural world, and he realizes that “no man cell in him can now forget that if the center of things is insane, it is insane with force” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=143}}. Although Rusty is hesitant to pursue the wounded
grizzly into thick brush, as Francis Macomber was reluctant to pursue the
lion early in “The Short Happy Life,”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003a}} D.J.’s self-encouragement—“That’s
it”—echoes what Wilson told Macomber who seemed suddenly cheerful and
determined to face the lion. “‘After all, what can they do to you?’” Macomber
says, and Wilson responds, “‘That’s it. . . . Worst one can do is kill you.’”
{{sfn|Hemingway|2003a|p=25}} D.J. would rather face God than“ look into the contempt and contumely of that State of Texas personified by Gottfried
Tex Hyde Jr.” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=143}}.

Another interesting Hemingway-Mailer crossover occurs when both men shoot at the grizzly and only D.J. has the nerve to walk close to make sure he’s dead. Yet, Rusty (“wetting his pants, doubtless”) takes credit for the kill shot, ultimately choosing the respect of the other hunters over the respect of his {{pg|204|205}}
son, none of which is lost on D.J. After the grizzly is felled by both men
shooting and Rusty takes the credit, he forever alienates his son: “Final end
of love of one son for one father.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=147}} That is different from a similar scene
in ''Green Hills''{{sfn|Mailer|1935}} in which Poor Old Mama and Poppa shoot at a lion, and while
the “killing of the lion had been confused and unsatisfactory,” Poppa
nonetheless gives the credit to his wife, even after seeing that the bullet dug
out of the animal came from his gun.{{sfn|Hemingway|1986|pp=36-37}}. As Foster notes,
<blockquote>D.J. breaks spiritually with his father when, out of habits of competitive vanity and self-justification, his father claims the grizzly bear that D.J. has mortally wounded, violating not only the father-son bond as reinforced by the hunt (stalking their dangerous quarry D.J. sees himself and his father as ‘war buddies’) but also the sacred blood bond between killer and prey. {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=20}}</blockquote>
Would D.J. have gone off to war a different man had his father given him
the credit?
Mailer says in the introduction to ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} that he had intended to write about a murderous Charles Manson-style clan in Provincetown, but began with a chapter on hunting bear in Alaska as “a prelude,”
with the boys “still young, still mean rather than uncontrollably murderous”
so that “the hunting might serve as a bridge to get them ready for more.”
{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=10}} As Foster summarizes,

<blockquote>High on pot, the prose of the Marquis de Sade and William Burroughs, and the cheerfully psychotic inspiration that he may be the voice of a ‘Harlem spade’ imprisoned in the body of the son of a white Dallas tycoon, he tells the story of how he got that way. It is an initiation story (new style) as An ''American Dream'' was a new-style story of sacrifice and redemption. {{sfn|Foster|1968|pp=19-20}}</blockquote>

How D.J. got that way explains how America got where it is, and why, by novel’s end, a boy who has enough aficion to know right from wrong in the matter of hunting etiquette seems suddenly hot to board that plane for “Vietnam, hot damn” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=208}}. Unless, of course, he is the voice of an ironist who asks which is worse, Harlem guiding Dallas or vice versa? The Hipster or the Redneck?{{pg|205|206}}
Ultimately, it is Mailer and D.J.’s adoption of the Hipster mind-set and
way of talking that sets them apart from others, even more so than the
hunter’s code of honor. And being an insider—someone who knows what
the outside world can only imagine—is perhaps the most crucial element
of ''aficion'', as Hemingway detailed it. “Jake achieves prominence in the group
because he is the aficionado,” Linda Wagner-Martin observes. And with Barnes as narrator {{sfn|Hemingway|1926}}, “Hemingway tries to use that mocking, quasi-humorous tone that he chooses for his ''Esquire'' columns during the 1930s, for ""Green Hills of Africa""{{sfn|Hemingway|1935}}, and for some of his stories” {{sfn|Hemingway|1935|p=10}}. In ""The Sun Also Rises""{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}}, the Pamplona hotel owner who has ''aficion'' and who boards bullfighters that share his ''aficion'', puts his hand on Jake Barnes’ shoulder and smiles. Jake writes,
<blockquote>He always smiled as though bull-fighting were a very special secret between the two of us; a rather shocking but really very deep secret that we knew about. He always smiled as though there were something lewd about the secret to outsiders, but that it was something that we understood. It would not do to expose it to people who would not understand. {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=131}}</blockquote>
Likewise, in ''Green Hills of Africa'', Poppa’s prowess and hunting ''aficion'' earns him a special tribal handshake “using the thumb which evidently denoted
extreme emotion” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=167}}; later, he asks what it means, and Pop explains, “It’s on the order of blood brotherhood but a little less formal,” and quips, “You’re getting to be a hell of a fellow” when he hears that the Massai have accepted Poppa into their circle {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=206}}.
“Hip makes for a livelier vocabulary, a more stylish way of carrying oneself, more and better orgasms,” writes one critic. {{sfn|Dupee|1976|p=101}} The Hipster, which D.J. embraces, is a culture whose Mandarin language is understood only by members of an exclusive group, the same as with Hemingway’s heroes. “The Hipster is, of course, only one of many possible realizations of the ‘new consciousness’ of which Mailer is the prophet,” Foster concludes {{sfn|Foster|1968|p=26}} and prophets are always insiders. By the end of ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}; it has become clear that D.J. is indeed an insider with a unique and prophetic voice. He’s also a true aficionado. But the disturbing question (and the force behind what power the novel possesses) is, as Mailer was fully{{pg|206|207}}
aware, of ''what?'' More and better orgasms? As Hemingway’s war-wounded
hero quips at the end of ''The Sun Also Rises''{{sfn|Hemingway|1986}},“Isn’t it pretty to think so?” {{sfn|Hemingway|1986|p=247}}.

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}

* {{cite book |last= Adams|first= Laura|date=1976 |title=Existential Battles: The Growth of Normal Mailer.|location= Athens: Ohio UP |publisher=Print |pages= |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Dupree |first= F.W.|date=1972 |title=“The American Norman Mailer.”Norman Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays.|location= Englewood Cliffs, N.J.|publisher=Prentice Hall|editor= Ed Leo Braudy |pages= 96-103|ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Foster |first= Richard|date=1968 |title=Norman Mailer |location= Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press. Print |publisher=Unversity of Minnesota Pamphlets of American Writers No. 73 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Hellman |first= John|date=1986 |title=American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam|location= New York |publisher=Columbia UP, Print. |pages= |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest|date=1986 |title=Conversations with Ernest Hemingway. |location= Jackson: UP of Mississippi|editor = Ed Matthew J. Bruccoli |publisher=|ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine|last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1932 |title=''Death in the Afternoon''|location= New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons. Print|ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine|date=1981 |last=Hemingway| first= Ernest |author-mask=1 ||title=''Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters'' |editor = Ed. Carlos Baker |location= New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine| last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1940 |title=''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' |location= New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons, 2003. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine| last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1935 |title=''Green Hills of Africa'' |location= New York |publisher= Scribner Classics, 1998. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1925 |title=''In Our Time'' |location= New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine| last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1964 |title=''A Moveable Feast'' |location= New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons, Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1952 |title=''The Old Man and the Sea'' |location= New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons, 2003. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=2003a|title="The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." ''The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.'' |location= New York |publisher= Charles Scribner's Sons|pages=5-28.Print|ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=2003b|title="The Snows of Kilimanjaro." ''The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.'' |location= New York |publisher= Charles Scribner's Son's |pages=39-56. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1926 |title=''The Sun Also Rises'' |location= New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons, 1954. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hemingway|first= Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1972|title="Three Shots." ''The Nick Adams Stories.'' |location= New York |publisher= Charles Scribner's Sons |pages=13-15. Print |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Leeds |first= Barry H|date=1969 |title=The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer |location= New York: New York UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Mailer |first= Norman|date=1988 |title=Conversations with Norman Mailer|editor= J. Michael Lennon |location= Jackson: UP of Mississippi. Print|ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer|first= Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1982|title=''Pieces and Pontifications'' |location= Boston|publisher=Little, Brown and Company, Print. |ref=harv}}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer|first= Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1967|title=''Why are we in Vietnam?'' |location= New York |publisher=G.P. Putnam's Sons, Print | |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Reynolds |first= Michael|date=1989 |title=''Hemingway: The Paris Years |location= Oxford |publisher=Basil Blackwell, Print|ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Wagner-Martin |first= Linda|date=1987 |title=''New Essays on'' The Sun Also Rises|location= Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP, Print.|ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Warren |first= Robert Penn|date=1974 |title="Ernest Hemingway." ''Ernest Hemingway: Five Decades of Criticism|editor= Linda Welshimer Wagner|location= East Lansing; Michigan State UP |pages=79 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Wenke |first= Joseph|date=1987 |title=Mailer's America |location= Hanover N.H. UP of New England, Print. |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last= Young |first= Philip|date=1959 |title=''Ernest Hemingway.'' |location= Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press. Print. |publisher=University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, No. 1. |ref=harv}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Advertisements for Others: The Blurbs of Norman Mailer

2025-04-16T02:32:43Z

JKilchenmann: remove red letter errors and fix author name

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{{byline|last=Hinton |first=Matthew S. |abstract=With ''Advertisements for Myself'', Norman Mailer established an influential foundation in his critique of fellow authors. Additionally, he secured his role as a contributor to the literary marketplace by way of his praise of other works. In over half a century, Norman Mailer composed approximately one hundred and forty blurbs for books on a bevy of subjects. From Hemingway to heavyweight champions, from conspiracy theories to Italian cooking, Mailer has, through his blurbs, shown great generosity to fellow writers, commented on a variety of topics, revealed several personal interests, and developed a poetry of promotion.. }}

WITH ''ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF'', NORMAN MAILER ESTABLISHED an influential foundation in his critique of fellow authors. Additionally, he secured his role as a contributor to the literary marketplace by way of his praise of other works. In over half a century, Norman Mailer composed approximately one hundred and forty blurbs for books on a bevy of subjects. From Hemingway to heavyweight champions, from conspiracy theories to Italian cooking, Mailer has, through his blurbs, shown great generosity to fellow writers, commented on a variety of topics, revealed several personal interests, and developed a poetry of promotion.
Although the 1990s were the peak years for his blurb-writing (he wrote thirty-six of them), Mailer was already punching up endorsements in the first full-year of his literary career. Fast on the heels of ''The Naked and the Dead'', he found fascination with a book authored by a thirty-eight-year-old Japanese businessman: a nightclub owner who was “Hawaiian-born, U.S.- educated, and a veteran of the Japanese army” named Hanama Tasaki.{{sfn|"Made in Japan"|1952}} Tasaki made his debut with ''Long the Imperial Way''—a war novel—and Mailer generously wrote the following one hundred and seventy two words:
<blockquote> I hope ''Long the Imperial Way'' finds a large audience, and to Americans this picture of Japanese life should prove fascinating. Even more important, the experience of military life seen through a Japanese filter is the possible way to grasp the swindle of modern war: the patriotism, the battle waged in the name of peace, the exploitation of soldiers by their officers—the sad song {{pg|453|454}} is here with all its verses. For undoubtedly the Japanese were more miserable, more subjected, more oppressed than soldiers of any other nation, and the brutalities and excesses they committed became comprehensible here to the Western mind. Or at least it is to be hoped that they do become comprehensible or we shall be in a pretty pass when not only the Russians but the Americans as well begin to commit the extra-curricular butcheries of war, and American soldiers and Russian soldiers will strike out in blind frustration and in desperation, swindled even in the moment of their death by the slogans which have already betrayed them.</blockquote>

The paragraph he wrote in support of James Jones’s ''From Here to Eternity'', one of his earliest blurbs, presages his relationship with the fellow war novelist—one of great camaraderie and, later, some disagreement. Mailer had received the work through Scribner’s editor, Burroughs Mitchell. Sick in bed in his Vermont home during the fall of 1950, with the galleys of ''Eternity'' to keep him company, Mailer had this to offer:

<blockquote> It’s a big fist of a book with powerful virtues and serious faults, but if the very good is mixed with the sometimes bad, those qual- ities are inseparable from the author. Jones writes with a wry compassionate anger which is individual and borrows from no writer I know. I think his book is one of the best of the ‘war novels’, and in certain facets perhaps the best.</blockquote>
In a letter to Jones in 1955, Mailer properly framed his contribution, saying, “I remember when I read ''Eternity.'' I was sick with the grippe at the time and I just got sicker. Because deep inside me I knew that no matter how I didn’t want to like it, and how I leaped with pleasure at its faults, it was still just too fucking good . . .” {{sfn|Dearborn|1999}}
Mailer suffered, surely, but also felt that Jones was “talking” to him, as good writers did through their books, especially a “major work” like ''Eternity.'' Later, after the deterioration of their friendship, Jones and Mailer would meet for the last time in Elaine’s, a bar in the Upper East Side. An uninformed Mailer suggested that the two “fight it out,” to which Jones replied, “I’m sick, I’ve got a bum heart” {{sfn|Jones|1951}} {{pg|454|455}}
Norman felt bad about having made this challenge, and relayed the story to Kaylie Jones when the two met at a cocktail party at Jean Stein’s in the late 1980s. Eager to heal old wounds, he offered his friendship to the then twenty-something author. Gloria Jones, rigid and quiet next her daughter through- out the exchange, finally spoke. “You can make it up to her right now,” she said, “give her a quote for her new book about Russia.” Mailer seemed to easily acquiesce, and Gloria added, “If you give her a quote for her novel . . . I swear, Norman, I’ll . . . I’ll . . . give you a blow job.” They all laughed, and Norman wrote the blurb for ''Quite the Other Way'',{{sfn|Jones|1990}} celebrating Kaylie’s “great honesty about a tricky and charged subject . . . a portrait of life in Moscow . . .”

The Joneses were not the only major authors to receive blurbs from Mailer. Mailer promoted ''The Naked Lunch'' {{sfn|Burroughs|1962}} as “a book of great beauty, great difficulty, and maniacally exquisite insight,” referring to Burroughs as “the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.” Mailer would go on public record in a Boston obscenity trial with his thoughts, along with Allen Ginsberg, to appeal the banning of the book. {{sfn|Lennon|2000|p=216}}

Not long after meeting James Baldwin in Paris in 1956—Jean Malaquais introduced the two at his apartment—Mailer “kindly” provided a blurb for the just-finished ''Giovanni’s Room''. {{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=144}}{{sfn|Baldwin|1965}} There to decompress after writing for ''The Village Voice'', the patriarch of hipsterdom was quitting Benzedrine and Seconal, and composed a simple review of Baldwin’s work, saying he “has become one of the few writers of our time . . . [he has written] a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction.”

Novelist and screenwriter Don Carpenter has had his share of Mailer praise as well, initially receiving a blurb for his first work in 1966, ''Hard Rain Falling'', {{sfn|Carpenter|1966}} which read, “Don Carpenter has written a remarkably cool, knowledgeable, sly, subtle, wry, painful novel about some intelligent and violent men and their little trip through life, prison, and the pains of reformation . . . the best novel I’ve ever read about contemporary show biz.”

Over twenty years later, Norman was doing his “church work” as president of the PEN American Center{{sfn|Lennon|2000|p=149}} and coping with the death of his mother, Fanny Mailer, but perhaps found solace in Carpenter’s ''The Class of ’49 ''. {{sfn|Carpenter|1985}} In an eloquent endorsement, he wrote: “I never knew what they meant when they said so-and-so writes like an angel, but now I do. Don Carpenter
{{pg|455|456}}
gives us a superb prose, light, fast as the speed of reading, quick in its turns, luminous, tender, humorous, sad, full of wise woe and comic optimism.”

As for Larry L. King, he would comment on ''The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas'' in a 1981 letter, saying he “love[ed] the penetration in that one.” Five years later, he reserved his less suggestive admiration for King’s ''None But a Blockhead'': “King’s strengths are his wit and his integrity . . . He rings an American bell. His writing is, I dare say, intoxicating.” {{sfn|King|1986}}

As with many novelists, Norman understood the infinite value of poets and their craft. He “accept[ed] the hazard of mentioning [his] own poetry” in a blurb for Florida poet Ed Skellings, {{sfn|Skellings|1976}} and included the refrain: “I want my poems / to be like bones / and shine silver in the sun.” Poet Norman Ros- ten, who referred to Mailer as “Norm I” (Rosten himself was “Norm II”), would also receive acclaim from his longtime friend. ''Over and Out'', {{sfn|Rosten|1972}} however, was not a poetry collection, but a “remarkable novel filled with poetic skills and startling tender sorrows which are blown away with the lightest diffusion of wit . . . the prevailing mood while reading it is pleasure, then more pleasure.” Rosten initiated Mailer’s literary life, helping him to carry the manuscript for ''The Naked and Dead'' on the subway to meet Ted Amussen. Once, he had even attempted to arrange a meeting between Norm I and Marilyn Monroe, who frequented the kitchen of his Connecticut home in the late 1950s. Mailer, who lived within a mere five miles, would tease Ros- ten about this, often accusing him of “favoring [Arthur] Miller” {{sfn|Rollyson|1991|p=253}} During the 1980s, both “Norms” would regularly eat lunch together in New York—it seems that they always stayed in touch.

But Mailer’s interests were never solely literary. Like any sane person, one of Norman’s favorite pastimes was sex. Yet with one book, he proudly announced a bit of ignorance. One Fall evening in 1956, Mailer had tried to prompt a fight between his then-wife Adele and Leslie Aldridge Westoff (then married to John Aldridge) at a party in their Connecticut farmhouse. Over forty years later, Leslie co-authored ''Passionate Sex: Discover the Special Power in You''{{sfn|Westoff|Stein|1999}} and contacted him for a blurb, saying “[Y]ou, Norman, have always been known for your witty, provocative, brilliant, and sexy comments
. . . so if you could just say one sentence . . . I will be forever grateful . . .” {{sfn|Greenstein|2000}} She knew how to stroke his ego, and Mailer’s response matched her praise in kind: “Working on my own stuff, I haven’t had a moment to look into ''Passionate Sex'', but how can others fail to buy it? If the author delivers one-tenth of what is promised in the title, the book will be the bargain of the{{pg|456|457}} year.” He allowed no editing of this blurb—no cuts whatsoever—and amended in an interview, “Why assume that endorsements are holy? I thought it was time to have a little fun with the solemnity of sexual promise. And indeed I did remain true to the endangered principle that information in an information age must strive to be as accurate as possible”. {{sfn|Greenstein|2000|p=40}} Whether he knew it or not, Norman’s comment would be telling of the very origin of the blurb itself, which first came to us on the cover of humorist Gelett Burgess’s ''Are You a Bromide?'' To promote his 1906 publication, Burgess had included the photo of a buxom woman with the fictional name of “Belinda Blurb,” followed by a brief, and nonsensical, text. This satirical look at self-praise caught on, and the word soon found a more serious home amongst promoters and advertisers. {{sfn|Corey|1997|p=35-6}} With his remarks, Norman had once again cut publicity down to its original chaff.

Mailer’s attention to sex was matched only by his early interest in fighting and its various styles. During the winter of 1956-57, Mailer was visited in his Connecticut home by Lyle Stuart, the publisher who would encourage him to begin writing about race in America, sending his statements to Faulkner and even Eleanor Roosevelt. Stuart was aware of Mailer’s interest in combat, and during this trip encouraged him to take jiu-jitsu classes in New York. Norman took to it immediately, and when he discovered that Stu- art was publishing a book by his own jiu-jitsu professor, he matched the fifteen-hundred-dollar advance, and profited from the investment by well over twenty-two thousand dollars.{{sfn|Mills|1982|p=184}} He even wrote a blurb, touting Kiyose Nakae’s 1958 ''Jiu-Jitsu Complete''{{sfn|Nakae|1958}} as “coherent and practical in its every detail.”

An affinity for boxing took Mailer from spectator to promoter to inside the ring. In the same above letter to King, he quipped, “I have to laugh when I think of all the dedication and abstention I’ve put into a sport where on my greatest days I rise within sight of being a mediocre amateur-gentlemen- boxer.” Norman would extol Larry Fink’s 1997 collection of boxing photo- graphs, proclaiming them to be “very good at capturing the dignity, the dread, the sense of doom and the desire to bring doom upon others that is the subtext of every fight . . . and every boxing gym.” He took to early spar- ring with Adele Morales’ father, Al, who always had a place to practice or a bag to swing at, and had associated with the likes of Roger Donoghue, Mo- hammed Ali, and very closely with light-heavyweight champ Jose Torres, whom Mailer financed for the 1965 title. Both men took great pains with {{pg|457|458}} each other as they traded punches and pages in the summer of 1972, Torres— who rented a nearby house in Jamaica, Vermont—was teaching Mailer the ropes, Mailer teaching Torres the pen. {{sfn|Rollyson|1991|p=189}} By the end of it, Tor- res completed his book on Ali, the well-known ''Sting Like a Bee''. {{sfn|Torres|1971}} Mailer’s blurb would prove a quick jab of friendship: “Fantastic . . . Goddamit.”

Just as he was no stranger to taking a swing, Mailer would have a deep interest in the concepts of God, the devil, and the everlasting fight between the two—a fight taking place in the ring of one’s very soul. Myron Kaufmann, a Jewish classmate from Harvard, was present when Bea Silverman (Mailer’s girlfriend at the time) turned to the other women eating dinner at Dunster House and asked “Do you girls fuck?” {{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=34}} For Kaufmann, author of the 1957 bestseller ''Remember Me to God'', {{sfn|Kaufmann|1957}} Norman would state his “extraordinary honesty” in saying that the book would “cause a noticeable shift in the consciousness of the American Jew and the American Protestant” and would credit it for awakening him to hints of anti-Semitism at Harvard, though he “never felt ghettoized” {{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=24}}.

Sandra Harmon, who booked Mailer for his infamous appearance with Gore Vidal on the Dick Cavett show, received his nod of approval for her novel, ''A Girl Like Me''. {{sfn|Harmon|1975}} The blurb, written soon after his return from Africa in 1975, took up the entire back cover. “We are entering a literature where all the lives which used to be silent now speak,” the comments began,
<blockquote> Now, in its way, ''A Girl Like Me'' is the most startling manifestation of this phenomenon. For no matter who else would write a book, how could we expect a novel as unendurably honest as this to come from that female Jewish world which is triangulated be- tween Brooklyn, Miami and Los Angeles, that secretive, plotting, self-calculating and wholly materialistic world, especially when its heroine is beautiful, sexually centered, victim and exploiter, as calculating and ambitious as the rest, and yet divinely, incomprehensibly honest. . . . </blockquote>

It seems appropriate that Harmon’s book made it to Mailer’s reading pile. It was around this time that he met Norris Church at a party thrown by long- time friends, Francis and Ecey Gwaltney. Opposite those “lives which used to be silent,” he filled his life, and his reading hours, with people of great fame. It is no secret that Norman was obsessed by the iconic Marilyn Monroe
{{pg|458|459}} (evidenced by his much disputed biography, Marilyn). The same year his name appeared on Harmon’s novel, it appeared on Robert Slatzer’s ''The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe'', hailing it as good enough to re-open the investigation on the starlet’s suspicious death:
<blockquote> [I]n fact I would say on the basis of hard evidence he has col- lected it would now be more difficult to prove she took her own life than that she was killed. It is already boring to say, ‘in light of Watergate . . .’ but in the light of Watergate, Dallas, Martin Luther King, Bobby, Malcolm X and Chappaquidick, I do not know how anyone could read the end of this book and think that a Coroner’s Inquest on the death of Marilyn Monroe can or should be avoided. The trouble is that public opinion must first call for it. . . . </blockquote>

In an interesting sidenote, biographer Carl Rollyson twice requested Mailer’s endorsement for his own book on Monroe: “He replied quite courteously, saying he hoped he would have time to read it—although he had stacks of books from friends who hoped he would write blurbs for them”. {{sfn|Rollyson|1991|p=371}}

Another iconic starlet, socialite, actress, and model—Edie Sedgwick— once auditioned for Mailer’s stage adaptation of ''The Deer Park'', though he thought she “wasn’t very good . . . she used so much of herself with every line that we knew she’d be immolated after three performances.” This quotation comes to us from the ''Edie: An American Biography'', {{sfn|Stein|Plimpton|1982}} by Jean Stein and longtime friend George Plimpton, which bore a blurb by Mailer: “[she] was the spirit of the Sixties . . . While it is not a novel (although it reads like one) I still will say: ''This is the book of the Sixties that we have been waiting for''.” In 1985, he would comment: “''Savage Grace'' has to be the best oral history to come out since Edie.” {{sfn|Robins|Aronson|1985}} Norman Mailer managed not only to get his name in Edie’s biography, but also on its cover, as well as mention it on an- other biography altogether—about ''Fatal Relations in a Rich and Famous Family'', the doomed Baekelands.

One cannot mention Mailer’s association with fame and doom without also invoking the Kennedy name. In the late 1980s, he would mirror his comments on Marilyn Monroe with Garrison’s On the Trail of the Assassins, {{sfn|Garrison|1988}} detailing the JFK shooting as “a conspiracy.” Of Summers’ Conspiracy: The {{pg|459|460}} ''Definitive Book on the JFK'' Assassination he would say, “I began it again as soon as I finished.” However, none of these was as lauded as ''Symptoms of Withdrawal: A Memoir of Snapshots and Redemption''. {{sfn|Lawford|2005}} At 82, Mailer was still going strong—the University of Texas had just purchased his archive for $2.5 million—and he was more than willing to contribute this blurb for Christopher Kennedy Lawford’s book:
<blockquote> Books about famous American families usually land with a pious splat, or look to excavate a mud hole, but this one is a beauty. The Kennedys have had more achievements and more God-size disasters than most of us can ever know, but not one of the Kennedys has been a good writer. That verdict can now be al- tered . . . given as far as he chooses to go, he certainly tells it like it is. Three cheers. {{sfn|Lawford|2005}} </blockquote>
Such a prominent and sprawling family name brings to mind Mailer’s own blood, specifically Cy Rembar, whose work, ''The End of Obscenity,'' {{sfn|Rembar|1968}} came only a few years after Norman’s testimony in favor of ''The Naked Lunch.'' Rembar’s work was supported by his cousin as “a quiet and essentially modest account of a legal revolution,” and would be bookended in 1996 by Mailer’s approval of Peter Alson’s ''Confessions of an Ivy League Bookie'' as
<blockquote> [T]ough, vulnerable, poignant . . . Alson’s achievement is to limn the spiritual pain of a well-educated Yuppie who is not on his uppers. This he does as no one has before. So, his confessional becomes one of those few books which captures a generation. Since I am Peter Alson’s uncle, I will probably be accused of nepotism, but to hell with that—I would stand by the first para- graph if he were your nephew. Literature is thicker than blood.{{sfn|Alson|1996}} </blockquote>
In his contributions to covers, Mailer even took the time to contemplate the minutiae of modern life. There is joyous disgust in his blurb for Fenichell’s ''Plastic: The Making of a Synthetic Century'', {{sfn|Fenichell|1999|}} “At last! For anyone who hates plastics and loves good writing, this is the book to satisfy your anger, your passion, and your instinctive judgment, and all at once.” And one cannot ignore ''Vittorio’s Dog Book'', {{sfn|Fiorucci|2002}} a collection of drawings that inspired the novelist to admit, “Dogs have souls. The only question, in my mind, is {{pg|460|461}} whether theirs are more noble than ours. And I say this despite having seen a great deal of execrable behavior in the canine species.”

Few subjects have escaped Norman Mailer’s interest, and even fewer observations his keen eye. The collection of his blurbs is a collection of reflective vignettes, and serves as a testament to his relationship with the spooky art, his munificence toward fellow conjurers, and his role as a quick-change artist; a Renaissance man; a broker of the literary marketplace. When considering the endorsement of fellow authors, it is perhaps best to heed Mailer’s advice, included in a 1974 letter to Richard Goodwin for his work ''The 'American Condition'':

<blockquote> If your publishers wish to cut [the blurb], that’s all right with me, but I’d like them to show the rare courtesy of indicating how and where they’re going to make the cuts . . . it creates good will and the opposite causes a quiet rancor to build in people who begin as your champion . . . don’t [take] the blurb and pull out of it ‘a great book.’ {{sfn|Goodwin|1974}} </blockquote>

==Citations==
{{reflist|20em}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}

* {{cite book |last=Alson |first=Peter |date=1996 |title= Confessions of an Ivy League Bookie |url= |location=New York |publisher=Crown Publishers, Inc |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Baldwin |first=James |date= 1965|title= Giovanni’s Room |url= |location= New York |publisher=Dial Press |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Burroughs |first=William |date= 1962|title= Naked Lunch |url= |location=New York |publisher=Grove Press|pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Carpenter |first=Don |date=1985 |title= The Class of ’’49: A Novel and Two Short Stories |url= |location= New York |publisher=North Point Press |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Carpenter |first=Don |author-mask= 1|date= 1966|title= Hard Rain Falling |url= |location=New York |publisher=Harcourt, Brace |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Corey |first=Dale |date=1997 |title=Inventing English: The Imaginative Origins of Everyday Expressions. |url= |location= New York |publisher=Berkley Books |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dearborn |first=Mary |date=1999 |title=Mailer: A Biography |url= |location=New York |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fenichell |first=Stephen |date=1999 |title=Plastic: The Making of a Synthetic Century |url= |location=New York |publisher=Harper business |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fiorucci |first=Vittorio |date=2002 |title=Vittorio’s Dog Book |url= |location= |publisher=Scarlet Claw Publishing, Inc |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Garrison |first=Jim |date=1988 |title=On the Trail of the Assassins |url= |location=New York |publisher=Sheridan Square Pub |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Goodwin |first=Richard |date=1974 |title=The American Condition |url= |location=New York |publisher=Doubleday |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last= Greenstein |first= Jennifer |date=April 2000 |title= Advertisement for Himself |url= |magazine= Brill’s Content |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Harmon |first=Sandra |date=1975 |title=A Girl Like Me |url= |location=New York |publisher= E.P. Dutton & Co |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Jones |first=James |date=1951 |title=From Here to Eternity |url= |location=New York |publisher= Charles Scribner’s Sons |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Jones |first=Kaylie | date=2009 |title=Lies My Mother Never Told Me |url= |location=New York |publisher=HarperCollins |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Jones |first=Kaylie |author-mask= 1 |date=1990 |title=Quite the OtherWay |url= |location=New York |publisher=Fawcett |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite interview |last=Jones |first=Kaylie |author-mask= 1 |subject-link= |date=11 June 2009 |title=Telephone Interview |url= |work= |interviewer-last= |interviewer-first= |interviewer-link= |location= |publisher= |access-date=}}
* {{cite book |last=Kaufmann |first=Myron |date=1957 |title=Remember Me to God |url= |location=Philadelphia |publisher=J. P. Lippincott |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=King |first=Larry |date=1986 |title=None But a Blockhead |url= |location=New York |publisher=Viking Adult |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lawford |first=Christopher Kennedy |date=2005 |title=Symptoms of Withdrawal: A Memoir of Snapshots and Redemption |url= |location=New York |publisher=William Morrow |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J.Michael. |date=2000 |title=Norman Mailer: Works and Days |url= |location=Shavertown, PA |publisher=Sligo Press |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last= |first= |date=4 August 1952 |title=Made in Japan |url= |magazine=Time Magazine |pages= |access-date= |ref={{harvid|"Made in Japan"|1952 }}}}
* {{cite book |last=Manso |first=Peter |date=1985 |title=Mailer: His Life and Times |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mills |first=Hiliary |date=1982 |title=Mailer: A Biography |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Nakae |first=Kiyose |date=1958 |title=Jiu-Jitsu Complete |url= |location=New York |publisher=Wehman Bros |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last= |first= |title=Norman Mailer |url= |journal=1999 James Jones Literary Society Symposium |volume= |issue= |date=1999 |pages= |access-date= |ref={{harvid|“Norman Mailer”|1999}}}}
* {{cite letter |first= Norman |last= Mailer|recipient= Richard Goodwin |subject= Letter to Richard Goodwin |date= 4 March 1974|ref=harv}}
* {{cite letter |first= Norman| last= Mailer |author-mask= 1|recipient= Larry L. King | subject=Letter to Larry L. King | date=11 May 1981 | publisher=The Daily Beast|ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Rembar |first=Charles |date=1968 |title=The End of Obscenity: The Trials of Lady Chatterly, Tropic of Cancer, and Fanny Hill |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Reuter |first=Madalynne |date=8 February 1985 |title=1,000 Writers toMeet in New York at PEN International Congress |url= |magazine=Publisher’s Weekly |pages=23-24 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last1=Robins |first1=Natalie |last2=Aronson |first2=Steven |date=1985 |title=Savage Grace: The True Story of Fatal Relations in a Rich and Famous American Family |url= |location=New York |publisher=William Morrow |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Rollyson |first=Carl |date=1991 |title=The Lives of Norman Mailer |url= |location=New York |publisher=Paragon House |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Rosten |first=Norman |date=1972 |title=Over and Out |url= |location=New York |publisher=George Braziller |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Skellings |first=Edmund |date=1976 |title=Heart Attacks |url= |location=Gainesville |publisher=UP of Florida |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Slatzer |first=Robert F. |date=1975 |title=The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe |url= |location=New York |publisher=Pinnacle |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last1=Stein |first1=Jean |last2=Plimpton |first2=George |date=1982 |title=Edie: An American Biography |url= |location=New York |publisher=Knopf |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Summers |first=Anthony |date=1989 |title=Conspiracy: The Definitive Book on the J.F.K. Assassination |url= |location=St. Paul |publisher=Paragon House Publishing |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Tasaki |first=Hanama |date=1950 |title=Long the Imperial Way |url= |location=New York |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Torres |first=Jose |date=1971 |title=Sting Like a Bee: The Mohammad Ali Story |url= |location=New York |publisher=Curtis Books |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last1=Westoff |first1=Leslie Aldridge |last2=Stein |first2=Daniel S. |date=1999 |title=Passionate Sex: Discover the Special Power in You |url= |location=New York |publisher=Carroll & Graf |pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Advertisements for Others: The Blurbs of Norman Mailer

2025-04-13T21:54:50Z

JKilchenmann: harvid

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{{byline|last=Mitchell |first=Matthew S Hinton |abstract=With ''Advertisements for Myself'', Norman Mailer established an influential foundation in his critique of fellow authors. Additionally, he secured his role as a contributor to the literary marketplace by way of his praise of other works. In over half a century, Norman Mailer composed approximately one hundred and forty blurbs for books on a bevy of subjects. From Hemingway to heavyweight champions, from conspiracy theories to Italian cooking, Mailer has, through his blurbs, shown great generosity to fellow writers, commented on a variety of topics, revealed several personal interests, and developed a poetry of promotion.. }}

WITH ''ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF'', NORMAN MAILER ESTABLISHED an influential foundation in his critique of fellow authors. Additionally, he secured his role as a contributor to the literary marketplace by way of his praise of other works. In over half a century, Norman Mailer composed approximately one hundred and forty blurbs for books on a bevy of subjects. From Hemingway to heavyweight champions, from conspiracy theories to Italian cooking, Mailer has, through his blurbs, shown great generosity to fellow writers, commented on a variety of topics, revealed several personal interests, and developed a poetry of promotion.
Although the 1990s were the peak years for his blurb-writing (he wrote thirty-six of them), Mailer was already punching up endorsements in the first full-year of his literary career. Fast on the heels of ''The Naked and the Dead'', he found fascination with a book authored by a thirty-eight-year-old Japanese businessman: a nightclub owner who was “Hawaiian-born, U.S.- educated, and a veteran of the Japanese army” named Hanama Tasaki.{{sfn|"Made in Japan"|1952}} Tasaki made his debut with ''Long the Imperial Way''—a war novel—and Mailer generously wrote the following one hundred and seventy two words:
<blockquote> I hope ''Long the Imperial Way'' finds a large audience, and to Americans this picture of Japanese life should prove fascinating. Even more important, the experience of military life seen through a Japanese filter is the possible way to grasp the swindle of modern war: the patriotism, the battle waged in the name of peace, the exploitation of soldiers by their officers—the sad song {{pg|453|454}} is here with all its verses. For undoubtedly the Japanese were more miserable, more subjected, more oppressed than soldiers of any other nation, and the brutalities and excesses they committed became comprehensible here to the Western mind. Or at least it is to be hoped that they do become comprehensible or we shall be in a pretty pass when not only the Russians but the Americans as well begin to commit the extra-curricular butcheries of war, and American soldiers and Russian soldiers will strike out in blind frustration and in desperation, swindled even in the moment of their death by the slogans which have already betrayed them.</blockquote>

The paragraph he wrote in support of James Jones’s ''From Here to Eternity'', one of his earliest blurbs, presages his relationship with the fellow war novelist—one of great camaraderie and, later, some disagreement. Mailer had received the work through Scribner’s editor, Burroughs Mitchell. Sick in bed in his Vermont home during the fall of 1950, with the galleys of ''Eternity'' to keep him company, Mailer had this to offer:

<blockquote> It’s a big fist of a book with powerful virtues and serious faults, but if the very good is mixed with the sometimes bad, those qual- ities are inseparable from the author. Jones writes with a wry compassionate anger which is individual and borrows from no writer I know. I think his book is one of the best of the ‘war novels’, and in certain facets perhaps the best.</blockquote>
In a letter to Jones in 1955, Mailer properly framed his contribution, saying, “I remember when I read ''Eternity.'' I was sick with the grippe at the time and I just got sicker. Because deep inside me I knew that no matter how I didn’t want to like it, and how I leaped with pleasure at its faults, it was still just too fucking good . . .” {{sfn|Dearborn|1999}}
Mailer suffered, surely, but also felt that Jones was “talking” to him, as good writers did through their books, especially a “major work” like ''Eternity.'' Later, after the deterioration of their friendship, Jones and Mailer would meet for the last time in Elaine’s, a bar in the Upper East Side. An uninformed Mailer suggested that the two “fight it out,” to which Jones replied, “I’m sick, I’ve got a bum heart” {{sfn|Jones|1951}} {{pg|454|455}}

==Citations==
{{reflist|20em}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}

* {{cite book |last=Dearborn |first=Mary |date=1999 |title= Mailer: A Biography |url= |location=New York |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last= Jones |first=James |date=1951 |title= From Here to Eternity |url= |location=New York |publisher=Charles Scribner’s Sons|pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last= |first= |date=4 August 1952 |title=Made in Japan |url= |magazine=Time Magazine |pages= |access-date= |ref={{harvid|"Made in Japan"|1952 }}}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman Mailer's The Fight: Hemingway, Bullfighting, and the Lovely Metaphysics of Boxing

2025-04-13T21:01:41Z

JKilchenmann: add sfn on page 130 to replace parenthetical

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{{byline|last=Cirino|first=Mark|abstract=Although Norman Mailer’s ''[[The Fight]]'' is ostensibly reportage about the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman championship heavyweight boxing match, we learn more about Mailer and his aesthetic and artistic values than we do about either fighter. One of Mailer’s methods for capturing his Zaire experience is to employ Ernest Hemingway as a ghostly father figure, a ''doppelgänger'', both an inspiration and a nagging reminder of his own inadequacies. An intertextual analysis of these two writers demonstrates the way Mailer uses boxing to offer his inflection of Hemingway’s twentieth-century themes. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04cir }}

{{dc|dc=A|lthough Norman Mailer’s ''The Fight'' is ostensibly reportage}} about the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman championship heavyweight boxing match in Zaire on 30 October 1974, we learn more about Mailer and his aesthetic and artistic values than we do about either fighter. We also learn far more than Mailer’s thoughts on boxing; we glean a broader metaphysical and philosophic notion of action and danger, and the writer’s own role in recording it in prose. One of Mailer’s methods for capturing his Zaire experience is to employ Ernest Hemingway as a ghostly father figure, a ''doppelgänger'', both an inspiration and a nagging reminder of his own inadequacies. Hemingway, whose suicide was thirteen years before the fight, is still active in Mailer’s text, who was enjoying a consciously Hemingwayesque project in Africa.

In Chuck Klosterman’s recent assessment of Norman Mailer as a boxing writer, he writes that “there is nothing metaphysical about getting punched in the face".{{sfn|Klosterman|2008|p=56}}This assertion suggests that Klosterman either has never been punched in the face or was concentrating on the wrong sensation when he was. Mailer and Hemingway represent the boxing ring and the bullfighting arena as possessing such metaphysical possibilities that they invite us to appreciate each of their values in human behavior and the qualities they demand their artists to possess. In ''The Fight'', Mailer’s conspicuous comparisons of boxing to bullfighting, Hemingway, and to art further invite{{pg|123|124}}comparison to Hemingway’s earlier texts. In all instances, we see Mailer and Hemingway with their incisive, intellectual evocations of men of thought (that is, Ali, and any quintessential Hemingway Hero, such as Robert Jordan in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' or his short story alter ego Nick Adams) in moments of peak activity. So, if Klosterman limits the transcendence of boxing simply to “primordial reality” and the “base qualities of being alive”,{{sfn|Klosterman|2008|p=56}}he sharply diverges from Mailer and Hemingway, who find in the maelstrom of a boxing match or the murderous possibilities of a bullring, life’s truest, most elevated and aesthetic moments. “Every wound,” Mailer observes in ''The Fight'', “has its own revelation”,{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=214}}both promising the importance of chronicling the defeated and the damaged and signaling his own fascination and debt to the warriors and athletes and even artists of the Hemingway canon. While Mailer may be overly epigrammatic, this aphorism accurately synopsizes the “wound theory” of criticism that defined (and later encumbered) Hemingway Studies for decades.

To Hemingway, boxing might have been important for more complex reasons than many readers ever understood. A celebrated example of this tension offers a useful illustration. The sordid history behind F. Scott Fitzgerald’s revisions to Hemingway’s short story “Fifty Grand” is relevant not as a salacious biographical anecdote or to provide retrospective textual minutiae. Instead, this conflict’s enduring controversy is itself the issue, one that reveals a major facet of Hemingway’s approach to character, and the larger importance of boxing to Hemingway and writers that would follow, primarily Mailer.

“Fifty Grand,” included in Hemingway’s second volume of short stories, ''Men Without Women'' (1927), was inspired by the anecdote with which the typescript draft begins:
{{cquote|Up at the gym over the Garden one time somebody says to Jack, “Say Jack how did you happen to beat Leonard anyway?” And Jack says, “Well, you see Benny’s an awful smart boxer. All the time he’s in there he’s thinking and all the time he’s thinking I was hitting him.”{{sfn|Beegel|1988|p=15}}}}

Lillian Ross reports Hemingway re-telling the story in 1950, about a quarter-century later: “‘One time I asked Jack, speaking of a fight with Benny Leonard,’“How did you handle Benny so easy, Jack?” “Ernie,” he said,“Benny{{pg|124|125}}is an awfully smart boxer. All the time he’s boxing, he’s thinking. All the time he was thinking, I was hitting him.” Hemingway gave a hoarse laugh, as though he had heard the story for the first time...He laughed again. ‘All the time he was thinking, I was hitting him’”.{{sfn|Ross|1961|p=64}}Ross implies surprise that this stale anecdote is so alive for Hemingway, standing in for the readers who may not have appreciated its importance. In his obnoxious essay “The Art of the Short Story,” written in 1959 and unpublished in his lifetime, Hemingway recollects of “Fifty Grand”: “This story originally started like this: “‘How did you handle Benny so easy, Jack?’ Soldier asked him. ‘Benny’s an awful smart boxer,’ Jack said. ‘All the time he’s in there, he’s thinking. All the time he’s thinking, I was hitting him'".{{sfn|Ross|1961|p=88}}These examples demonstrate that his acquiescence to Fitzgerald’s editorial judgment in 1927 haunted him for three-and-a-half decades, literally until his death.{{efn|Elsewhere, Hemingway remarks on the intelligence of fighters just as he evaluates their physical skill: in 1922, Hemingway describes Battling Siki, the challenger to Georges Carpentier, “siki tough slowthinker but mauling style may puzzle carp”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=73}}In his early journalism, Hemingway reports that, “Jack Dempsey has an imposing list of knockouts over bums and tramps, who were nothing but big slow-moving, slow-thinking set ups for him”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1998|p=192}}Indeed, the payoff of “Fifty Grand”—when Jack Brennan double crosses the double crossers—comes when Jack says, “It’s funny how fast you can think when it means that much money”.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=249}}}}

Fitzgerald’s objection to Hemingway opening the short story with the boxing anecdote was like his misgivings about the original beginning of ''The Sun Also Rises'', what he perceived to be Hemingway’s “tendency to envelope or...to ''embalm'' in mere wordiness an anecdote or joke”.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1995|p=142}}As Susan Beegel notes in her discussion of Hemingway’s impulse to include the anecdote, “Thinking takes time, and boxing is a sport in which speed is of the essence”.{{sfn|Beegel|1988|p=15}}Beegel’s point must be extended: life, at times, is a sport in which speed is of the essence, particularly if it is to be lived to its fullest. As we see in Mailer—think of ''The Naked and the Dead'' and certainly ''The Fight''—Hemingway placed all his characters in situations in which a quick, strategic, pragmatic response is more appropriate than contemplation and conceptualization, despite the characters’ natural inclinations to indulge their memories, imaginative speculation, and ruminations. Muhammad Ali, after all, is no mindless slugger; he is portrayed as a genius, a scientist, an artist, or a “brain fighter,” in the champ’s own words. More than a boxer, Mailer considers Ali “the first psychologist of the body”,{{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=23}}suggesting that his power is in his mind, as opposed to the brute force, the rage, and the animalistic approach of Foreman and Joe Frazier.

But why did Hemingway’s remorse over deferring to Fitzgerald’s suggestions for “Fifty Grand” fester for the rest of his life? After all, what does one paragraph matter? In “The Art of the Short Story,” Hemingway recounts his version of the circumstances behind the editorial change, and his regret over excising “that lovely revelation of the metaphysics of boxing”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1981a|p=89}}{{pg|125|126}}

Hemingway’s essay taunts Fitzgerald for not appreciating that Hemingway was “trying to explain to him how a truly great boxer like Jack Britton functioned”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1981a|p=89}}The manuscript of “Fifty Grand” betrays Hemingway’s bitterness: on it, he scrawled, “1st 3 pages mutilated by Scott Fitzgerald”.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=148}}How can one writer—particularly an established one, which by 1927 Hemingway was—blame a colleague for ruining his own text? This irrational grudge must have endured so persistently because Hemingway disobeyed his instincts as a writer, ironically behaving with the same lack of intuitive trust as the excerpt negatively portrays Benny Leonard. Hemingway obeyed Fitzgerald to great success with ''The Sun Also Rises'', did so again the following year with “Fifty Grand,” and, by 1929, responded to Fitzgerald’s criticisms of A Farewell to Arms with “Kiss my ass”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=78}}

Fitzgerald and others have misconstrued aspects of Hemingway’s objectives, which Mailer grasped intuitively and intellectually. The central thrust to Hemingway’s literary project was to dramatize the compromised functioning of thought as the modern consciousness is incorporated into the violent activities of the twentieth-century man of action. Hemingway’s portrayal of thinking during war takes this idea to the extreme. In Hemingway’s introduction to ''Men at War'', the anthology of war writing he edited, he writes, “Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present minute with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire. It, naturally, is the opposite of all those gifts a writer should have”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1942|p=xxiv}}Hemingway’s articulation of this conflict is a revelation: he is disclosing the tension that defines his work, the internal struggle between a man of action and a man of thought. Hemingway is distinguishing between the curse of Ishmael and the curse of Stubb in ''Moby-Dick'': Ishmael cannot turn the thinking off; for him, the sea and meditation are inextricable, even when he is on the night watch; Ahab’s eleventh commandment, on the other hand, is: do not think.

This dichotomy is always in play in the Hemingway text, and sometimes baldly explicit. Early in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', for example, Robert Jordan coaxes himself, “Turn off the thinking now...You’re a bridge-blower now. Not a thinker”,{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=17}}just as he later disingenuously asserts, “My mind is in suspension until we win the war”.{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=245}}In a 1938 letter to Maxwell Perkins,{{pg|126|127}}Hemingway blames his depressed mood on the rigors of living in a Spanish war zone while simultaneously trying to write his stories of the Spanish Civil War: “If I sound bitter or gloomy throw it out. It’s that it takes one kind of training and frame of mind to do what I’ve been doing and another to write prose”.{{sfn|Bruccoli|1996|p=253}}Ultimately, Hemingway’s contribution to the psychological novel, and to literary Modernism’s conception of mind, is his depiction of how a human being thinks during episodes of great stress, including matadors, boxers, and soldiers, as well as those haunted by their memories of those experiences.

For the purposes of Mailer’s and Hemingway’s intertextuality, boxing and bullfighting are virtually synonymous. Each sport affords the spectator an opportunity to witness violence in a largely—but not completely—sanitized outlet. ''In The Sun Also Rises'', a novel that essentially introduced the bullfight to mainstream American consciousness, boxing and bullfighting are explicitly compared. In addition to the scapegoat Robert Cohn’s dubious (but eventually demonstrable) boxing background, Jake Barnes and his friend Bill Gorton attend the Ledoux-Kid Francis fight in Paris less than a week before their excursion to the Pamplona bullfights. Later, during the ''desencajonada'', or unloading of the bulls, however, Jake constructs the simile of bullfighting to boxing. He tells Brett Ashley, “Look how he knows how to use his horns...He’s got a left and right just like a boxer.” As Brett confirms, “I saw him shift from his left to his right horn”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=144}}The two activities are clearly appealing to Hemingway: one man, by himself, confronting his own limits as he encounters an attacker with his skill, knowledge, courage, and mind control. Both activities are ritual performances, yet both flirt with the possibility of death, danger, crippling injury, as well as murder.

In Mailer, similarly, the allure of boxing seems to be the formalized structure of a violent situation as an attenuated restatement of war experience. Mailer has suggested as much, saying that boxing presents “a way for a violent man to begin to comprehend that living in a classic situation—in other words, living within certain limitations rather than expressing oneself uncontrollably is a way to live that he didn’t have before”.{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|p=185}}Mailer’s articulation is anticipated by Jake Barnes himself, who explains the process to Brett so that the bullfight “became more something that was going on with a definite end, and less of a spectacle with unexplained horrors”;{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|p=171}}in other words, the difference between bullfighting/boxing and war. Just as Mailer differentiates between a championship boxing match between{{pg|127|128}}professionals and a street fight, Hemingway distinguishes between a properly sanctioned bullfight and an amateur bullfight: “The amateur bullfight is as unorganized as a riot and all results are uncertain, bulls or men may be killed; it is all chance and the temper of the populace. The formal bullfight is a commercial spectacle built on the planned and ordered death of the bull and that is its end".{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=372}}If the Marquis of Queensbury rules codify violence in boxing and allow it to transcend a back-alley brawl, Hemingway and Mailer are always conscious of this spectrum of violence and its relative level of chaos.

To Mailer and Hemingway, the men who prevail within this organized violence transcend athletic excellence and attain the status of aesthetic and artistic exemplars. Mailer begins ''The Fight'' by describing Ali as “our most beautiful man”,{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=3}}just as Jake says that bullfighting prodigy Pedro Romero is the “best-looking boy I have ever seen”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=167}}{{efn|After Ali’s victory, Mailer suggests that “Maybe he never appeared more handsome”{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=212}}}}Ali was thirty-two when the Rumble in the Jungle took place; Romero is no more than twenty. Mailer was fifty-one in Zaire; Hemingway turned twenty-six in the summer of 1925, when ''The Sun Also Rises'' was composed. If Ali and Romero serve as embodiments of male beauty, Hemingway also uses Romero as a counterbalance to the malaise that had infected the “lost” members of the post-war generation. When Robert Cohn laments, “my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it,” Jake responds, “Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=18}}Fitzgerald texts like ''The Great Gatsby'' impute an additional intensity of experience to the wealthy; Hemingway ascribes this same quality to the courageous activity of bullfighters. Boxing is precisely the same. In the extended set-piece of the Ledoux-Francis fight that Hemingway sketched in the first draft of SAR, the characters remark on the fight and Ledoux in a way that previews their same awe of bullfighters. Bill Gorton tells Jake, “By God Ledoux is great”{{sfn|Hemingway|1972|p=233}}and asks, “Why don’t they have guys like that in my business (that is, writing)"?{{sfn|Hemingway|1972|p=233}} Bill later deflects a compliment by telling Jake, “I’m not such a good man as Ledoux”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1972|p=234}}In the same way, the bullfighter Maera, whom Hemingway kills off in Chapter XIV of ''In Our Time'', is declared by Nick Adams to be “the greatest man he’d ever known".{{sfn|Hemingway|1972|p=237}}Between Maera and James Joyce, Hemingway wrote Ezra Pound in 1924, there is “absolutely no comparison in art...Maera by a mile”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1981b|p=119}}Boxing and bullfighters emerge in these texts as ideals, both masculine and artistic.

The artistic component of the allure of these sports is Mailer’s explicit{{pg|128|129}}reason for attending the Rumble in the Jungle. When Mailer attributes Foreman’s reference to himself in the third person as equivalent to the “schizophrenia” that “great artists” possess,{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=56}}it echoes Hemingway’s Romero who “talked about his work as something altogether apart from himself”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=178}}For Mailer, though, the real artist is of course not Foreman, but Ali. “If ever a fighter,” Mailer writes, “had been able to demonstrate that boxing was a twentieth century art, it must be Ali”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=162}}Hemingway writes in ''Death in the Afternoon'' that the only trait separating bull-fighting from its inclusion as one of the major arts is its impermanence. In ''The Dangerous Summer'', Hemingway pointedly compares bullfighting to art: “A bullfighter can never see the work of art that he is making. He has no chance to correct it as a painter or writer has. He cannot hear it as a musician can All the time, he is making his work of art he knows that he must keep within the limits of his skill and the knowledge of the animal”.{{efn|Earlier in The Dangerous Summer, Luis Miguel Dominguín is also compared to an artist: “He had the complete and respectful concentration on his work which marks all great artists”{{sfn|Hemingway|1985|p=106}}}}{{sfn|Hemingway|1985|p=198}}Whether Hemingway is posturing in an intentionally provocative way or not—he surely enjoyed presenting himself as the only novelist who would prefer to be Maera killing a bull than Joyce writing ''Ulysses''—it is sufficient to note that in his career-long characterizations of bullfighters, he saw artistry and exemplary conduct when they excelled during their performances, and displayed high and noble aims in their approaches to their work. The crucial way that bullfighting is instructive to a reading of ''The Fight'' emerges when Mailer captures Ali’s demeanor in the ring and the strategy he uses to dismantle and ultimately defeat Foreman. This exalted strategy is two-fold: in the first round, Ali relies on the enormously dangerous right-hand leads to score against Foreman. The audacity of this means of attack is captured in italicized awe in ''The Fight''. It is not a right, but a ''right''. “Right-hand leads!” Mailer exults, “My God!”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=180}}He explains the technicality that leading with the right “is the most difficult and dangerous punch. Difficult to deliver and dangerous to oneself”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=179}}Hemingway makes the same observation in Romero’s code of performance, which is that he has “the old thing, the holding of his purity of line through the maximum of exposure”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=172}}Ali might have danced his way to victory against Foreman, but he did not. He deftly took on the punishment of a much stronger man, and attacked in a way that would leave himself vulnerable, all in the hopes of sapping Foreman’s power. These are the qualities which Hemingway and Mailer extol.

In rounds two through five, Ali uses the infamous rope-a-dope, which absorbs punishment as Foreman punches himself out, using the great{{pg|129|130}}champion’s strength against himself. The parallel between Ali’s strategy and the matador’s gambit is evident. Hemingway quotes the bullfighter El Gallo as shunning exercises that would increase his strength: “What do I want with strength, man? The bull weighs half a ton. Should I take exercises for strength to match him? Let the bull have the strength”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=21}}As this remark suggests, rather than the simple-minded machismo that Hemingway is too frequently reputed to value, the virtue of the effective matador comes in mastering the fear that will inevitably arise when a man encounters a beast that dwarfs him. The successful matador must control his thoughts and emotions and rely on his skill and knowledge to subdue his opponent. Ali faces something precisely equivalent in Zaire. During a training sequence in ''When We Were Kings'', Ali yells out, “He’s the bull. I’m the matador,” clearly deferring to Foreman the trait of power and aggressiveness, and assuming for himself the wit, the knowledge, and the artistry needed to prevail.

Mailer’s hagiography of Ali, then, becomes the more vital when we go beyond his admiration for the fighter to recognize why this admiration was so profound. Ali’s preparation for the Foreman fight (in the 234-page Vintage edition of ''The Fight'', the opening bell to the knockout is confined to pages 177–210; thus, in a book called ''The Fight'', only fourteen percent of the book chronicles the fight{{efn|Mailer’s pacing might have been a model for '' When We Were Kings'', an 89-minute film of which the fight itself spans 7:14, or about 8%.}}follows El Gallo’s logical yet somewhat counter-intuitive training procedure. Mailer reports that Ali confesses, “Foreman can hit harder than me”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=16}}During the uninspired sparring session that opens ''The Fight'', Ali’s strategy is presaged. Since he knows he cannot compete with Foreman’s strength, Ali contrives to use Foreman’s strength against him. Mailer chronicles this strategy meticulously, writing of Ali that “part of his art was to reduce the force of each blow he received to the head and then fraction it further”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=4}}Art? An art to getting hit in the face? If so, it is coupled by fractioning, a melding of the art of war and the sweet science of boxing. Ali consciously courts the same dichotomy that Mailer proposes. Skipping rope in his training quarters, he barks out, “I’m a brain fighter. I’m scientific. I’m artistic.”{{sfn|Gast|1996}} The marriage of art and science continues when Mailer describes “the second half of the art of getting hit was to learn the trajectories with which punches glanced off your glove and still hit you”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=5}}If the study of trajectories is associated with physics, Ali the artist is associated with dance and writing and theatre. This almost suicidal strategy—unappreciated, Mailer suggests, by lesser minds like sportswriters and fight critics—recalls the “calculus” with which {{pg|130|131}}Hemingway claimed he wrote ''Across the River and Into the Trees'', destined for dismissal by ignorant critics. Mailer is unapologetic about twinning art and boxing: he references Joyce’s ''A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'', Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch,” ''Moby-Dick'', and even Hemingway’s ''A Farewell to Arms'', reaching to masterpieces of art and literature to evoke athletic performance.

Mailer extends this articulation to propose that Ali has a physiological understanding of receiving violence that is almost hair-trigger in its fineness. “It was a study,” he writes, “to watch Ali take punches”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=5}}Mailer sees Ali “teaching his nervous system to transmit shock faster than other men could”{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=4}}and possessing the ability to “assimilate punches faster than other fighters,” as Ali “could literally transmit the shock through more parts of his body or direct it to its best path”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=5}}After watching a Foreman training session, Mailer concluded, “it seemed certain that if Ali wished to win, he would have to take more punishment than ever before in his career”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=53}}As Mailer mentions during his commentary in ''When We Were Kings'', “It was as if he wanted to train his body to receive these messages of punishment.”

Just as Ali is positioned as an artist, a craftsman, and a scientist, Mailer describes him in the same way that Hemingway describes matadors. During the first round of the fight, after Ali has tagged Foreman with a scoring punch, Foreman “charged in rage”,{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=178}}a raging bull whose strength must be absorbed, reallocated, frustrated, and then eliminated by the more intelligent foe. After another exchange, in fact, “Foreman responded like a bull. He roared forward. A dangerous bull. His gloves were out like horns”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|pp=178–79}}Even the collection of declarative sentences, uncluttered by punctuation marks, recalls the way Hemingway captures Romero’s style in the ring. After Ali’s strategy of absorbing punches against the ropes emerges, Mailer writes that Foreman “had the pensive expression of a steer being dogged to the ground by a cowboy”,{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=184}}continuing the juxtaposition of Ali’s savvy with Foreman’s depiction as an animal, a beast of the same variety that charges mindlessly and dies inevitably in Pamplona. A brilliant depiction of Ali using his facial expression to deceive Foreman furthers the comparison: Ali, against the ropes, is
{{cquote|now banishing Foreman’s head with the turn of a matador sending away a bull after five fine passes were made, and once when he seemed to hesitate just a little too long, something stirred in{{pg|131|132}}George-like that across-the-arena knowledge of a bull when it is ready at last to gore the matador rather than the cloth, and like a member of a cuadrilla, somebody in Ali’s corner screamed, “Careful! Careful! Careful”!{{sfn|Mailer|1975|pp=196–97}}}}

Is this comparison self-indulgent? How many American readers would find a description of Ali’s defensive strategy in any way clarified by an esoteric gesture towards a bullfight? This link only makes sense in the context of Mailer’s incessant negotiation with the specter of Ernest Hemingway, shadowing him during his journey through Zaire.

Hemingway is introduced into the narrative when Mailer arrives in an unappealing Kinshasa with a stomach ailment, and immediately name drops Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway: Conrad for his iconic depiction of the Congo, and Hemingway, about whom Mailer wonders, “Was it part of Hemingway’s genius that he could travel with healthy insides?”,{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=22}}ignoring the overwhelming catalogue of incidents and accidents that Hemingway suffered during his lifetime of travels. When Mailer hears the mighty roar of a lion, he begins a reverie: “To be eaten by a lion on the banks of the Congo— who could fail to notice that it was Hemingway’s own lion waiting down these years for the flesh of Ernest until an appropriate substitute had at last arrived?”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=92}}If the sound of the lion causes Mailer to fancy a lofty reenactment of Francis Macomber’s paranoia, or Mary’s quest for the lion in ''Under Kilimanjaro'', he does well to confess that the joke is on him: Zaire has a zoo. In Mailer’s description of a drunken balancing act on a balcony outside his hotel room, he speculates on the possibility of dying in this way. “What could be worse than accidental suicide?” he asks rhetorically. “A reverberation of Hemingway’s end shivered its echo”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=123}}These three examples indeed position Mailer as an “appropriate substitute” for Hemingway, both in his ambitious writing project in Africa, his encounters with the beasts of the jungle, and the courting of his own death, with Hemingway’s 1961 suicide still hovering over Mailer’s behavior, his thoughts, and his writing.

But Mailer is not through. When he puts forth Ali’s quandary once the fight is under his control, that he must choose between a victory by either a lethargic decision or the flourish of a spectacular knockout, he is compared to “a torero after a great faena who must still face the drear potential of a protracted inept and disappointing kill,” while Foreman remains “a bull”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=200}}In the sixth round, by which time the bout’s fate is foretold, Ali sizes{{pg|132|133}}up Foreman “the way a bullfighter lines up a bull before going in over the horns for the kill...a fair conclusion was that the bull still had an access of strength too great for the kill”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=202}}In a sequence where Mailer would make dozens of comparisons, frantically seeking metaphorical images to convey the magnitude of the scene, his clinging to bullfighting imagery is striking thematically and strategically, even if the image might only resonate with a specialist, with himself, or with a fellow aficionado of ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{efn|Cf. Advertisements For Myself, when Mailer writes, “I used to compare the bed to the bullfight, sometimes seeing myself as the matador and sometimes as the bull”}}{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=495}}When Mailer compares Foreman’s clumsiness to “a street fighter at the end of a long rumble”,{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=204}}the reader does not require any special base of knowledge to access the comparison.

The dynamic set up between Foreman and Ali leads to the rope-a-dope strategy that is ultimately Foreman’s undoing and proof of Ali’s ingenuity. Parodying his own proclivity towards “Germanic formulation,” Mailer teases that he might characterize this approach as “the modal transposition from Active to Passive”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=221}}The serious point about Ali’s strategy, though, is that he did not overpower Foreman (because he could not), and did not even use superior skill. He outsmarted him, outclassed him. Ali kills ''recibiendo''. His technique is the boxing equivalent of the bullfighter’s choice to kill by receiving the bull, to allow the bull’s aggression to work against itself by charging into the sword, rather than attacking the animal. Just as Ali’s technique is legendary, both Mailer and Hemingway have extolled the ''recibiendo'' style as, on several levels, the most sublime way to kill a bull.

Not many Americans understood the importance of ''recibiendo'' before 1926, when Hemingway turned the technique into an objective correlative for courage, the grace-under-pressure ideal that has become threadbare in recent discussions of Hemingway’s texts. In the final bullfight before the end of the festival of San Fermin, Romero’s performance is captured:

{{cquote|The bull watched him. Romero spoke to the bull and tapped one of his feet. The bull charged and Romero waited for the charge, the muleta held low, sighting along the blade, his feet firm. Then without taking a step forward, he became one with the bull...{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=224}}}}

In ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway defines ''Recibir'', “to kill the bull from in front awaiting his charge without moving the feet once the charge has started”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=442}}This definition is nearly a precise restatement of Romero’s{{pg|133|134}}triumph in ''The Sun Also Rises'', his feet firm, waiting for the charge. Hemingway refers to ''recibiendo'' as the most “difficult, dangerous and emotional way to kill bulls”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1985|p=442}}In ''The Dangerous Summer'', Hemingway refers to the technique as “the oldest and the most dangerous and the most beautiful” manner of killing.{{sfn|Hemingway|1985|p=202}}By employing the ''recibiendo'' technique, Antonio Ordóñez in ''The Dangerous Summer'' and Pedro Romero in ''The Sun Also Rises'' impress their observers and impress the writers recording their accomplishments.

Mailer shares Hemingway’s fascination with a matador killing ''recibiendo''. His miniaturized version of ''Death in the Afternoon'', published in 1967, called simply ''The Bullfight'',{{efn|Mailer’s introductory remarks in that text are titled: ''Footnote to Death in the Afternoon.''}} describes this classic style of killing with a sense of awe, and is worth quoting at length:

{{cquote|The bull charged prematurely, and Amado, determined to get the kill, did not skip away but held ground, received the charge, stood there with the sword, turned the bull’s head with the muleta, and the bull impaled himself on the point of the torero’s blade which went right into the proper space between the shoulders, and the bull ran right up on it into his death, took several steps to the side, gave a toss of his head at heaven, and fell. Amado had killed ''recibiendo''. He had killed standing still, receiving the bull while the bull charged. No one had seen that in years.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=n.pg}}}}

By leaning back against the ropes and inciting Foreman’s charge, Ali displays the same bravado, courage, and panache in dominating his opponent as these matadors who Mailer and Hemingway laud with such emotion. {{efn|One of the ways Mailer praises Ali in ''When We Were Kings'' is by saying, “What a classic performance,” suggesting the classic style of defeating an opponent that parallels a heroic matador.}}

Mailer and Hemingway mimic the matadors they lionize in two significant ways. For Hemingway, the ''corto y derecho'' style of bullfighting that he describes in “The Undefeated,” another story from ''Men Without Women'', is so closely associated with his own “short and straight” writing style that the reference is almost transparently self-referential and was so already by its publication in 1927. In the same way that Jake’s attention to Romero is revelatory of what he values in a man, Hemingway’s own characterization of Romero is crucial for what Hemingway values in art. When Romero’s performance is summarized as “not brilliant bull-fighting...only perfect bull-fighting”,{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=221}}and that Romero’s style contained “no tricks and no{{pg|134|135}}mystifications”,{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=223}}Hemingway is separating his own novel from modern masterpieces of the previous few years like ''Ulysses'' or ''The Great Gatsby'' or ''Mrs. Dalloway'' and even anticipating the experimentation of ''The Sound and the Fury'', which would come a few years later.

Just as Hemingway mimics Romero’s clarity, classicism, and linearity in prose,{{efn|The first draft of ''The Sun Also Rises'' originally began in medias res, beginning in Spain, then flashing back to Paris. The change to linearity transcends a narratological decision to achieve thematic importance. For the essential study of ''The Sun Also Rises''’s composition and its implications, see Svoboda.}}Mailer links the passes of his narrative, endeavoring to reach a narrative climax just as the fight reaches its dramatic climax in the eighth round. Unlike Hemingway, who did not cling to figurative language in a conspicuous quest to have the reader understand perfectly a situation which he might not have ever seen before, Mailer’s sequence of comparisons rises to the task as the most memorable writerly performance in his account of the “Rumble in the Jungle.”

A few years earlier, Mailer warned his readers that “Sooner or later, fight metaphors, like fight managers, go sentimental. They go military” (''King of the Hill'').{{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=66}}True to his word, the first similes of the eighth round follow such a trope: Ali chooses his shots “as if he had a reserve of good punches... like a soldier in a siege who counts his bullets”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=206}}Some of the exchanges at the beginning of round eight recall the “great bombardment” of the fifth,{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=207}}which Mailer calls one of the greatest in the history of boxing, with a “shelling reminiscent of artillery battles in World War I”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=195}}While Mailer may caution us of the glibness of comparing boxing to warfare, he gleefully perpetuates the absurdity; he well knows that three minutes of getting punched by a man—even by George Foreman—is nothing like a world war, but he willingly adopts the parlance and conventions of boxing writing.

Towards the end of the seventh round, Mailer uses scenery-chewing similes to control the pace of the narrative, the better to convey Foreman’s mighty fatigue.

{{cquote|Foreman was fighting as slowly as a worn-out fighter in the Golden Gloves, slow as a man walking up a hill of pillows, slow as he would have looked if their first round had been rerun in slow motion, that was no slower than Foreman was fighting now...he was reminiscent...of a linebacker coiling around a runner with his hands and arms in the slow-motion replay...{{sfn|Mailer|1975|pp=204–05}}}}{{pg|135|136}}

And no slower than Mailer is narrating now. In this sequence of three similes, the first and third compare a slow fighter to a slow fighter. To say that Foreman, a tired professional fighter, looks as tired as a tired amateur fighter, is patently ridiculous. Furthermore, to state that he is as slow as a slow-motion version of himself, or a slow-motion version of someone else is not a helpful comparison; it is not vivid and inventive writing. The second simile is brilliant, and would be the only one needed, if the first and third did not aid in establishing the pacing of the moment in the fight.

Directly before the eighth round, Ali’s eyes, by contrast to Foreman’s torpor, are “quick as the eyes, indeed, of a squirrel”,{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=206}}demonstrating the energy, vivacity and speed that has been sapped from Foreman. During the round, Mailer’s similes are telling; they evoke the spectator’s enthusiasm, the witness’s thrill of the final sequence of the fight. Foreman’s legs become “like a horse high-stepping along a road full of rocks”;{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=206}}he bounces off the ropes and pursues Ali “like a man chasing a cat”;{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=206}}he waves his gloves at Ali “like an infant six feet tall waving its uncoordinated battle arm”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=207}}When Ali delivers the ''coup de grâce'', “Foreman’s arms flew out to the side like a man with a parachute jumping out of a plane”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=208}}How does he fall? “He went over like a six-foot, sixty-year-old butler who has just heard tragic news”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=208}}Foreman transforms from a six-foot infant to a six-foot sexagenarian manservant in two minutes. And, finally, Mailer compares a knocked-out fighter to “a drunk hoping to get out of bed to go to work”,{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=208}}an unfortunately predictable association.

All of these similes are Mailer’s own flourishes, the passes that he links together, striving to express his enthusiasm and awe, seeking to get the reader more intimately involved with the experience, culminating with one final comparison, not of Ali or of Foreman, but of his own reaction: our narrator was “like a dim parent who realizes suddenly his child is indeed and indubitably married”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=209}}The figurative rope-a-dope that Mailer employs is unlike Hemingway’s description of the bullfight, but identical in that the scene he is attempting to capture must be described according to the terms of the action being rendered.

Where does ''The Fight'' ultimately belong in Norman Mailer’s life’s work? Is it a self-aggrandizing study of a sport, the nuances of which only a select few appreciate or care about? Is ''The Fight'' Mailer’s ''Death in the Afternoon''— the disquisition on bullfighting Hemingway wrote as a young man—or more precisely his ''The Dangerous Summer'', Hemingway’s revisitation of the{{pg|136|137}}bullfights at the end of his career? Is it Mailer’s ''A Moveable Feast'', a version of his memoirs? Does it equate to the two books Hemingway devoted to African safaris? A combination of all of these? ''The Fight'', ultimately, illuminates the reader of the way Mailer views violence, writing, and Hemingway himself, which positions it as a supplementary text to virtually every other major Mailer effort. With Hemingway and bullfighting as constant presences in ''The Fight'', these intertextual questions yield results that allow Mailer’s project to transcend journalism, or sports writing, to become a key text to determining his restatement of Hemingway’s classic twentieth-century themes.

===Notes===
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===Citations===
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
*{{Cite book| author-last=Beegel | author-first=Susan F. |title=Hemingway’s Craft of Omission: Four Manuscript Examples |location=Ann Arbor, MI |publisher=UMI Research Press |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |date=1988 |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite book| author-last= Bruccoli |author-first= Matthew J. |date= 1996 |title=The Only Thing That Counts: Ernest Hemingway-Maxwell Perkins Correspondence |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
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*{{Cite book|last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |title=The Fight |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown |date=1975 |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite book|last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |title=King of the Hill: Norman Mailer on the fight of the Century |location=New York |publisher=New American Library |date=1971 |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite book|last1=Mailer |first1=Norman |author-mask=1 |first2=John Buffalo |last2=Mailer |title=The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker, and Bad Conscience in America |location=New York |publisher=Nation Books |date=2006 |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite book|last=Reynolds |first=Michael S. |title=Hemingway’s First War: The Making of A Farewell to Arms |location=Princeton, NJ |publisher=Princeton UP |date=1976 |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
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*{{Cite book|last=Ross |first=Lillian |title=Portrait of Hemingway |location=New York |publisher=Simon & Schuster |date=1961 |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite book |last=Svoboda |first=Frederic Joseph |title=Ernest Hemingway & The Sun Also Rises: The crafting of a Style |location=Lawrence, KS |publisher=UP of Kansas |date=1983 |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman Mailer's The Fight: Hemingway, Bullfighting, and the Lovely Metaphysics of Boxing

2025-04-13T17:01:05Z

JKilchenmann: Hemingway 2 citations in 1981, added a/b

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{{byline|last=Cirino|first=Mark|abstract=Although Norman Mailer’s ''[[The Fight]]'' is ostensibly reportage about the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman championship heavyweight boxing match, we learn more about Mailer and his aesthetic and artistic values than we do about either fighter. One of Mailer’s methods for capturing his Zaire experience is to employ Ernest Hemingway as a ghostly father figure, a ''doppelgänger'', both an inspiration and a nagging reminder of his own inadequacies. An intertextual analysis of these two writers demonstrates the way Mailer uses boxing to offer his inflection of Hemingway’s twentieth-century themes. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04cir }}

{{dc|dc=A|lthough Norman Mailer’s ''The Fight'' is ostensibly reportage}} about the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman championship heavyweight boxing match in Zaire on 30 October 1974, we learn more about Mailer and his aesthetic and artistic values than we do about either fighter. We also learn far more than Mailer’s thoughts on boxing; we glean a broader metaphysical and philosophic notion of action and danger, and the writer’s own role in recording it in prose. One of Mailer’s methods for capturing his Zaire experience is to employ Ernest Hemingway as a ghostly father figure, a ''doppelgänger'', both an inspiration and a nagging reminder of his own inadequacies. Hemingway, whose suicide was thirteen years before the fight, is still active in Mailer’s text, who was enjoying a consciously Hemingwayesque project in Africa.

In Chuck Klosterman’s recent assessment of Norman Mailer as a boxing writer, he writes that “there is nothing metaphysical about getting punched in the face".{{sfn|Klosterman|2008|p=56}}This assertion suggests that Klosterman either has never been punched in the face or was concentrating on the wrong sensation when he was. Mailer and Hemingway represent the boxing ring and the bullfighting arena as possessing such metaphysical possibilities that they invite us to appreciate each of their values in human behavior and the qualities they demand their artists to possess. In ''The Fight'', Mailer’s conspicuous comparisons of boxing to bullfighting, Hemingway, and to art further invite{{pg|123|124}}comparison to Hemingway’s earlier texts. In all instances, we see Mailer and Hemingway with their incisive, intellectual evocations of men of thought (that is, Ali, and any quintessential Hemingway Hero, such as Robert Jordan in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' or his short story alter ego Nick Adams) in moments of peak activity. So, if Klosterman limits the transcendence of boxing simply to “primordial reality” and the “base qualities of being alive”,{{sfn|Klosterman|2008|p=56}}he sharply diverges from Mailer and Hemingway, who find in the maelstrom of a boxing match or the murderous possibilities of a bullring, life’s truest, most elevated and aesthetic moments. “Every wound,” Mailer observes in ''The Fight'', “has its own revelation”,{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=214}}both promising the importance of chronicling the defeated and the damaged and signaling his own fascination and debt to the warriors and athletes and even artists of the Hemingway canon. While Mailer may be overly epigrammatic, this aphorism accurately synopsizes the “wound theory” of criticism that defined (and later encumbered) Hemingway Studies for decades.

To Hemingway, boxing might have been important for more complex reasons than many readers ever understood. A celebrated example of this tension offers a useful illustration. The sordid history behind F. Scott Fitzgerald’s revisions to Hemingway’s short story “Fifty Grand” is relevant not as a salacious biographical anecdote or to provide retrospective textual minutiae. Instead, this conflict’s enduring controversy is itself the issue, one that reveals a major facet of Hemingway’s approach to character, and the larger importance of boxing to Hemingway and writers that would follow, primarily Mailer.

“Fifty Grand,” included in Hemingway’s second volume of short stories, ''Men Without Women'',{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=1927}}was inspired by the anecdote with which the typescript draft begins:
{{cquote|Up at the gym over the Garden one time somebody says to Jack, “Say Jack how did you happen to beat Leonard anyway?” And Jack says, “Well, you see Benny’s an awful smart boxer. All the time he’s in there he’s thinking and all the time he’s thinking I was hitting him.”{{sfn|Beegel|1988|p=15}}}}

Lillian Ross reports Hemingway re-telling the story in 1950, about a quarter-century later: “‘One time I asked Jack, speaking of a fight with Benny Leonard,’“How did you handle Benny so easy, Jack?” “Ernie,” he said,“Benny{{pg|124|125}}is an awfully smart boxer. All the time he’s boxing, he’s thinking. All the time he was thinking, I was hitting him.” Hemingway gave a hoarse laugh, as though he had heard the story for the first time...He laughed again. ‘All the time he was thinking, I was hitting him’”.{{sfn|Ross|1961|p=64}}Ross implies surprise that this stale anecdote is so alive for Hemingway, standing in for the readers who may not have appreciated its importance. In his obnoxious essay “The Art of the Short Story,” written in 1959 and unpublished in his lifetime, Hemingway recollects of “Fifty Grand”: “This story originally started like this: “‘How did you handle Benny so easy, Jack?’ Soldier asked him. ‘Benny’s an awful smart boxer,’ Jack said. ‘All the time he’s in there, he’s thinking. All the time he’s thinking, I was hitting him'".{{sfn|Ross|1961|p=88}}These examples demonstrate that his acquiescence to Fitzgerald’s editorial judgment in 1927 haunted him for three-and-a-half decades, literally until his death.{{efn|Elsewhere, Hemingway remarks on the intelligence of fighters just as he evaluates their physical skill: in 1922, Hemingway describes Battling Siki, the challenger to Georges Carpentier, “siki tough slowthinker but mauling style may puzzle carp”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=73}}In his early journalism, Hemingway reports that, “Jack Dempsey has an imposing list of knockouts over bums and tramps, who were nothing but big slow-moving, slow-thinking set ups for him”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1998|p=192}}Indeed, the payoff of “Fifty Grand”—when Jack Brennan double crosses the double crossers—comes when Jack says, “It’s funny how fast you can think when it means that much money”.{{sfn|Hemingway|p=249)}}}}

Fitzgerald’s objection to Hemingway opening the short story with the boxing anecdote was like his misgivings about the original beginning of ''The Sun Also Rises'', what he perceived to be Hemingway’s “tendency to envelope or...to ''embalm'' in mere wordiness an anecdote or joke”.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|p=142|1995}}As Susan Beegel notes in her discussion of Hemingway’s impulse to include the anecdote, “Thinking takes time, and boxing is a sport in which speed is of the essence”.{{sfn|Beegel|1988|p=15}}Beegel’s point must be extended: life, at times, is a sport in which speed is of the essence, particularly if it is to be lived to its fullest. As we see in Mailer—think of ''The Naked and the Dead'' and certainly ''The Fight''—Hemingway placed all his characters in situations in which a quick, strategic, pragmatic response is more appropriate than contemplation and conceptualization, despite the characters’ natural inclinations to indulge their memories, imaginative speculation, and ruminations. Muhammad Ali, after all, is no mindless slugger; he is portrayed as a genius, a scientist, an artist, or a “brain fighter,” in the champ’s own words. More than a boxer, Mailer considers Ali “the first psychologist of the body”,{{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=23}}suggesting that his power is in his mind, as opposed to the brute force, the rage, and the animalistic approach of Foreman and Joe Frazier.

But why did Hemingway’s remorse over deferring to Fitzgerald’s suggestions for “Fifty Grand” fester for the rest of his life? After all, what does one paragraph matter? In “The Art of the Short Story,” Hemingway recounts his version of the circumstances behind the editorial change, and his regret over excising “that lovely revelation of the metaphysics of boxing”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1981a|p=89}}{{pg|125|126}}

Hemingway’s essay taunts Fitzgerald for not appreciating that Hemingway was “trying to explain to him how a truly great boxer like Jack Britton functioned”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1981a|p=89}}The manuscript of “Fifty Grand” betrays Hemingway’s bitterness: on it, he scrawled, “1st 3 pages mutilated by Scott Fitzgerald”.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=148}}How can one writer—particularly an established one, which by 1927 Hemingway was—blame a colleague for ruining his own text? This irrational grudge must have endured so persistently because Hemingway disobeyed his instincts as a writer, ironically behaving with the same lack of intuitive trust as the excerpt negatively portrays Benny Leonard. Hemingway obeyed Fitzgerald to great success with ''The Sun Also Rises'', did so again the following year with “Fifty Grand,” and, by 1929, responded to Fitzgerald’s criticisms of A Farewell to Arms with “Kiss my ass”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=78}}

Fitzgerald and others have misconstrued aspects of Hemingway’s objectives, which Mailer grasped intuitively and intellectually. The central thrust to Hemingway’s literary project was to dramatize the compromised functioning of thought as the modern consciousness is incorporated into the violent activities of the twentieth-century man of action. Hemingway’s portrayal of thinking during war takes this idea to the extreme. In Hemingway’s introduction to ''Men at War'', the anthology of war writing he edited, he writes, “Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present minute with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire. It, naturally, is the opposite of all those gifts a writer should have”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1942|p=xxiv}}Hemingway’s articulation of this conflict is a revelation: he is disclosing the tension that defines his work, the internal struggle between a man of action and a man of thought. Hemingway is distinguishing between the curse of Ishmael and the curse of Stubb in ''Moby-Dick'': Ishmael cannot turn the thinking off; for him, the sea and meditation are inextricable, even when he is on the night watch; Ahab’s eleventh commandment, on the other hand, is: do not think.

This dichotomy is always in play in the Hemingway text, and sometimes baldly explicit. Early in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', for example, Robert Jordan coaxes himself, “Turn off the thinking now...You’re a bridge-blower now. Not a thinker”,{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=17}}just as he later disingenuously asserts, “My mind is in suspension until we win the war”.{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=245}}In a 1938 letter to Maxwell Perkins,{{pg|126|127}}Hemingway blames his depressed mood on the rigors of living in a Spanish war zone while simultaneously trying to write his stories of the Spanish Civil War: “If I sound bitter or gloomy throw it out. It’s that it takes one kind of training and frame of mind to do what I’ve been doing and another to write prose”.{{sfn|Bruccoli|1996|p=253}}Ultimately, Hemingway’s contribution to the psychological novel, and to literary Modernism’s conception of mind, is his depiction of how a human being thinks during episodes of great stress, including matadors, boxers, and soldiers, as well as those haunted by their memories of those experiences.

For the purposes of Mailer’s and Hemingway’s intertextuality, boxing and bullfighting are virtually synonymous. Each sport affords the spectator an opportunity to witness violence in a largely—but not completely—sanitized outlet. ''In The Sun Also Rises'', a novel that essentially introduced the bullfight to mainstream American consciousness, boxing and bullfighting are explicitly compared. In addition to the scapegoat Robert Cohn’s dubious (but eventually demonstrable) boxing background, Jake Barnes and his friend Bill Gorton attend the Ledoux-Kid Francis fight in Paris less than a week before their excursion to the Pamplona bullfights. Later, during the ''desencajonada'', or unloading of the bulls, however, Jake constructs the simile of bullfighting to boxing. He tells Brett Ashley, “Look how he knows how to use his horns...He’s got a left and right just like a boxer.” As Brett confirms, “I saw him shift from his left to his right horn”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=144}}The two activities are clearly appealing to Hemingway: one man, by himself, confronting his own limits as he encounters an attacker with his skill, knowledge, courage, and mind control. Both activities are ritual performances, yet both flirt with the possibility of death, danger, crippling injury, as well as murder.

In Mailer, similarly, the allure of boxing seems to be the formalized structure of a violent situation as an attenuated restatement of war experience. Mailer has suggested as much, saying that boxing presents “a way for a violent man to begin to comprehend that living in a classic situation—in other words, living within certain limitations rather than expressing oneself uncontrollably is a way to live that he didn’t have before”.{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|p=185}}Mailer’s articulation is anticipated by Jake Barnes himself, who explains the process to Brett so that the bullfight “became more something that was going on with a definite end, and less of a spectacle with unexplained horrors”;{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|p=171}}in other words, the difference between bullfighting/boxing and war. Just as Mailer differentiates between a championship boxing match between{{pg|127|128}}professionals and a street fight, Hemingway distinguishes between a properly sanctioned bullfight and an amateur bullfight: “The amateur bullfight is as unorganized as a riot and all results are uncertain, bulls or men may be killed; it is all chance and the temper of the populace. The formal bullfight is a commercial spectacle built on the planned and ordered death of the bull and that is its end".{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=372}}If the Marquis of Queensbury rules codify violence in boxing and allow it to transcend a back-alley brawl, Hemingway and Mailer are always conscious of this spectrum of violence and its relative level of chaos.

To Mailer and Hemingway, the men who prevail within this organized violence transcend athletic excellence and attain the status of aesthetic and artistic exemplars. Mailer begins ''The Fight'' by describing Ali as “our most beautiful man”,{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=3}}just as Jake says that bullfighting prodigy Pedro Romero is the “best-looking boy I have ever seen”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=167}}{{efn|After Ali’s victory, Mailer suggests that “Maybe he never appeared more handsome”{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=212}}}}Ali was thirty-two when the Rumble in the Jungle took place; Romero is no more than twenty. Mailer was fifty-one in Zaire; Hemingway turned twenty-six in the summer of 1925, when ''The Sun Also Rises'' was composed. If Ali and Romero serve as embodiments of male beauty, Hemingway also uses Romero as a counterbalance to the malaise that had infected the “lost” members of the post-war generation. When Robert Cohn laments, “my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it,” Jake responds, “Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=18}}Fitzgerald texts like ''The Great Gatsby'' impute an additional intensity of experience to the wealthy; Hemingway ascribes this same quality to the courageous activity of bullfighters. Boxing is precisely the same. In the extended set-piece of the Ledoux-Francis fight that Hemingway sketched in the first draft of SAR, the characters remark on the fight and Ledoux in a way that previews their same awe of bullfighters. Bill Gorton tells Jake, “By God Ledoux is great”{{sfn|Hemingway|1972|p=233}}and asks, “Why don’t they have guys like that in my business (that is, writing)"?{{sfn|Hemingway|1972|p=233}} Bill later deflects a compliment by telling Jake, “I’m not such a good man as Ledoux”.{{{{sfn|Hemingway|1972|p=234}}In the same way, the bullfighter Maera, whom Hemingway kills off in Chapter XIV of ''In Our Time'', is declared by Nick Adams to be “the greatest man he’d ever known".{{sfn|Hemingway|1972|p=237}}Between Maera and James Joyce, Hemingway wrote Ezra Pound in 1924, there is “absolutely no comparison in art...Maera by a mile”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1981b|p=119}}Boxing and bullfighters emerge in these texts as ideals, both masculine and artistic.

The artistic component of the allure of these sports is Mailer’s explicit{{pg|128|129}}reason for attending the Rumble in the Jungle. When Mailer attributes Foreman’s reference to himself in the third person as equivalent to the “schizophrenia” that “great artists” possess,{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=56}}it echoes Hemingway’s Romero who “talked about his work as something altogether apart from himself”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=178}}For Mailer, though, the real artist is of course not Foreman, but Ali. “If ever a fighter,” Mailer writes, “had been able to demonstrate that boxing was a twentieth century art, it must be Ali”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=162}}Hemingway writes in ''Death in the Afternoon'' that the only trait separating bull-fighting from its inclusion as one of the major arts is its impermanence. In ''The Dangerous Summer'', Hemingway pointedly compares bullfighting to art: “A bullfighter can never see the work of art that he is making. He has no chance to correct it as a painter or writer has. He cannot hear it as a musician can All the time, he is making his work of art he knows that he must keep within the limits of his skill and the knowledge of the animal”.{{efn|Earlier in The Dangerous Summer, Luis Miguel Dominguín is also compared to an artist: “He had the complete and respectful concentration on his work which marks all great artists”{{sfn|Hemingway|1985|p=106}}}}{{sfn|Hemingway|1985|p=198}}Whether Hemingway is posturing in an intentionally provocative way or not—he surely enjoyed presenting himself as the only novelist who would prefer to be Maera killing a bull than Joyce writing ''Ulysses''—it is sufficient to note that in his career-long characterizations of bullfighters, he saw artistry and exemplary conduct when they excelled during their performances, and displayed high and noble aims in their approaches to their work. The crucial way that bullfighting is instructive to a reading of ''The Fight'' emerges when Mailer captures Ali’s demeanor in the ring and the strategy he uses to dismantle and ultimately defeat Foreman. This exalted strategy is two-fold: in the first round, Ali relies on the enormously dangerous right-hand leads to score against Foreman. The audacity of this means of attack is captured in italicized awe in ''The Fight''. It is not a right, but a ''right''. “Right-hand leads!” Mailer exults, “My God!”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=180}}He explains the technicality that leading with the right “is the most difficult and dangerous punch. Difficult to deliver and dangerous to oneself”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=179}}Hemingway makes the same observation in Romero’s code of performance, which is that he has “the old thing, the holding of his purity of line through the maximum of exposure”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=172}}Ali might have danced his way to victory against Foreman, but he did not. He deftly took on the punishment of a much stronger man, and attacked in a way that would leave himself vulnerable, all in the hopes of sapping Foreman’s power. These are the qualities which Hemingway and Mailer extol.

In rounds two through five, Ali uses the infamous rope-a-dope, which absorbs punishment as Foreman punches himself out, using the great{{pg|129|130}}champion’s strength against himself. The parallel between Ali’s strategy and the matador’s gambit is evident. Hemingway quotes the bullfighter El Gallo as shunning exercises that would increase his strength: “What do I want with strength, man? The bull weighs half a ton. Should I take exercises for strength to match him? Let the bull have the strength”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=21}}As this remark suggests, rather than the simple-minded machismo that Hemingway is too frequently reputed to value, the virtue of the effective matador comes in mastering the fear that will inevitably arise when a man encounters a beast that dwarfs him. The successful matador must control his thoughts and emotions and rely on his skill and knowledge to subdue his opponent. Ali faces something precisely equivalent in Zaire. During a training sequence in ''When We Were Kings'', Ali yells out, “He’s the bull. I’m the matador,” clearly deferring to Foreman the trait of power and aggressiveness, and assuming for himself the wit, the knowledge, and the artistry needed to prevail.

Mailer’s hagiography of Ali, then, becomes the more vital when we go beyond his admiration for the fighter to recognize why this admiration was so profound. Ali’s preparation for the Foreman fight (in the 234-page Vintage edition of ''The Fight'', the opening bell to the knockout is confined to pages 177–210; thus, in a book called ''The Fight'', only fourteen percent of the book chronicles the fight{{efn|Mailer’s pacing might have been a model for '' When We Were Kings'', an 89-minute film of which the fight itself spans 7:14, or about 8%.}}follows El Gallo’s logical yet somewhat counter-intuitive training procedure. Mailer reports that Ali confesses, “Foreman can hit harder than me”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=16}}During the uninspired sparring session that opens ''The Fight'', Ali’s strategy is presaged. Since he knows he cannot compete with Foreman’s strength, Ali contrives to use Foreman’s strength against him. Mailer chronicles this strategy meticulously, writing of Ali that “part of his art was to reduce the force of each blow he received to the head and then fraction it further”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=4}}Art? An art to getting hit in the face? If so, it is coupled by fractioning, a melding of the art of war and the sweet science of boxing. Ali consciously courts the same dichotomy that Mailer proposes. Skipping rope in his training quarters, he barks out, “I’m a brain fighter. I’m scientific. I’m artistic” (''When We Were Kings''). The marriage of art and science continues when Mailer describes “the second half of the art of getting hit was to learn the trajectories with which punches glanced off your glove and still hit you”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=5}}If the study of trajectories is associated with physics, Ali the artist is associated with dance and writing and theatre. This almost suicidal strategy—unappreciated, Mailer suggests, by lesser minds like sportswriters and fight critics—recalls the “calculus” with which {{pg|130|131}}Hemingway claimed he wrote ''Across the River and Into the Trees'', destined for dismissal by ignorant critics. Mailer is unapologetic about twinning art and boxing: he references Joyce’s ''A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'', Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch,” ''Moby-Dick'', and even Hemingway’s ''A Farewell to Arms'', reaching to masterpieces of art and literature to evoke athletic performance.

Mailer extends this articulation to propose that Ali has a physiological understanding of receiving violence that is almost hair-trigger in its fineness. “It was a study,” he writes, “to watch Ali take punches”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=5}}Mailer sees Ali “teaching his nervous system to transmit shock faster than other men could”{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=4}}and possessing the ability to “assimilate punches faster than other fighters,” as Ali “could literally transmit the shock through more parts of his body or direct it to its best path”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=5}}After watching a Foreman training session, Mailer concluded, “it seemed certain that if Ali wished to win, he would have to take more punishment than ever before in his career”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=53}}As Mailer mentions during his commentary in ''When We Were Kings'', “It was as if he wanted to train his body to receive these messages of punishment.”

Just as Ali is positioned as an artist, a craftsman, and a scientist, Mailer describes him in the same way that Hemingway describes matadors. During the first round of the fight, after Ali has tagged Foreman with a scoring punch, Foreman “charged in rage”,{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=178}}a raging bull whose strength must be absorbed, reallocated, frustrated, and then eliminated by the more intelligent foe. After another exchange, in fact, “Foreman responded like a bull. He roared forward. A dangerous bull. His gloves were out like horns”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=178–79}}Even the collection of declarative sentences, uncluttered by punctuation marks, recalls the way Hemingway captures Romero’s style in the ring. After Ali’s strategy of absorbing punches against the ropes emerges, Mailer writes that Foreman “had the pensive expression of a steer being dogged to the ground by a cowboy”,{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=184}}continuing the juxtaposition of Ali’s savvy with Foreman’s depiction as an animal, a beast of the same variety that charges mindlessly and dies inevitably in Pamplona. A brilliant depiction of Ali using his facial expression to deceive Foreman furthers the comparison: Ali, against the ropes, is
{{cquote|now banishing Foreman’s head with the turn of a matador sending away a bull after five fine passes were made, and once when he seemed to hesitate just a little too long, something stirred in{{pg|131|132}}George-like that across-the-arena knowledge of a bull when it is ready at last to gore the matador rather than the cloth, and like a member of a cuadrilla, somebody in Ali’s corner screamed, “Careful! Careful! Careful”!{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=196–97}}}}

Is this comparison self-indulgent? How many American readers would find a description of Ali’s defensive strategy in any way clarified by an esoteric gesture towards a bullfight? This link only makes sense in the context of Mailer’s incessant negotiation with the specter of Ernest Hemingway, shadowing him during his journey through Zaire.

Hemingway is introduced into the narrative when Mailer arrives in an unappealing Kinshasa with a stomach ailment, and immediately name drops Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway: Conrad for his iconic depiction of the Congo, and Hemingway, about whom Mailer wonders, “Was it part of Hemingway’s genius that he could travel with healthy insides?”,{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=22}}ignoring the overwhelming catalogue of incidents and accidents that Hemingway suffered during his lifetime of travels. When Mailer hears the mighty roar of a lion, he begins a reverie: “To be eaten by a lion on the banks of the Congo— who could fail to notice that it was Hemingway’s own lion waiting down these years for the flesh of Ernest until an appropriate substitute had at last arrived?”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=92}}If the sound of the lion causes Mailer to fancy a lofty reenactment of Francis Macomber’s paranoia, or Mary’s quest for the lion in ''Under Kilimanjaro'', he does well to confess that the joke is on him: Zaire has a zoo. In Mailer’s description of a drunken balancing act on a balcony outside his hotel room, he speculates on the possibility of dying in this way. “What could be worse than accidental suicide?” he asks rhetorically. “A reverberation of Hemingway’s end shivered its echo”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=123}}These three examples indeed position Mailer as an “appropriate substitute” for Hemingway, both in his ambitious writing project in Africa, his encounters with the beasts of the jungle, and the courting of his own death, with Hemingway’s 1961 suicide still hovering over Mailer’s behavior, his thoughts, and his writing.

But Mailer is not through. When he puts forth Ali’s quandary once the fight is under his control, that he must choose between a victory by either a lethargic decision or the flourish of a spectacular knockout, he is compared to “a torero after a great faena who must still face the drear potential of a protracted inept and disappointing kill,” while Foreman remains “a bull”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=200}}In the sixth round, by which time the bout’s fate is foretold, Ali sizes{{pg|132|133}}up Foreman “the way a bullfighter lines up a bull before going in over the horns for the kill...a fair conclusion was that the bull still had an access of strength too great for the kill”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=202}}In a sequence where Mailer would make dozens of comparisons, frantically seeking metaphorical images to convey the magnitude of the scene, his clinging to bullfighting imagery is striking thematically and strategically, even if the image might only resonate with a specialist, with himself, or with a fellow aficionado of ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{efn|Cf. Advertisements For Myself, when Mailer writes, “I used to compare the bed to the bullfight, sometimes seeing myself as the matador and sometimes as the bull”}}{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=495}}When Mailer compares Foreman’s clumsiness to “a street fighter at the end of a long rumble”,{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=204}}the reader does not require any special base of knowledge to access the comparison.

The dynamic set up between Foreman and Ali leads to the rope-a-dope strategy that is ultimately Foreman’s undoing and proof of Ali’s ingenuity. Parodying his own proclivity towards “Germanic formulation,” Mailer teases that he might characterize this approach as “the modal transposition from Active to Passive”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=221}}The serious point about Ali’s strategy, though, is that he did not overpower Foreman (because he could not), and did not even use superior skill. He outsmarted him, outclassed him. Ali kills ''recibiendo''. His technique is the boxing equivalent of the bullfighter’s choice to kill by receiving the bull, to allow the bull’s aggression to work against itself by charging into the sword, rather than attacking the animal. Just as Ali’s technique is legendary, both Mailer and Hemingway have extolled the ''recibiendo'' style as, on several levels, the most sublime way to kill a bull.

Not many Americans understood the importance of ''recibiendo'' before 1926, when Hemingway turned the technique into an objective correlative for courage, the grace-under-pressure ideal that has become threadbare in recent discussions of Hemingway’s texts. In the final bullfight before the end of the festival of San Fermin, Romero’s performance is captured:

{{cquote|The bull watched him. Romero spoke to the bull and tapped one of his feet. The bull charged and Romero waited for the charge, the muleta held low, sighting along the blade, his feet firm. Then without taking a step forward, he became one with the bull...{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=224}}}}

In ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway defines ''Recibir'', “to kill the bull from in front awaiting his charge without moving the feet once the charge has started”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=442}}This definition is nearly a precise restatement of Romero’s{{pg|133|134}}triumph in ''The Sun Also Rises'', his feet firm, waiting for the charge. Hemingway refers to ''recibiendo'' as the most “difficult, dangerous and emotional way to kill bulls”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1985|p=442}}In ''The Dangerous Summer'', Hemingway refers to the technique as “the oldest and the most dangerous and the most beautiful” manner of killing.{{sfn|Hemingway|1985|p=202}}By employing the ''recibiendo'' technique, Antonio Ordóñez in ''The Dangerous Summer'' and Pedro Romero in ''The Sun Also Rises'' impress their observers and impress the writers recording their accomplishments.

Mailer shares Hemingway’s fascination with a matador killing ''recibiendo''. His miniaturized version of ''Death in the Afternoon'', published in 1967, called simply ''The Bullfight'',{{efn|Mailer’s introductory remarks in that text are titled: ''Footnote to Death in the Afternoon.''}} describes this classic style of killing with a sense of awe, and is worth quoting at length:

{{cquote|The bull charged prematurely, and Amado, determined to get the kill, did not skip away but held ground, received the charge, stood there with the sword, turned the bull’s head with the muleta, and the bull impaled himself on the point of the torero’s blade which went right into the proper space between the shoulders, and the bull ran right up on it into his death, took several steps to the side, gave a toss of his head at heaven, and fell. Amado had killed ''recibiendo''. He had killed standing still, receiving the bull while the bull charged. No one had seen that in years.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=n.pg}}}}

By leaning back against the ropes and inciting Foreman’s charge, Ali displays the same bravado, courage, and panache in dominating his opponent as these matadors who Mailer and Hemingway laud with such emotion. {{efn|One of the ways Mailer praises Ali in ''When We Were Kings'' is by saying, “What a classic performance,” suggesting the classic style of defeating an opponent that parallels a heroic matador.}}

Mailer and Hemingway mimic the matadors they lionize in two significant ways. For Hemingway, the ''corto y derecho'' style of bullfighting that he describes in “The Undefeated,” another story from ''Men Without Women'', is so closely associated with his own “short and straight” writing style that the reference is almost transparently self-referential and was so already by its publication in 1927. In the same way that Jake’s attention to Romero is revelatory of what he values in a man, Hemingway’s own characterization of Romero is crucial for what Hemingway values in art. When Romero’s performance is summarized as “not brilliant bull-fighting...only perfect bull-fighting”,{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=221}}and that Romero’s style contained “no tricks and no{{pg|134|135}}mystifications”,{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=223}}Hemingway is separating his own novel from modern masterpieces of the previous few years like ''Ulysses'' or ''The Great Gatsby'' or ''Mrs. Dalloway'' and even anticipating the experimentation of ''The Sound and the Fury'', which would come a few years later.

Just as Hemingway mimics Romero’s clarity, classicism, and linearity in prose,{{efn|The first draft of ''The Sun Also Rises'' originally began in medias res, beginning in Spain, then flashing back to Paris. The change to linearity transcends a narratological decision to achieve thematic importance. For the essential study of ''The Sun Also Rises''’s composition and its implications, see Svoboda.}}Mailer links the passes of his narrative, endeavoring to reach a narrative climax just as the fight reaches its dramatic climax in the eighth round. Unlike Hemingway, who did not cling to figurative language in a conspicuous quest to have the reader understand perfectly a situation which he might not have ever seen before, Mailer’s sequence of comparisons rises to the task as the most memorable writerly performance in his account of the “Rumble in the Jungle.”

A few years earlier, Mailer warned his readers that “Sooner or later, fight metaphors, like fight managers, go sentimental. They go military” (''King of the Hill'').{{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=66}}True to his word, the first similes of the eighth round follow such a trope: Ali chooses his shots “as if he had a reserve of good punches... like a soldier in a siege who counts his bullets”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=206}}Some of the exchanges at the beginning of round eight recall the “great bombardment” of the fifth,{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=207}}which Mailer calls one of the greatest in the history of boxing, with a “shelling reminiscent of artillery battles in World War I”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=195}}While Mailer may caution us of the glibness of comparing boxing to warfare, he gleefully perpetuates the absurdity; he well knows that three minutes of getting punched by a man—even by George Foreman—is nothing like a world war, but he willingly adopts the parlance and conventions of boxing writing.

Towards the end of the seventh round, Mailer uses scenery-chewing similes to control the pace of the narrative, the better to convey Foreman’s mighty fatigue.

{{cquote|Foreman was fighting as slowly as a worn-out fighter in the Golden Gloves, slow as a man walking up a hill of pillows, slow as he would have looked if their first round had been rerun in slow motion, that was no slower than Foreman was fighting now...he was reminiscent...of a linebacker coiling around a runner with his hands and arms in the slow-motion replay...{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=204–05}}}}{{pg|135|136}}

And no slower than Mailer is narrating now. In this sequence of three similes, the first and third compare a slow fighter to a slow fighter. To say that Foreman, a tired professional fighter, looks as tired as a tired amateur fighter, is patently ridiculous. Furthermore, to state that he is as slow as a slow-motion version of himself, or a slow-motion version of someone else is not a helpful comparison; it is not vivid and inventive writing. The second simile is brilliant, and would be the only one needed, if the first and third did not aid in establishing the pacing of the moment in the fight.

Directly before the eighth round, Ali’s eyes, by contrast to Foreman’s torpor, are “quick as the eyes, indeed, of a squirrel”,{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=206}}demonstrating the energy, vivacity and speed that has been sapped from Foreman. During the round, Mailer’s similes are telling; they evoke the spectator’s enthusiasm, the witness’s thrill of the final sequence of the fight. Foreman’s legs become “like a horse high-stepping along a road full of rocks”;{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=206}}he bounces off the ropes and pursues Ali “like a man chasing a cat”;{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=206}}he waves his gloves at Ali “like an infant six feet tall waving its uncoordinated battle arm”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=207}}When Ali delivers the ''coup de grâce'', “Foreman’s arms flew out to the side like a man with a parachute jumping out of a plane”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=208}}How does he fall? “He went over like a six-foot, sixty-year-old butler who has just heard tragic news”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=208}}Foreman transforms from a six-foot infant to a six-foot sexagenarian manservant in two minutes. And, finally, Mailer compares a knocked-out fighter to “a drunk hoping to get out of bed to go to work”,{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=208}}an unfortunately predictable association.

All of these similes are Mailer’s own flourishes, the passes that he links together, striving to express his enthusiasm and awe, seeking to get the reader more intimately involved with the experience, culminating with one final comparison, not of Ali or of Foreman, but of his own reaction: our narrator was “like a dim parent who realizes suddenly his child is indeed and indubitably married”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=209}}The figurative rope-a-dope that Mailer employs is unlike Hemingway’s description of the bullfight, but identical in that the scene he is attempting to capture must be described according to the terms of the action being rendered.

Where does ''The Fight'' ultimately belong in Norman Mailer’s life’s work? Is it a self-aggrandizing study of a sport, the nuances of which only a select few appreciate or care about? Is ''The Fight'' Mailer’s ''Death in the Afternoon''— the disquisition on bullfighting Hemingway wrote as a young man—or more precisely his ''The Dangerous Summer'', Hemingway’s revisitation of the{{pg|136|137}}bullfights at the end of his career? Is it Mailer’s ''A Moveable Feast'', a version of his memoirs? Does it equate to the two books Hemingway devoted to African safaris? A combination of all of these? ''The Fight'', ultimately, illuminates the reader of the way Mailer views violence, writing, and Hemingway himself, which positions it as a supplementary text to virtually every other major Mailer effort. With Hemingway and bullfighting as constant presences in ''The Fight'', these intertextual questions yield results that allow Mailer’s project to transcend journalism, or sports writing, to become a key text to determining his restatement of Hemingway’s classic twentieth-century themes.

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

===Citations===
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
*{{Cite book| author-last=Beegel | author-first=Susan F. |title=Hemingway’s Craft of Omission: Four Manuscript Examples |location=Ann Arbor, MI |publisher=UMI Research Press |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |date=1988 |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite book| author-last= Bruccoli |author-first= Matthew J. |date= 1996 |title=The Only Thing That Counts: Ernest Hemingway-Maxwell Perkins Correspondence |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite book |author-last=Burwell |author-first=Rose Marie |title=Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |location=Cambridge, UK |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |date=1996 |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |title=A Life in Letters |editor-first=Matthew J. |editor-last=Bruccoli |location=New York |publisher=Touchstone |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |date=1995 |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite AV media |last=Gast |first=Leon |title=When We Were Kings |date=1996 |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Film |url=https://youtu.be/svhnasgxpqs?si=SF1viC9Lbcs401BG |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite magazine |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |title=The Art of the Short Story |magazine=Paris Review |date=Spring 1981a|pages=85-102 |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |authormask=1 |title=The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition |location=New York |publisher=Scribner’s |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |date=2003 |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite book|last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |authormask=1 |title=The Dangerous Summer |date=1985 |location=New York |publisher=Scribner’s |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite book|last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |authormask=1 |title=Death in the Afternoon |location=New York |publisher=Scribner’s |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |date=1932 |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite book|last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |authormask=1 |title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961 |location=New York |publisher=Scribner's |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |editor-first=Carlos |editor-last=Baker |date=1981b |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite book|last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |authormask=1 |title=For Whom the Bell Tolls |date=1940 |location=New York |publisher=Scribner’s |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite book|editor-last=Hemingway |editor-first=Ernest |editormask=1 |title=Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time |date=1942 |location=New York |publisher=Crown Publishers |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite book|last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |authormask=1 |title=The Nick Adams Stories |date=1972 |location=New York |publisher=Scribner's |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite book|last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |authormask=1 |title=The Sun Also Rises |date=1926 |location=New York |publisher=Scribner’s |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite book|last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |authormask=1 |title=The Sun Also Rises: A Facsimile Edition Volume One |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew J. |date=1990 |location=Detroit |publisher=Omnigraphics |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite magazine|last=Klosterman |first=Chuck |title=Nothing to Worry About |magazine=Esquire |pages=56-57|isbn= |author-link= |date=Feb 2008 |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite book|last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=Advertisements for Myself |location=New York |publisher=Putnam |date=1959 |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite book|last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative |location=New York |publisher=Mcmillan |date=1967 |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite book|last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |title=The Fight |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown |date=1975 |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite book|last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |title=King of the Hill: Norman Mailer on the fight of the Century |location=New York |publisher=New American Library |date=1971 |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite book|last1=Mailer |first1=Norman |author-mask=1 |first2=John Buffalo |last2=Mailer |title=The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker, and Bad Conscience in America |location=New York |publisher=Nation Books |date=2006 |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite book|last=Reynolds |first=Michael S. |title=Hemingway’s First War: The Making of A Farewell to Arms |location=Princeton, NJ |publisher=Princeton UP |date=1976 |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite book|last=Reynolds |first=Michael S. |authormask=1 |title=Hemingway: The Paris Years |location=Cambridge, MA |publisher=Basil Blackwell |date=1989 |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite book|last=Reynolds |first=Michael S. |authormask=1 |title=The Young Hemingway |location=New York |publisher=Norton |date=1998 |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite book|last=Ross |first=Lillian |title=Portrait of Hemingway |location=New York |publisher=Simon & Schuster |date=1961 |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
*{{Cite book |last=Svoboda |first=Frederic Joseph |title=Ernest Hemingway & The Sun Also Rises: The crafting of a Style |location=Lawrence, KS |publisher=UP of Kansas |date=1983 |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-12T20:28:16Z

JKilchenmann: /* Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics */ new section

{{Talk header}}
[[/Archive 202504/]]

== Final edits ==
Hello, my article is complete: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Ernest_and_Norman_(Exit_Music)|Ernest and Norman (Exit Music)]]
:{{Reply to|Flowersbloom}} great, thank you. I made some corrections. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, Dr. Lucas. Below is the link to my edited article:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:ASpeed/sandbox
:{{Reply to|ASpeed}} great. Let me know when it’s finished and posted, and I’l have a look. It appears as if you still have a bit of work to do. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. I have completed most of my Remediation Articles, but I still show issues for the one named, "[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman]].

Based on the latest updates, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Battles_for_Regard,_Writerly_and_Otherwise|Battles for Regard, Writerly and Otherwise]] looks good with exception of including a '''category'''.
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} this one is good. I made some corrections before removing the banner, mostly in your sources. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

May you let me know if there is anything I can do on my end to resolve the issues with the first [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|article]]?

[[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 21:47, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} looking very good, but some sources missing page numbers. Please see to those. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

:::Thank you @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] . I will review those and respond when complete. [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 22:47, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::::@[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. Thank you for your feedback. A review of article additions was made for source pages. [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 20:22, 11 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::{{Reply to| ALedezma}} ok, looking good. I made some corrections. There's one final thing to do: no footnotes should appear in the notes section; use {{tl|harvtxt}} instead; I did one to show you how to use the template. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:39, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I finished my remediation article https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 19:44, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TWietstruk}} good work so far, but there is more to do: placement of footnotes (eliminate spaces around them and punctuation always goes ''before'' the footnote.); proofread for typos; fix all red errors at the bottom (most of these are from errors in sourcing); works cited entries should be bulleted list and eliminate space between entries. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I have finished my assigned remediation article: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Jive-Ass_Aficionado:_Why_Are_We_in_Vietnam%3F_and_Hemingway%27s_Moral_Code#cite_note-FOOTNOTEHemingway2003-24
Username ADear.
:{{Reply to|ADear}} thank you. I have marked this as complete. Please be sure you sign your talk page posts correctly. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Erhernandez}} well done! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. I removed your banner after making a few corrections. Please have a look over it and move on to the next thing. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:06, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. I was able to get the 2 web citations to link correctly. But for some reason, I cannot get the Mailer 1967 film Wild 90 citation to link to the reference list. Please advise. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} OK, all fixed and published. Thanks. Please move on to another remediation. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:46, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe there have been some updates made to the project. I believe I have also updated the works cited section to show correct templates. Please let me know if there is anything further that I need to do. Thank you, Caitlin.
::{{reply to| CVinson}} please sign your talk page posts correctly. Thanks. You still need to do some work on the sources. Use the <code>|author-mask=1</code> in your template for repeated author names. Also, you must eliminate the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” message at the bottom. No spaces or returns before or after the {{tl|pg}} call, as I already mentioned above. No parenthetical citations should be left, either; those should all be remediated to footnotes. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:50, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I have updated the sources and updated the in-text citations. I am still having trouble with the "Harv and Sfn no-target errors." I have not been successful in fixing this error and have tried multiple ways to fix it. —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 8:18, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

::::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I see that I still have a red X for my remediation assignment. Is there something else I am still missing? —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::{{reply to| CVinson}} sorry, I'm just getting back to it. There are quite a few punctuation errors. Some left out and others appear after the {{tl|sfn}}. I'm trying to correct those I see, but you should have a look, too. Page is designated as <code>p=</code> in {{tl|sfn}}, not <code>pg=</code>; and a span of pages needs <code>pp=</code>. Again, I have tried to correct these. I removed the banner, but please have another look through. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:01, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} a stellar job. Well done. I removed the banner, so you can move on to another article. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:12, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} Well done! Banner removed, url added. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:18, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

==Oohh Normie Final Edits==
Hi Dr. Lucas, I have finished my article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/"Oohh_Normie_—_You're_Sooo_Hemingway":_Mailer_Memories_and_Encounters|Oohh Normie, You're Sooo Hemingway]]. Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. [[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 20:01, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Tbara4554}} thank you. I made some corrections and removed the banner. You might want to have another look over it. Please move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:53, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Harlot%27s_Ghost,_Bildungsroman,_Masculinity_and_Hemingway

[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 21:22, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} excellent. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:39, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== I am done with this ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Situating_Hemingway:_Mailer,_Style,_Ethics
:Received. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:29, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Review PM Article ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|here]] is my remediated article, ready for review![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 12:21, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} great work. I have removed the banner, so you are good to move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:20, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have finished my remedidation project and I am ready for it to be reviewed. '''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]

Thanks,

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 13:04, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work so far. Please remove wikilinks. Change ' and " to typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. And all red errors at the bottom of the page need to be taken care of. These are likely all from coding errors in your sources. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have removed the wikilinks, changed to the correct typographic style and updated my sources.
'''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe] Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:55, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

[I forgot to fill out the summary box. I am adding my summary]
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you're getting there! It looks great. You must eliminate all the red errors at the bottom. These appear when there are errors in your citations. Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:15, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

@{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything I can think of and I still have harv and sfn no-target errors and harv and sfn multiple-target errors and cs1 uses editors parameter. Do I not include the editor? [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 16:03, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have managed to get rid of two of the red target errors. I am still working on finding the harv sfn multiple target error. Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 20:37, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything i can think of to remove the last red error flag. I had to turn it in. I don't know that else I can do in this situation. I was given citation that did not follow any of the given formats. [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:45, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} all parenthetical citations must be remediated to {{tl|sfn}}; none of yours are. Get these done, then we can worry about the errors. (Some notes on sources: any generic <code><nowiki>{{citation}}</nowiki></code> will not be correct. I see you have a book review by Marshall that has no source (I tried to find the original and cannot; this is a weird citation; I'll continue to look for it). There's also one that looks like a film that should use the [[w:Template:Cite AV media|<code>Cite AV media</code> template]].) Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:16, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Submission ==

Hello!
Here's my remediated article; [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Devil's_Party:_Reading_and_Wreaking_Vengeance_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest|The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in ''The Castle in the Forest'']].
Thanks! Please let me know if there's anything I can review or correct.
[[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 13:23, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} nice work! Banner removed, so please move on to something else in the volume. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Vol. 4: Rumors of Grace article remediated ==

I believe I have completed remediation of ''[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Rumors_of_Grace:_God-Language_in_Hemingway_and_Mailer|Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer]]'', vol. 4. I was having last-minute trouble with sfn errors for sources without authors, but Justin Kilchenmann helped me out, so I think they are fixed.
:{{Reply to|Sherrilledwards}} You have done a remarkable job—a real Herculean effort! Footnotes should not go in any notes. See those I changed; the others should be changed in the same way. I have done some, but the others have to be fixed, I'm afraid. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}}I believe I have completed these fixes, so the article is again ready for review. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 15:49, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Inside Norman Mailer ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished remediating the article, [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]]. Please let me know if I need to make any adjustments. Thank you! [[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 18:09, 7 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Chelsey.brantley}} good work! Please help with another article from volume 4. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:36, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed: Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine ==

I hope I am doing this is right. I have finished remediating my article about Norman Mailer and its in my designated sandbox [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer:_Playboy_Magazine_Heavyweight here.]
If there are any last minute edits, let me know. I got the last of the errors removed yesterday. And I believe we are on the same page with leaving the in-line citations for ''Playboy'' to be as is, since the author didn't put them down in the works cited. [[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:14, 7 April 2025 (EDT)Nina Mizner
:{{Reply to|NrmMGA5108}} looking good! So, the parenthetical citations still in the article, I'm assuming, are there because of those missing sources? Please check your page numbers; some seem to be off. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:04, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I found the page number error and its corrected, and yes all the parenthetical citations should be referencing issues of the ''playboy'' magazine, which were not listed in the works cited. --[[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| NrmMGA5108}} it looks great. I removed the banner! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:29, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Remediation From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity? ==

Greeting Dr. Lucas,

I have made the adjustment that you mentioned.

I also made additional edits to my short footnotes and noticed that my citations did not link to my references - which has been fixed.

I have tested all of my citations, and they all work.

Here is my article by Alexander Hicks, ''From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity?''

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/From_Here_to_Eternity_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead:_Premiere_to_Eternity%3F

Have a great day.
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} Please always sign your talk page posts. Several “quoted items” in the article appear as ‘quoted items’; these must be corrected, please. No spaces or returns should surround {{tl|pg}} calls. Multiple page numbers should look like this <code><nowiki>{{sfn|Moretti|1996|pp=11-14}}</nowiki></code>; note the double <code>pp</code>. There seem to be many typos. I corrected some for you, but you must see to the rest. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:16, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

Are these the only additional corrections that need to be made? This is different from what you mentioned before.

I just want to be sure that I have hit everything.

Also can you verify what other typos you are seeing, I have ran through this twice.

If something is spelt a certain way, for example "Soljer", I have left it that way. Since it is mentioned like that in the article.
—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 06:49, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

I have gone through and fixed all of the short footnotes.

I have gone line by line with a ruler to look at any typos, and fixed the words that I found that had a dash in them/needed to be lowercased.

I have also fixed the quotations.

—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 12:31, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} much better. Periods go inside quotations marks; I think I fixed these, but please check. Also, there are no spaces before footnotes; again, I did a find/replace, but you should check. Also, check that all titles of novels are italicized (if it's italicized in the PDF, then it has to be italicized in the remediation, including abbreviations, like ''Naked''); I fixed a couple. Also, no extra spaces; there should only be a single blank space between paragraphs. There are quite a few little details that needed (need?) fixing. I removed the banner, but please check my work. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 12:41, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon” ==

Greetings Dr. Lucus,

My article is ready for your review. Thank you.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer%E2%80%99s_%E2%80%9CFootnote_to_Death_in_the_Afternoon%E2%80%9D)
:{{Reply to| KForeman}} it's coming along. Please ''always'' sign your talk page posts. Right up top, there are errors. Please use the real {{tl|pg}}, like all the other articles. Citations need to be fixed. All parenthetical citations must be converted. You still have quite a bit of work to do. All red sections need to be seen to and corrected. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

=Remediation of "Cluster Seeds and the Mailer Legacy"=
Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have completed the remediation of [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Cluster_Seeds_and_the_Mailer_Legacy&oldid=18200| my article], and it is ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 11:32, 8 April 2025 (EDT)@ADavis
:{{Reply to| ADavis}} got it. I think I check it yesterday and removed the banner then. Please move on to another piece. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediating Article: Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing Volume 4. ==

Hello Dr. Lucas,

I have completed remediating my article. Here is the link [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|The Mailer Review: Volume 4: Mailer, Hemingway, Boxing (2010)]] [[User:JBrown|JBrown]] ([[User talk:JBrown|talk]]) 13:01, 8 April 2025 (EDT)JBrown
:{{Reply to|JBrown}} a good start, but all parenthetical citations need to be footnotes. Also, check your headers. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norris Church Mailer'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up remediating the article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norris Church Mailer|Norris Church Mailer]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 13:42, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Kamyers}} awesome work! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edits Completed and Ready for Review ==

Dr. Lucas, I have completed my assigned remediation article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Looking_at_the_Past:_Nostalgia_as_Technique_in_The_Naked_and_the_Dead_and_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls|Looking at the Past: Nostalgia as Technique in The Naked and the Dead and For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. Please review at your convenience. I enjoyed working on this assignment. I look forward to your suggestions and feedback. All the best, Danielle (DBond007)
:{{Reply to| DBond007}} ok, good work. Please remove all the external links. Links to Wikipedia are not necessary, but if used, they need to be done correctly. There should be no spaces before {{tl|sfn}}. May sure all your ' and " are actually typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. Remove any superfluous spaces and line breaks; these mess up the formatting. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Thank you. I will get started on these revisions immediately. Thanks for the feedback and your time. :)[[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 11:30, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}} I have completed all the requested revisions and ready for review round 2. Thank you again![[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 12:10, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to|DBond007}} looking better! There are still items to be seen to, like titles on novels and magazines need to appear like they do in the original: if it's italicized in the PDF, it must be italicized on the web. I added the epigram for you and corrected that pesky citation. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:41, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed the remediation assignment ==

Good evening Dr. Lucas,

I hope I am doing this right. Here is the link for my completed Remediation article: [http://The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Encounters_with_Mailer Encounters with Mailer].

I look forward to reading your feedback.

All the best,

Patrick Riley
:{{Reply to|Priley1984}} thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:40, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project Submission: An Expected Encounter in an Unexpected Place ==

Link:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_An_Expected_Encounter_in_an_Unexpected_Place

Winnie Verna
:{{Reply to|Wverna}} received, thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:51, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== E.Mosley ==

Good evening, @Grlucas. I have completed my Remediation Articles[[https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/On_Reading_Mailer_Too_Young]]. The article I had was " On Reading Mailer Too Young Volume 4, 2010
:{{Reply to| Essence903m}} thank you. I had to fix and clean-up quite a bit. Your saves also do not include summaries. When you move on to your next article, please be more careful and follow the instructions. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Kynndra Watson ==

Good Evening, @grlucas. i have completed my Remediation articles: Volume 5: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law and Volume 4: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer,_Hemingway,_and_the_%E2%80%9CReds%E2%80%9D.

Thank you.
:{{Reply to| KWatson}} thank you, and this is a good start, but there are still many items that need to be cleaned up, like footnote indications (They go after punctuation), citation errors (all the red errors at the bottom need to be seen to), extra spaces and ALL CAPS need to be removed. Please see other completed articles for models. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:18, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/What Would Be the Fun of That?|"What Would Be the Fun of That?"]] by Peter Alson.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:33, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} awesome! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:21, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “Remembering Norris Church” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris Church|“Remembering Norris Church”]] by John Bowers.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 16:17, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} and again, excellent! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:22, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “The Norris I Knew” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/The Norris I Knew|“The Norris I Knew”]] by Christopher Busa.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:04, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} rockin’! 👍🏼 —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:24, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Norris Mailer" Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Norris Mailer|"Norris Mailer"]] by Nancy Collins.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} thanks again. You’re tearing it up. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:32, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Rise Above It" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Rise Above It|"Rise Above It"]] by David Ebershoff—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 11:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} excellent. Many thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:15, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Additional Articles ==

Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have remediated [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/A_View_Through_the_Prism&oldid=18744|"A View Through the Prism"], [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/Lip_Liner|"Lip Liner"], and [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Living_Room_Show#|"The Living Room Show"] in Volume 5. They are ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 12:31, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ADavis}} great work. Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:26, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Submission notification sent 29 March ==

@grlucas

Dr. Lucas - I sent a Talk Page notification that I had completed the page I remediated on 29 March. The table indicates I haven't done anything yet. I sent it from the Talk Page from the article site. I don't see a response from that notification, but I had received one from you earlier in the process.
I don't understand what happened.

[[User:LogansPop22|LogansPop22]] ([[User talk:LogansPop22|talk]]) 14:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|LogansPop22}} sorry if I missed that. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Hemingway and Women at the Front: Blowing Bridges in The Fifth Column, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Other Works|this article]], right? It's looking great, though all the parenthetical citations must be converted to footnotes using {{tl|sfn}} and some of the author names in your notes should use {{tl|harvtxt}}. I added the "citations" section for you. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law ==

@Grlucas, I have made some additional edits to this [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law article] in Volume 5 by correcting most of the citations. There are 2 that still do not work, but I think that is because the sources are incomplete.

[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 21:16, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TPoole}} Looking really good, and this is a complicated one. A couple of things: no spaces or line breaks before or after {{tl|pg}}; I removed the spaces before {{tl|sfn}}, but you might want to check them; there are some typos, like missing spaces before some parentheses; no footnotes should appear in the notes section: use {{tl|harvtxt}} instead. And all the red errors at the bottom need to be cleared up. Great work so far! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:00, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Red Error-Gone ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}I have deleted all the sfn's and the red error is gone. I don't know why I didn't think about this days ago.

[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe|Gladstein-Monroe]]

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 23:07, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} getting closer. A few things: you should use <code>|author-mask=1</code> for repeated author names in your works cited; all parenthetical citations need to be replaced with footnotes using {{tl|sfn}}; must punctuation in your sources need to be removed as the templates do that for you; and you need to use {{tl|harvtxt}} for citations in your endnotes. Also, letters and films have their own templates. I did a couple of these for you as examples. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:14, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Remembering Norris" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris|"Remembering Norris"]] by Margo Howard.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:20, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_From_Orgone_Accumulator_to_Cancer_Protection_for_Schizophrenics

I was unable to find the correct format for the first works cited entry under Mailer. It is a reprint of a magazine article. Thank you. [[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 16:28, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics

2025-04-12T20:25:03Z

JKilchenmann: fix paragraph before blockquote

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{Byline |last=O'Neill Hooker |first=Maureen |abstract=Cancer is a recurring theme in Mailer’s fiction. He believed that malignancy begins with a single defective cell that attacks a healthy body from inside. Mailer believed that spontaneous action requires courage, a feeling synonymous with guts and bravery and audacity. He also believed that the failure to act, or the failure of a courageous attempt to act, causes cancer.|url=...}}

{{dc|dc=T|HERE IS NO QUESTION THAT NORMAN MAILER BELIEVED}} in the toxic effects of anger unexpressed. Why else would he, a talented handyman and carpenter, build his own orgone accumulator? In the six-foot tall phone booth-sized box, lined and padded with foam rubber, he wailed and banged out his personal version of scream therapy in order to de-stress from life in the fast lane.{{sfn|Bosworth|2008|p=401}} It is entirely possible that this activity protected his health in two important ways: first, it reduced his stress, and second, he ''believed'' that it reduced his stress. It may have even helped to clarify his thoughts regarding the origin of cancer and its infrequency in schizophrenics.

J. Michael Lennon recently made a startling discovery. It was a single page of twenty-five lines, handwritten by Mailer, probably in the early 1960s, which hypothesized that impotent emotion causes cancer. As examples of impotent emotion, Mailer described an ugly woman who waited in vain for a beautiful lover, a poor man who wished disaster upon his rich relatives, and a person who carried within his heart a desire to murder, an obsession he would never translate into action. Mailer stated that when inner tension becomes acute, cells exist at the edge of rebellion and the violence they cannot express is suffered within. He claimed that stress caused by unexpressed anger results in cancer.{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.}} Decades before it was scientifically studied and confirmed, he wrote of the existence of switches that activate the disease.{{pg|445|446}}
In fact, cancer is a recurring theme in Mailer’s fiction. He believed that
malignancy begins with a single defective cell which attacks a healthy body from inside. Dougy Madden, in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'', knew immediately when his cancer began. After being shot, he chased his assailant for six blocks; when he found himself in front of St. Vincent’s Hospital, he stopped. Instead of continuing the chase, Dougy went inside and grabbed an orderly by the collar.

“[J]ust at the moment when I got tough with that punk in the white jacket was when I felt the first switch get thrown in the cancer.”{{sfn|Mailer|1984|p=158}} In that instant, according to Dougy’s self-revelation, he “lost his balls” and became the victim of impotent emotion.

A ''Mademoiselle'' magazine interview by Eve Auchincloss and Nancy Lynch in February of 1961 is featured in “Conversations with Norman Mailer,” edited by J. Michael Lennon. It quotes Mailer saying, “It’s not living in certain courageous moments that gives one cancer.” He continues,
<blockquote>The tragedy of it all is that if you choose to be brave at a certain moment and you fail, that’s even more likely to give you cancer than not doing anything at all. And since everyone has lost faith and a sense of certain values nobody acts any more. And more and more courageous moments are being lost all over the world, particularly in this country. And for that reason cancer is spreading. One of the causes of cancer must be the absence of action.{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=42-43}}</blockquote>
Later in the ''Mademoiselle'' interview, Mailer suggests that Americans no longer believe in their innate ability to rise to the demands of the moment. He associates their lack of confidence to a generation’s lack of courage and
ties both to the increasing prevalence of cancer. Courage is an instinctive reaction that occurs in a moment fraught with danger and risk when there is
no time for preparation and the outcome is uncertain. If an ax-wielding
madman chases you across a bridge and you throw yourself over the side in time to land on the deck of a passing barge, your courage has saved you. But the opportunity to jump existed in a flash of wild exhilaration and would have disappeared if you had hesitated for an instant to consider the impulse.

Mailer believed that spontaneous action requires courage, a feeling{{pg|446|447}}synonymous with guts and bravery and audacity. He also believed that the failure to act, or the failure of a courageous attempt to act, causes cancer.

In 1974 Dr. Robert Ader, an experimental psychologist, gave lab rats sugar water and a nausea inducing drug called Cytoxin. As soon as the rats were conditioned to associate sweet water with a stomachache, the Cytoxin was
eliminated. Thereafter, the rats became sick when they drank plain sugar water. Dr. Ader watched and waited to determine how long it would take the rodents to forget that sweet water made them nauseous. In the second month, the rats surprised him by dying.

Noting that one of the side effects of Cytoxin is suppression of the immune system, Dr. Ader observed that although the dead rats were not receiving the drug, they thought that they were. That thought shut down their immune systems and left them vulnerable to the ordinary germs which killed them. Obviously a critical connection existed between the rats’ minds and their immune systems. {{sfn|Ader|1992|p=6-8}} Practical wisdom has always known that there is a connection between the will and the cure. It took an additional six
years to prove what the stoic Lucius Seneca said near the time of Christ, “It is part of the cure to wish to be cured.”{{sfn|Hoyt|1896|p=688}}

In 1981 it was Neurobiologist Dr. David Felten, (currently a Research and Medical Director at the Beaumont Hospital Research Institute and a former recipient of the MacArthur Foundation genius award), a leading researcher in mind-body medicine, who finally discovered the hardwired connection between the immune system and the central nervous system controlled by the brain. Although ideas of cellular structure and function had existed for some time, they could not be proven because it was impossible to observe submicroscopic compositions like viruses. Advances in technology, including the invention of the electron microscope, greatly expanded the verifiable. The Felten research team led the way in a new field named Psychoneuroimmunology, or PNI. Researchers used fluorescent stain to trace nerves from the brain to bone marrow, lymph nodes, and the spleen. They discovered a network of nerves leading to blood vessels as well as cells of the immune system. At last the connection was visible and scientific research had proven
that the mind could control the body’s susceptibility to disease.

In 1989 Dr. Michael Bishop and Dr. Harold Varmus won the Nobel Prize
in Physiology for their cancer discoveries. They established that mutated or damaged cells protect the body from their own dysfunction in three ways: they repair themselves, they halt the process of reproduction in order to buy {{pg|447|448}}time to remedy the defects, or if that fails, they can commit cell suicide (called “apoptosis”). If this doesn’t work, the result is uncontrolled proliferation of damaged cells, or cancer.

In a ''Harvard Magazine'' article which included excerpts from his book that
would be published later that year, Dr. Bishop quotes Norman Mailer, a fellow
alumnus. He refers to Mailer’s “cancer trigger” theory with a quote from
''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'': “None of the doctors have a feel for the subject.... The way I see the matter, it’s a circuit of illness with two switches.... Two terrible things have to happen before the crud can get its start. The first cocks the trigger. The other fires it. I’ve been walking around with the trigger cocked for forty-five years.” {{sfn|Mailer|1984|p=158}} Bishop further explains, “The speaker here was a smoker who died of lung cancer four pages later in Mailer’s novel . . .Mailer’s conservative estimate of two ‘triggers’ has since been revised upward for most cancers, but otherwise, the imagery is on target.” Dr. Bishop, completes the reference with “Norman Mailer gets it,” meaning that Norman Mailer understands how cancer works.{{sfn|Bishop|2003b|p=53}}

Anne Harrington, the chair of the History of Science Department at Harvard, writes in her book, ''The Cure Within'', that Mailer authorized his defense lawyers to develop the argument that if he had repressed his rage,
instead of stabbing his wife Adele, he would have gone on to develop cancer.{{sfn|Harrington|2008|p=90-91}} She does not suggest that he thought fear of cancer allowed one to act out one’s rage, nor do his characters propose such violence. However, Mailer had no doubt that failure to act in a moment of great emotion causes the disease.

An estimated two million Americans have schizophrenia, a biological condition that affects a person’s ability to think clearly, distinguish reality from fantasy, manage emotions, make decisions, and relate to others. The World Health Organization has identified schizophrenia as one of the ten most debilitating diseases affecting humans. The fact that those who suffer from schizophrenia are a population of very heavy smokers (up to 88%) would lead one to expect that they had a high incidence of cancer{{sfn|Hughes|Hatsukami|Mitchell|Dahlgren|1986|p=995}} However, the opposite is true. Norman Mailer believed that their mental illness protected them.

Researchers at National Institutes of Mental Health emphasize that many of the genes associated with schizophrenia are the same as those that are associated with cancer, but the disorders use them in opposite ways. While cancer results from changes in the genes that cause the cells to go into {{pg|448|449}} overdrive and multiply rapidly, the same genes cause cells in schizophrenia to slow to a crawl.

Dr. Amanda Law of the University of Oxford, who heads a team at National Institutes of Mental Health, explored specific pathways that cells use to make basic decisions about their development and their fate. She says,
<blockquote>“This is about basic decision making by cells—whether to multiply, move, or change their basic architecture....Cancer and schizophrenia may be strange bedfellows that have similarities at the molecular level. The differences lie in how cells respond to external stimuli: in cancer the molecular system functions to
speed up the cell and in schizophrenia the system is altered in such a way that causes the cell to slow down.” {{sfn|Genetics|2007}}</blockquote>

Dr. Daniel Weinberger of NIMH says, “It’s very curious that a brain disorder associated with very complicated human behavior has at a genetic and cellular level a striking overlap with cancer, a very non-behavior related disorder.
Understanding these pathways might provide us with some new strategies for thinking about cancer.”{{sfn|Reis|2007}} Dr. Weinberger adds that future research involving this information will explore ways to reverse these processes—speeding the system up in schizophrenia and slowing it down in cancer—with implications that may help in the treatment of both diseases. The most advanced research today is attempting to target cancer cells and turn down their genetic instructions to multiply, invade, occupy, and overcome all resistance by using the cell’s own dimmer switch.{{sfn|Dotinga|2008}} Turning down the intensity of uncontrolled growth is a big step towards turning it off. The human cell, with the infinite complexity of its ultramicroscopic components, has been revealing its secrets to scientists who now envision cancer vaccines made of cells from a victim’s own cancer.{{sfn|Reis|2007}}

But what about Mailer’s belief that schizophrenia affords protection from
cancer? Does any substantiation exist? Evidence in a study of the tumor suppressor gene APC (adenomatous polyposis coli), which protects people from cancer growth, indicates a significant association between APC and schizophrenia. This gene is thought to confirm susceptibility to schizophrenia and reduce vulnerability to cancer. {{sfn|Cui|Jiang|Jiang|Xu|Yao|2005|p=675}}

However, one fact must not be overlooked. Cancer is a disease of old age, and the mentally ill die earlier than the general population. In the article{{pg|449|450}}“Dying too Young; Cardiovascular Neglect of the Mentally Ill,” we learn that earlier studies of the mentally ill estimated their life spans to average 20% fewer years than the rest of the population. Recent figures vary from state to state, but are alarmingly higher. In Ohio schizophrenics average a loss of thirty-two years of life. As a rule, they take poor care of themselves, have an unhealthy lifestyle, and suffer from metabolic syndrome (idle, overweight, poor nutrition).{{sfn|Nasrallah|2007}} It is possible that many of them do not live long enough to suffer from cancer.

Mailer’s newly discovered handwritten hypothesis, which connects “impotent emotion” and cancer, draws attention to the feeling we are most likely to label “stress.” The bane of modern humankind, stress causes a myriad of toxic effects. “When the weight of impossible desire is suffered within, the tension becomes acute and the cells live at the edge of rebellion.” According to Mailer, they may “secede from the body or face their death.” It is an impossible situation. “Man is made of mind and body” and Mailer concludes, when the situation “becomes intolerable, either the mind or the body must divide itself from the whole.” {{sfn|Mailer|n.d.}}

It is interesting that a Dissociative State (a term used in mental illness) can be a temporary condition that follows a period of high stress. It may involve a sudden disappearance which includes travel or wandering and sometimes the establishment of a new identity. The missing period is called a Fugue. The Fugue is followed by a return to normal, often with no memories of the interim. This sounds very much like an “intolerable” situation, perhaps due
to an impossible desire, which drives the mind to separate itself from the body. The Dissociative State can become permanent, of course, or cyclical, like schizophrenia, bipolar, and other mental illnesses. When cells on the edge of rebellion don’t secede from the body, but instead they commit cell suicide, they become cancerous. In either case Norman Mailer’s “impotent
emotion” refers to a powerful force or experience which drives one to the edge of disaster and beyond. He understood the concept organically and was correct to relate human behavior to cellular activity.

From 1989 to 2003 researchers mapped more than the 20,000 genes each person carries in the hope of comparing defective and healthy ones in order
to reveal the secrets of diseases like cancer. The human genome is the DNA blueprint for the body. The equivalent of hundreds of volumes of instructions exists on each genome to direct how cells are assembled and work together.{{sfn|Beil|2008}} There is as much mystery in the cell as there is in outer space. {{pg|450|451}} Norman Mailer was actively interested in all of it and we know this by the passion of his opinions.

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

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite journal |last=Ader |first=Dr. Robert |title=On the Clinical Relevance of Psychoneuroimmunology |journal=Clinical Immunology and Immunopathology |volume=64.1 |date=1992|pages=6-8 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Ader |first=Dr. Robert |authormask=1 |editor1=N. Cohen |editor2=Dr. David Felton|date=2001 |title=Psychoneuroimmunology |edition=3 |location=New York |publisher=Academic Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Beil |first=Laura |date=2008 |title=Medicine’s New Epicenter? Epigenetics |journal=Cure: Cancer Updates, Research & Education ||volume=Winter 2008|publisher=CURE Media Group |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Bishop |first=J. Michael |date=2003a |title=How to Win the Nobel Prize: An Unexpected Life in Science |location=Cambridge |publisher=Harvard |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Bishop |first=J. Michael |authormask=1 |date=2003b |title=What Causes Cancer; Genetic Sloppiness, the Cellular ‘Social Contract’ and Malignancy |magazine=Harvard Magazine ||volume=March-April |pages=49+ |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Bosworth |first=Patricia |date=2008 |title=Mailer’s Movie Madness |magazine=Vanity Fair ||volume=March |pages=397+ |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last1=Cui |first1=D.H. |last2=Jiang |first2=K.D. |last3=Jiang |first3=S.D. |last4=Xu |first4=Y.F. |last5=Yao |first5=H. |date=2005 |title=The Tumor Suppressor Adenomatous Polyposis Coli Gene Is Associated With Susceptibility to Schizophrenia |journal=Molecular Psychiatry ||volume=10.7 |pages=669-677|ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Dotinga |first=Randy |date=1 July 2008 |title=Scientists Find Way to Dim Cancer Switch |magazine=The Washington Post |publisher=Washington Post Company |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |date=8 December 2007 |title=Genetics Might Explain Why Schizophrenics Have Lower Cancer Rates |magazine=Science 2.0 |publisher=ION Publications LLC |ref={{harvid|Genetics|2007}} }}

* {{cite book |last=Harrington |first=Anne |date=2008 |title=The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine |location=New York |publisher=W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hoyt |first=J.K. |date=1896 |title=The Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations: English, Latin, and Modern Foreign Languages |location=New York |publisher=Funk and Wagnalls |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last1=Hughes |first1=J.R. |last2=Hatsukami |first2=D.K. |last3=Mitchell |first3=J.E. |last4=Dahlgren |first4=L.A. |date=1986 |title=Prevalence of Smoking Among Psychiatric Outpatients |journal=American Journal of Psychiatry ||volume=143.8 |pages=993-997 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1988 |chapter=An Interview with Norman Mailer |title=Conversations with Norman Mailer |editor= J. Michael Lennon |location=Jackson |publisher=UP of Mississippi |pages=39-51|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=n.d. |title=Note on Cancer |publisher=Collection of J. Michael Lennon |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1984|title=Tough Guy's Don't Dance|location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Nasrallah |first=Henry A. |date=2007 |title=Dying Too Young: Cardiovascular Neglect of the Mentally Ill |journal=Current Psychiatry Online. ||volume=January 2007 |publisher=Quadrant HealthCom Inc|ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Reis |first=Sharon|date=10 December 2007 |title=Genetic Links between Schizophrenia and Cancer |magazine=Medical News Today |publisher=MediLexicon International Ltd. |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics

2025-04-12T20:22:20Z

JKilchenmann: final edits

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{Byline |last=O'Neill Hooker |first=Maureen |abstract=Cancer is a recurring theme in Mailer’s fiction. He believed that malignancy begins with a single defective cell that attacks a healthy body from inside. Mailer believed that spontaneous action requires courage, a feeling synonymous with guts and bravery and audacity. He also believed that the failure to act, or the failure of a courageous attempt to act, causes cancer.|url=...}}

{{dc|dc=T|HERE IS NO QUESTION THAT NORMAN MAILER BELIEVED}} in the toxic effects of anger unexpressed. Why else would he, a talented handyman and carpenter, build his own orgone accumulator? In the six-foot tall phone booth-sized box, lined and padded with foam rubber, he wailed and banged out his personal version of scream therapy in order to de-stress from life in the fast lane.{{sfn|Bosworth|2008|p=401}} It is entirely possible that this activity protected his health in two important ways: first, it reduced his stress, and second, he ''believed'' that it reduced his stress. It may have even helped to clarify his thoughts regarding the origin of cancer and its infrequency in schizophrenics.

J. Michael Lennon recently made a startling discovery. It was a single page of twenty-five lines, handwritten by Mailer, probably in the early 1960s, which hypothesized that impotent emotion causes cancer. As examples of impotent emotion, Mailer described an ugly woman who waited in vain for a beautiful lover, a poor man who wished disaster upon his rich relatives, and a person who carried within his heart a desire to murder, an obsession he would never translate into action. Mailer stated that when inner tension becomes acute, cells exist at the edge of rebellion and the violence they cannot express is suffered within. He claimed that stress caused by unexpressed anger results in cancer.{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.}} Decades before it was scientifically studied and confirmed, he wrote of the existence of switches that activate the disease.{{pg|445|446}}
In fact, cancer is a recurring theme in Mailer’s fiction. He believed that
malignancy begins with a single defective cell which attacks a healthy body from inside. Dougy Madden, in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'', knew immediately when his cancer began. After being shot, he chased his assailant for six blocks; when he found himself in front of St. Vincent’s Hospital, he stopped. Instead of continuing the chase, Dougy went inside and grabbed an orderly by the collar.

“[J]ust at the moment when I got tough with that punk in the white jacket was when I felt the first switch get thrown in the cancer.”{{sfn|Mailer|1984|p=158}} In that instant, according to Dougy’s self-revelation, he “lost his balls” and became the victim of impotent emotion.

A ''Mademoiselle'' magazine interview by Eve Auchincloss and Nancy Lynch in February of 1961 is featured in “Conversations with Norman Mailer,” edited by J. Michael Lennon. It quotes Mailer saying, “It’s not living in certain courageous moments that gives one cancer.” He continues,
<blockquote>The tragedy of it all is that if you choose to be brave at a certain moment and you fail, that’s even more likely to give you cancer than not doing anything at all. And since everyone has lost faith and a sense of certain values nobody acts any more. And more and more courageous moments are being lost all over the world, particularly in this country. And for that reason cancer is spreading. One of the causes of cancer must be the absence of action.{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=42-43}}</blockquote>
Later in the ''Mademoiselle'' interview, Mailer suggests that Americans no longer believe in their innate ability to rise to the demands of the moment. He associates their lack of confidence to a generation’s lack of courage and
ties both to the increasing prevalence of cancer. Courage is an instinctive reaction that occurs in a moment fraught with danger and risk when there is
no time for preparation and the outcome is uncertain. If an ax-wielding
madman chases you across a bridge and you throw yourself over the side in time to land on the deck of a passing barge, your courage has saved you. But the opportunity to jump existed in a flash of wild exhilaration and would have disappeared if you had hesitated for an instant to consider the impulse.

Mailer believed that spontaneous action requires courage, a feeling{{pg|446|447}}synonymous with guts and bravery and audacity. He also believed that the failure to act, or the failure of a courageous attempt to act, causes cancer.

In 1974 Dr. Robert Ader, an experimental psychologist, gave lab rats sugar water and a nausea inducing drug called Cytoxin. As soon as the rats were conditioned to associate sweet water with a stomachache, the Cytoxin was
eliminated. Thereafter, the rats became sick when they drank plain sugar water. Dr. Ader watched and waited to determine how long it would take the rodents to forget that sweet water made them nauseous. In the second month, the rats surprised him by dying.

Noting that one of the side effects of Cytoxin is suppression of the immune system, Dr. Ader observed that although the dead rats were not receiving the drug, they thought that they were. That thought shut down their immune systems and left them vulnerable to the ordinary germs which killed them. Obviously a critical connection existed between the rats’ minds and their immune systems. {{sfn|Ader|1992|p=6-8}} Practical wisdom has always known that there is a connection between the will and the cure. It took an additional six
years to prove what the stoic Lucius Seneca said near the time of Christ, “It is part of the cure to wish to be cured.”{{sfn|Hoyt|1896|p=688}}

In 1981 it was Neurobiologist Dr. David Felten, (currently a Research and Medical Director at the Beaumont Hospital Research Institute and a former recipient of the MacArthur Foundation genius award), a leading researcher in mind-body medicine, who finally discovered the hardwired connection between the immune system and the central nervous system controlled by the brain. Although ideas of cellular structure and function had existed for some time, they could not be proven because it was impossible to observe submicroscopic compositions like viruses. Advances in technology, including the invention of the electron microscope, greatly expanded the verifiable. The Felten research team led the way in a new field named Psychoneuroimmunology, or PNI. Researchers used fluorescent stain to trace nerves from the brain to bone marrow, lymph nodes, and the spleen. They discovered a network of nerves leading to blood vessels as well as cells of the immune system. At last the connection was visible and scientific research had proven
that the mind could control the body’s susceptibility to disease.

In 1989 Dr. Michael Bishop and Dr. Harold Varmus won the Nobel Prize
in Physiology for their cancer discoveries. They established that mutated or damaged cells protect the body from their own dysfunction in three ways: they repair themselves, they halt the process of reproduction in order to buy {{pg|447|448}}time to remedy the defects, or if that fails, they can commit cell suicide (called “apoptosis”). If this doesn’t work, the result is uncontrolled proliferation of damaged cells, or cancer.

In a ''Harvard Magazine'' article which included excerpts from his book that
would be published later that year, Dr. Bishop quotes Norman Mailer, a fellow
alumnus. He refers to Mailer’s “cancer trigger” theory with a quote from
''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'': “None of the doctors have a feel for the subject.... The way I see the matter, it’s a circuit of illness with two switches.... Two terrible things have to happen before the crud can get its start. The first cocks the trigger. The other fires it. I’ve been walking around with the trigger cocked for forty-five years.” {{sfn|Mailer|1984|p=158}} Bishop further explains, “The speaker here was a smoker who died of lung cancer four pages later in Mailer’s novel . . .Mailer’s conservative estimate of two ‘triggers’ has since been revised upward for most cancers, but otherwise, the imagery is on target.” Dr. Bishop, completes the reference with “Norman Mailer gets it,” meaning that Norman Mailer understands how cancer works.{{sfn|Bishop|2003b|p=53}}

Anne Harrington, the chair of the History of Science Department at Harvard, writes in her book, ''The Cure Within'', that Mailer authorized his defense lawyers to develop the argument that if he had repressed his rage,
instead of stabbing his wife Adele, he would have gone on to develop cancer.{{sfn|Harrington|2008|p=90-91}} She does not suggest that he thought fear of cancer allowed one to act out one’s rage, nor do his characters propose such violence. However, Mailer had no doubt that failure to act in a moment of great emotion causes the disease.

An estimated two million Americans have schizophrenia, a biological condition that affects a person’s ability to think clearly, distinguish reality from fantasy, manage emotions, make decisions, and relate to others. The World Health Organization has identified schizophrenia as one of the ten most debilitating diseases affecting humans. The fact that those who suffer from schizophrenia are a population of very heavy smokers (up to 88%) would lead one to expect that they had a high incidence of cancer{{sfn|Hughes|Hatsukami|Mitchell|Dahlgren|1986|p=995}} However, the opposite is true. Norman Mailer believed that their mental illness protected them.

Researchers at National Institutes of Mental Health emphasize that many of the genes associated with schizophrenia are the same as those that are associated with cancer, but the disorders use them in opposite ways. While cancer results from changes in the genes that cause the cells to go into {{pg|448|449}} overdrive and multiply rapidly, the same genes cause cells in schizophrenia to slow to a crawl.

Dr. Amanda Law of the University of Oxford, who heads a team at National Institutes of Mental Health, explored specific pathways that cells use to make basic decisions about their development and their fate. She says,<blockquote>“This is about basic decision making by cells—whether to multiply, move, or change their basic architecture....Cancer and schizophrenia may be strange bedfellows that have similarities at the molecular level. The differences lie in how cells respond to external stimuli: in cancer the molecular system functions to
speed up the cell and in schizophrenia the system is altered in such a way that causes the cell to slow down.” {{sfn|Genetics|2007}}</blockquote>

Dr. Daniel Weinberger of NIMH says, “It’s very curious that a brain disorder associated with very complicated human behavior has at a genetic and cellular level a striking overlap with cancer, a very non-behavior related disorder.
Understanding these pathways might provide us with some new strategies for thinking about cancer.”{{sfn|Reis|2007}} Dr. Weinberger adds that future research involving this information will explore ways to reverse these processes—speeding the system up in schizophrenia and slowing it down in cancer—with implications that may help in the treatment of both diseases. The most advanced research today is attempting to target cancer cells and turn down their genetic instructions to multiply, invade, occupy, and overcome all resistance by using the cell’s own dimmer switch.{{sfn|Dotinga|2008}} Turning down the intensity of uncontrolled growth is a big step towards turning it off. The human cell, with the infinite complexity of its ultramicroscopic components, has been revealing its secrets to scientists who now envision cancer vaccines made of cells from a victim’s own cancer.{{sfn|Reis|2007}}

But what about Mailer’s belief that schizophrenia affords protection from
cancer? Does any substantiation exist? Evidence in a study of the tumor suppressor gene APC (adenomatous polyposis coli), which protects people from cancer growth, indicates a significant association between APC and schizophrenia. This gene is thought to confirm susceptibility to schizophrenia and reduce vulnerability to cancer. {{sfn|Cui|Jiang|Jiang|Xu|Yao|2005|p=675}}

However, one fact must not be overlooked. Cancer is a disease of old age, and the mentally ill die earlier than the general population. In the article{{pg|449|450}}“Dying too Young; Cardiovascular Neglect of the Mentally Ill,” we learn that earlier studies of the mentally ill estimated their life spans to average 20% fewer years than the rest of the population. Recent figures vary from state to state, but are alarmingly higher. In Ohio schizophrenics average a loss of thirty-two years of life. As a rule, they take poor care of themselves, have an unhealthy lifestyle, and suffer from metabolic syndrome (idle, overweight, poor nutrition).{{sfn|Nasrallah|2007}} It is possible that many of them do not live long enough to suffer from cancer.

Mailer’s newly discovered handwritten hypothesis, which connects “impotent emotion” and cancer, draws attention to the feeling we are most likely to label “stress.” The bane of modern humankind, stress causes a myriad of toxic effects. “When the weight of impossible desire is suffered within, the tension becomes acute and the cells live at the edge of rebellion.” According to Mailer, they may “secede from the body or face their death.” It is an impossible situation. “Man is made of mind and body” and Mailer concludes, when the situation “becomes intolerable, either the mind or the body must divide itself from the whole.” {{sfn|Mailer|n.d.}}

It is interesting that a Dissociative State (a term used in mental illness) can be a temporary condition that follows a period of high stress. It may involve a sudden disappearance which includes travel or wandering and sometimes the establishment of a new identity. The missing period is called a Fugue. The Fugue is followed by a return to normal, often with no memories of the interim. This sounds very much like an “intolerable” situation, perhaps due
to an impossible desire, which drives the mind to separate itself from the body. The Dissociative State can become permanent, of course, or cyclical, like schizophrenia, bipolar, and other mental illnesses. When cells on the edge of rebellion don’t secede from the body, but instead they commit cell suicide, they become cancerous. In either case Norman Mailer’s “impotent
emotion” refers to a powerful force or experience which drives one to the edge of disaster and beyond. He understood the concept organically and was correct to relate human behavior to cellular activity.

From 1989 to 2003 researchers mapped more than the 20,000 genes each person carries in the hope of comparing defective and healthy ones in order
to reveal the secrets of diseases like cancer. The human genome is the DNA blueprint for the body. The equivalent of hundreds of volumes of instructions exists on each genome to direct how cells are assembled and work together.{{sfn|Beil|2008}} There is as much mystery in the cell as there is in outer space. {{pg|450|451}} Norman Mailer was actively interested in all of it and we know this by the passion of his opinions.

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

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite journal |last=Ader |first=Dr. Robert |title=On the Clinical Relevance of Psychoneuroimmunology |journal=Clinical Immunology and Immunopathology |volume=64.1 |date=1992|pages=6-8 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Ader |first=Dr. Robert |authormask=1 |editor1=N. Cohen |editor2=Dr. David Felton|date=2001 |title=Psychoneuroimmunology |edition=3 |location=New York |publisher=Academic Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Beil |first=Laura |date=2008 |title=Medicine’s New Epicenter? Epigenetics |journal=Cure: Cancer Updates, Research & Education ||volume=Winter 2008|publisher=CURE Media Group |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Bishop |first=J. Michael |date=2003a |title=How to Win the Nobel Prize: An Unexpected Life in Science |location=Cambridge |publisher=Harvard |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Bishop |first=J. Michael |authormask=1 |date=2003b |title=What Causes Cancer; Genetic Sloppiness, the Cellular ‘Social Contract’ and Malignancy |magazine=Harvard Magazine ||volume=March-April |pages=49+ |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Bosworth |first=Patricia |date=2008 |title=Mailer’s Movie Madness |magazine=Vanity Fair ||volume=March |pages=397+ |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last1=Cui |first1=D.H. |last2=Jiang |first2=K.D. |last3=Jiang |first3=S.D. |last4=Xu |first4=Y.F. |last5=Yao |first5=H. |date=2005 |title=The Tumor Suppressor Adenomatous Polyposis Coli Gene Is Associated With Susceptibility to Schizophrenia |journal=Molecular Psychiatry ||volume=10.7 |pages=669-677|ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Dotinga |first=Randy |date=1 July 2008 |title=Scientists Find Way to Dim Cancer Switch |magazine=The Washington Post |publisher=Washington Post Company |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |date=8 December 2007 |title=Genetics Might Explain Why Schizophrenics Have Lower Cancer Rates |magazine=Science 2.0 |publisher=ION Publications LLC |ref={{harvid|Genetics|2007}} }}

* {{cite book |last=Harrington |first=Anne |date=2008 |title=The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine |location=New York |publisher=W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hoyt |first=J.K. |date=1896 |title=The Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations: English, Latin, and Modern Foreign Languages |location=New York |publisher=Funk and Wagnalls |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last1=Hughes |first1=J.R. |last2=Hatsukami |first2=D.K. |last3=Mitchell |first3=J.E. |last4=Dahlgren |first4=L.A. |date=1986 |title=Prevalence of Smoking Among Psychiatric Outpatients |journal=American Journal of Psychiatry ||volume=143.8 |pages=993-997 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1988 |chapter=An Interview with Norman Mailer |title=Conversations with Norman Mailer |editor= J. Michael Lennon |location=Jackson |publisher=UP of Mississippi |pages=39-51|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=n.d. |title=Note on Cancer |publisher=Collection of J. Michael Lennon |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1984|title=Tough Guy's Don't Dance|location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Nasrallah |first=Henry A. |date=2007 |title=Dying Too Young: Cardiovascular Neglect of the Mentally Ill |journal=Current Psychiatry Online. ||volume=January 2007 |publisher=Quadrant HealthCom Inc|ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Reis |first=Sharon|date=10 December 2007 |title=Genetic Links between Schizophrenia and Cancer |magazine=Medical News Today |publisher=MediLexicon International Ltd. |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics

2025-04-12T20:04:37Z

JKilchenmann: typo fixes

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{Byline |last=O'Neill Hooker |first=Maureen |abstract=Cancer is a recurring theme in Mailer’s fiction. He believed that malignancy begins with a single defective cell that attacks a healthy body from inside. Mailer believed that spontaneous action requires courage, a feeling synonymous with guts and bravery and audacity. He also believed that the failure to act, or the failure of a courageous attempt to act, causes cancer.|url=...}}

{{dc|dc=T|HERE IS NO QUESTION THAT NORMAN MAILER BELIEVED}} in the toxic effects of anger unexpressed. Why else would he, a talented handyman and carpenter, build his own orgone accumulator? In the six-foot tall phone booth-sized box, lined and padded with foam rubber, he wailed and banged out his personal version of scream therapy in order to de-stress from life in the fast lane.{{sfn|Bosworth|2008|p=401}} It is entirely possible that this activity protected his health in two important ways: first, it reduced his stress, and second, he ''believed'' that it reduced his stress. It may have even helped to clarify his thoughts regarding the origin of cancer and its infrequency in schizophrenics.

J. Michael Lennon recently made a startling discovery. It was a single page of twenty-five lines, handwritten by Mailer, probably in the early 1960s, which hypothesized that impotent emotion causes cancer. As examples of impotent emotion, Mailer described an ugly woman who waited in vain for a beautiful lover, a poor man who wished disaster upon his rich relatives, and a person who carried within his heart a desire to murder, an obsession he would never translate into action. Mailer stated that when inner tension becomes acute, cells exist at the edge of rebellion and the violence they cannot express is suffered within. He claimed that stress caused by unexpressed anger results in cancer.{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.}} Decades before it was scientifically studied and confirmed, he wrote of the existence of switches that activate the disease.{{pg|445|446}}
In fact, cancer is a recurring theme in Mailer’s fiction. He believed that
malignancy begins with a single defective cell which attacks a healthy body from inside. Dougy Madden, in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'', knew immediately when his cancer began. After being shot, he chased his assailant for six blocks; when he found himself in front of St. Vincent’s Hospital, he stopped. Instead of continuing the chase, Dougy went inside and grabbed an orderly by the collar.

“[J]ust at the moment when I got tough with that punk in the white jacket was when I felt the first switch get thrown in the cancer.”{{sfn|Mailer|1984|p=158}} In that instant, according to Dougy’s self-revelation, he “lost his balls” and became the victim of impotent emotion.

A ''Mademoiselle'' magazine interview by Eve Auchincloss and Nancy Lynch in February of 1961 is featured in “Conversations with Norman Mailer,” edited by J. Michael Lennon. It quotes Mailer saying, “It’s not living in certain courageous moments that gives one cancer.” He continues,
<blockquote>The tragedy of it all is that if you choose to be brave at a certain moment and you fail, that’s even more likely to give you cancer than not doing anything at all. And since everyone has lost faith and a sense of certain values nobody acts any more. And more and more courageous moments are being lost all over the world, particularly in this country. And for that reason cancer is spreading. One of the causes of cancer must be the absence of action.{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=42-43}}</blockquote>
Later in the ''Mademoiselle'' interview, Mailer suggests that Americans no longer believe in their innate ability to rise to the demands of the moment. He associates their lack of confidence to a generation’s lack of courage and
ties both to the increasing prevalence of cancer. Courage is an instinctive reaction that occurs in a moment fraught with danger and risk when there is
no time for preparation and the outcome is uncertain. If an ax-wielding
madman chases you across a bridge and you throw yourself over the side in time to land on the deck of a passing barge, your courage has saved you. But the opportunity to jump existed in a flash of wild exhilaration and would have disappeared if you had hesitated for an instant to consider the impulse.

Mailer believed that spontaneous action requires courage, a feeling{{pg|446|447}}synonymous with guts and bravery and audacity. He also believed that the failure to act, or the failure of a courageous attempt to act, causes cancer.

In 1974 Dr. Robert Ader, an experimental psychologist, gave lab rats sugar water and a nausea inducing drug called Cytoxin. As soon as the rats were conditioned to associate sweet water with a stomachache, the Cytoxin was
eliminated. Thereafter, the rats became sick when they drank plain sugar water. Dr. Ader watched and waited to determine how long it would take the rodents to forget that sweet water made them nauseous. In the second month, the rats surprised him by dying.

Noting that one of the side effects of Cytoxin is suppression of the immune system, Dr. Ader observed that although the dead rats were not receiving the drug, they thought that they were. That thought shut down their immune systems and left them vulnerable to the ordinary germs which killed them. Obviously a critical connection existed between the rats’ minds and their immune systems. {{sfn|Ader|1992|p=6-8}} Practical wisdom has always known that there is a connection between the will and the cure. It took an additional six
years to prove what the stoic Lucius Seneca said near the time of Christ, “It is part of the cure to wish to be cured.”{{sfn|Hoyt|1896|p=688}}

In 1981 it was Neurobiologist Dr. David Felten, (currently a Research and Medical Director at the Beaumont Hospital Research Institute and a former recipient of the MacArthur Foundation genius award), a leading researcher in mind-body medicine, who finally discovered the hardwired connection between the immune system and the central nervous system controlled by the brain. Although ideas of cellular structure and function had existed for some time, they could not be proven because it was impossible to observe submicroscopic compositions like viruses. Advances in technology, including the invention of the electron microscope, greatly expanded the verifiable. The Felten research team led the way in a new field named Psychoneuroimmunology, or PNI. Researchers used fluorescent stain to trace nerves from the brain to bone marrow, lymph nodes, and the spleen. They discovered a network of nerves leading to blood vessels as well as cells of the immune system. At last the connection was visible and scientific research had proven
that the mind could control the body’s susceptibility to disease.

In 1989 Dr. Michael Bishop and Dr. Harold Varmus won the Nobel Prize
in Physiology for their cancer discoveries. They established that mutated or damaged cells protect the body from their own dysfunction in three ways: they repair themselves, they halt the process of reproduction in order to buy {{pg|447|448}}time to remedy the defects, or if that fails, they can commit cell suicide (called “apoptosis”). If this doesn’t work, the result is uncontrolled proliferation of damaged cells, or cancer.

In a ''Harvard Magazine'' article which included excerpts from his book that
would be published later that year, Dr. Bishop quotes Norman Mailer, a fellow
alumnus. He refers to Mailer’s “cancer trigger” theory with a quote from
''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'': “None of the doctors have a feel for the subject.... The way I see the matter, it’s a circuit of illness with two switches.... Two terrible things have to happen before the crud can get its start. The first cocks the trigger. The other fires it. I’ve been walking around with the trigger cocked for forty-five years.” {{sfn|Mailer|1984|p=158}} Bishop further explains, “The speaker here was a smoker who died of lung cancer four pages later in Mailer’s novel . . .Mailer’s conservative estimate of two ‘triggers’ has since been revised upward for most cancers, but otherwise, the imagery is on target.” Dr. Bishop, completes the reference with “Norman Mailer gets it,” meaning that Norman Mailer understands how cancer works.{{sfn|Bishop|2003b|p=53}}

Anne Harrington, the chair of the History of Science Department at Harvard, writes in her book, ''The Cure Within'', that Mailer authorized his defense lawyers to develop the argument that if he had repressed his rage,
instead of stabbing his wife Adele, he would have gone on to develop cancer.{{sfn|Harrington|2008|p=90-91}} She does not suggest that he thought fear of cancer allowed one to act out one’s rage, nor do his characters propose such violence. However, Mailer had no doubt that failure to act in a moment of great emotion causes the disease.

An estimated two million Americans have schizophrenia, a biological condition that affects a person’s ability to think clearly, distinguish reality from fantasy, manage emotions, make decisions, and relate to others. The World Health Organization has identified schizophrenia as one of the ten most debilitating diseases affecting humans. The fact that those who suffer from schizophrenia are a population of very heavy smokers (up to 88%) would lead one to expect that they had a high incidence of cancer{{sfn|Hughes|Hatsukami|Mitchell|Dahlgren|1986|p=995}} However, the opposite is true. Norman Mailer believed that their mental illness protected them.

Researchers at National Institutes of Mental Health emphasize that many of the genes associated with schizophrenia are the same as those that are associated with cancer, but the disorders use them in opposite ways. While cancer results from changes in the genes that cause the cells to go into {{pg|448|449}} overdrive and multiply rapidly, the same genes cause cells in schizophrenia to slow to a crawl.

Dr. Amanda Law of the University of Oxford, who heads a team at National Institutes of Mental Health, explored specific pathways that cells use
to make basic decisions about their development and their fate. She says,<blockquote>“This is about basic decision making by cells—whether to multiply, move, or change their basic architecture....Cancer and schizophrenia may be strange bedfellows that have similarities at the molecular level. The differences lie in how cells respond to external stimuli: in cancer the molecular system functions to
speed up the cell and in schizophrenia the system is altered in such a way that causes the cell to slow down.” {{sfn|Genetics|2007}}</blockquote>

Dr. Daniel Weinberger of NIMH says, “It’s very curious that a brain disorder associated with very complicated human behavior has at a genetic and cellular level a striking overlap with cancer, a very non-behavior related disorder.
Understanding these pathways might provide us with some new strategies for thinking about cancer.”{{sfn|Reis|2007}} Dr. Weinberger adds that future research involving this information will explore ways to reverse these processes—speeding the system up in schizophrenia and slowing it down in cancer—with implications that may help in the treatment of both diseases. The most advanced research today is attempting to target cancer cells and turn down their genetic instructions to multiply, invade, occupy, and overcome all resistance by using the cell’s own dimmer switch.{{sfn|Dotinga|2008}} Turning
down the intensity of uncontrolled growth is a big step towards turning it off. The human cell, with the infinite complexity of its ultramicroscopic components, has been revealing its secrets to scientists who now envision
cancer vaccines made of cells from a victim’s own cancer.{{sfn|Reis|2007}}

But what about Mailer’s belief that schizophrenia affords protection from
cancer? Does any substantiation exist? Evidence in a study of the tumor suppressor gene APC (adenomatous polyposis coli), which protects people from cancer growth, indicates a significant association between APC and schizophrenia. This gene is thought to confirm susceptibility to schizophrenia and reduce vulnerability to cancer. {{sfn|Cui|Jiang|Jiang|Xu|Yao|2005|p=675}}

However, one fact must not be overlooked. Cancer is a disease of old age, and the mentally ill die earlier than the general population. In the article{{pg|449|450}}“Dying too Young; Cardiovascular Neglect of the Mentally Ill,” we learn that earlier studies of the mentally ill estimated their life spans to average 20% fewer years than the rest of the population. Recent figures vary from state to state, but are alarmingly higher. In Ohio schizophrenics average a loss of thirty-two years of life. As a rule, they take poor care of themselves, have an unhealthy lifestyle, and suffer from metabolic syndrome (idle, overweight, poor nutrition).{{sfn|Nasrallah|2007}} It is possible that many of them do not live long enough to suffer from cancer. Mailer’s newly discovered handwritten hypothesis, which connects “impotent
emotion” and cancer, draws attention to the feeling we are most likely to label “stress.” The bane of modern humankind, stress causes a myriad of toxic effects. “When the weight of impossible desire is suffered within, the tension becomes acute and the cells live at the edge of rebellion.” According to Mailer, they may “secede from the body or face their death.” It is an impossible situation. “Man is made of mind and body” and Mailer concludes, when the situation “becomes intolerable, either the mind or the body must divide itself from the whole.” {{sfn|Mailer|n.d.}}

It is interesting that a Dissociative State (a term used in mental illness) can be a temporary condition that follows a period of high stress. It may involve a sudden disappearance which includes travel or wandering and sometimes the establishment of a new identity. The missing period is called a Fugue. The Fugue is followed by a return to normal, often with no memories of the interim. This sounds very much like an “intolerable” situation, perhaps due
to an impossible desire, which drives the mind to separate itself from the body. The Dissociative State can become permanent, of course, or cyclical, like schizophrenia, bipolar, and other mental illnesses. When cells on the edge of rebellion don’t secede from the body, but instead they commit cell suicide, they become cancerous. In either case Norman Mailer’s “impotent
emotion” refers to a powerful force or experience which drives one to the edge of disaster and beyond. He understood the concept organically and was correct to relate human behavior to cellular activity.

From 1989 to 2003 researchers mapped more than the 20,000 genes each person carries in the hope of comparing defective and healthy ones in order
to reveal the secrets of diseases like cancer. The human genome is the DNA blueprint for the body. The equivalent of hundreds of volumes of instructions exists on each genome to direct how cells are assembled and work together.{{sfn|Beil|2008}} There is as much mystery in the cell as there is in outer space. {{pg|450|451}} Norman Mailer was actively interested in all of it and we know this by the passion of his opinions.

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

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite journal |last=Ader |first=Dr. Robert |title=On the Clinical Relevance of Psychoneuroimmunology |journal=Clinical Immunology and Immunopathology |volume=64.1 |date=1992|pages=6-8 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Ader |first=Dr. Robert |authormask=1 |editor1=N. Cohen |editor2=Dr. David Felton|date=2001 |title=Psychoneuroimmunology |edition=3 |location=New York |publisher=Academic Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Beil |first=Laura |date=2008 |title=Medicine’s New Epicenter? Epigenetics |journal=Cure: Cancer Updates, Research & Education ||volume=Winter 2008|publisher=CURE Media Group |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Bishop |first=J. Michael |date=2003a |title=How to Win the Nobel Prize: An Unexpected Life in Science |location=Cambridge |publisher=Harvard |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Bishop |first=J. Michael |authormask=1 |date=2003b |title=What Causes Cancer; Genetic Sloppiness, the Cellular ‘Social Contract’ and Malignancy |magazine=Harvard Magazine ||volume=March-April |pages=49+ |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Bosworth |first=Patricia |date=2008 |title=Mailer’s Movie Madness |magazine=Vanity Fair |pages=397+ |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last1=Cui |first1=D.H. |last2=Jiang |first2=K.D. |last3=Jiang |first3=S.D. |last4=Xu |first4=Y.F. |last5=Yao |first5=H. |date=2005 |title=The Tumor Suppressor Adenomatous Polyposis Coli Gene Is Associated With Susceptibility to Schizophrenia |journal=Molecular Psychiatry ||volume=10.7 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Dotinga |first=Randy |date=1 July 2008 |title=Scientists Find Way to Dim Cancer Switch |magazine=The Washington Post |publisher=Washington Post Company |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |date=8 December 2007 |title=Genetics Might Explain Why Schizophrenics Have Lower Cancer Rates |magazine=Science 2.0 |publisher=ION Publications LLC |ref={{harvid|Genetics|2007}} }}

* {{cite book |last=Harrington |first=Anne |date=2008 |title=The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine |location=New York |publisher=W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hoyt |first=J.K. |date=1896 |title=The Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations: English, Latin, and Modern Foreign Languages |location=New York |publisher=Funk and Wagnalls |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last1=Hughes |first1=J.R. |last2=Hatsukami |first2=D.K. |last3=Mitchell |first3=J.E. |last4=Dahlgren |first4=L.A. |date=1986 |title=Prevalence of Smoking Among Psychiatric Outpatients |journal=American Journal of Psychiatry ||volume=143.8 |pages=993-997 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1988 |chapter=An Interview with Norman Mailer |title=Conversations with Norman Mailer |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael|location=Jackson |publisher=UP of Mississippi |pages=39-51|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=n.d. |title=Note on Cancer |publisher=Collection of J. Michael Lennon |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1984|title=Tough Guy's Don't Dance|location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Nasrallah |first=Henry A. |date=2007 |title=Dying Too Young: Cardiovascular Neglect of the Mentally Ill |journal=Current Psychiatry Online. ||volume=January 2007 |publisher=Quadrant HealthCom Inc|ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Reis |first=Sharon|date=10 December 2007 |title=Genetic Links between Schizophrenia and Cancer |magazine=Medical News Today |publisher=MediLexicon International Ltd. |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics

2025-04-12T19:35:31Z

JKilchenmann: all in-text citations fixed

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{Byline |last=O'Neill Hooker |first=Maureen |abstract=Cancer is a recurring theme in Mailer’s fiction. He believed that malignancy begins with a single defective cell that attacks a healthy body from inside. Mailer believed that spontaneous action requires courage, a feeling synonymous with guts and bravery and audacity. He also believed that the failure to act, or the failure of a courageous attempt to act, causes cancer.|url=...}}

{{dc|dc=T|HERE IS NO QUESTION THAT NORMAN MAILER BELIEVED}} in the toxic effects of anger unexpressed. Why else would he, a talented handyman and carpenter, build his own orgone accumulator? In the six-foot tall phone booth-sized box, lined and padded with foam rubber, he wailed and banged out his personal version of scream therapy in order to de-stress from life in the fast lane.{{sfn|Bosworth|2008|p=401}} It is entirely possible that this activity protected his health in two important ways: first, it reduced his stress, and second, he ''believed'' that it reduced his stress. It may have even helped to clarify his thoughts regarding the origin of cancer and its infrequency in schizophrenics.

J. Michael Lennon recently made a startling discovery. It was a single page of twenty-five lines, handwritten by Mailer, probably in the early 1960s, which hypothesized that impotent emotion causes cancer. As examples of impotent emotion, Mailer described an ugly woman who waited in vain for a beautiful lover, a poor man who wished disaster upon his rich relatives, and a person who carried within his heart a desire to murder, an obsession he would never translate into action. Mailer stated that when inner tension becomes acute, cells exist at the edge of rebellion and the violence they cannot express is suffered within. He claimed that stress caused by unexpressed anger results in cancer.{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.}} Decades before it was scientifically studied and confirmed, he wrote of the existence of switches that activate the disease.{{pg|445|446}}
In fact, cancer is a recurring theme in Mailer’s fiction. He believed that
malignancy begins with a single defective cell which attacks a healthy body from inside. Dougy Madden, in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'', knew immediately when his cancer began. After being shot, he chased his assailant for six blocks; when he found himself in front of St. Vincent’s Hospital, he stopped. Instead of continuing the chase, Dougy went inside and grabbed an orderly by the collar.

“[J]ust at the moment when I got tough with that punk in the white jacket was when I felt the first switch get thrown in the cancer.”{{sfn|Mailer|1984|p=158}} In that instant, according to Dougy’s self-revelation, he “lost his balls” and became the victim of impotent emotion.

A ''Mademoiselle'' magazine interview by Eve Auchincloss and Nancy Lynch in February of 1961 is featured in “Conversations with Norman Mailer,” edited by J. Michael Lennon. It quotes Mailer saying, “It’s not living in certain courageous moments that gives one cancer.” He continues,
<blockquote>The tragedy of it all is that if you choose to be brave at a certain moment and you fail, that’s even more likely to give you cancer than not doing anything at all. And since everyone has lost faith and a sense of certain values nobody acts any more. And more and more courageous moments are being lost all over the world, particularly in this country. And for that reason cancer is spreading. One of the causes of cancer must be the absence of action.{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=42-43}}</blockquote>
Later in the ''Mademoiselle'' interview, Mailer suggests that Americans no longer believe in their innate ability to rise to the demands of the moment. He associates their lack of confidence to a generation’s lack of courage and
ties both to the increasing prevalence of cancer. Courage is an instinctive reaction that occurs in a moment fraught with danger and risk when there is
no time for preparation and the outcome is uncertain. If an ax-wielding
madman chases you across a bridge and you throw yourself over the side in time to land on the deck of a passing barge, your courage has saved you. But the opportunity to jump existed in a flash of wild exhilaration and would have disappeared if you had hesitated for an instant to consider the impulse.

Mailer believed that spontaneous action requires courage, a feeling{{pg|446|447}}synonymous with guts and bravery and audacity. He also believed that the failure to act, or the failure of a courageous attempt to act, causes cancer.

In 1974 Dr. Robert Ader, an experimental psychologist, gave lab rats sugar water and a nausea inducing drug called Cytoxin. As soon as the rats were conditioned to associate sweet water with a stomachache, the Cytoxin was
eliminated. Thereafter, the rats became sick when they drank plain sugar water. Dr. Ader watched and waited to determine how long it would take the rodents to forget that sweet water made them nauseous. In the second month, the rats surprised him by dying.

Noting that one of the side effects of Cytoxin is suppression of the immune system, Dr. Ader observed that although the dead rats were not receiving the drug, they thought that they were. That thought shut down their immune systems and left them vulnerable to the ordinary germs which killed them. Obviously a critical connection existed between the rats’ minds and their immune systems. {{sfn|Ader|1992|p=6-8}} Practical wisdom has always known that there is a connection between the will and the cure. It took an additional six
years to prove what the stoic Lucius Seneca said near the time of Christ, “It is part of the cure to wish to be cured.”{{sfn|Hoyt|1896|p=668}}

In 1981 it was Neurobiologist Dr. David Felten, (currently a Research and Medical Director at the Beaumont Hospital Research Institute and a former recipient of the MacArthur Foundation genius award), a leading researcher in mind-body medicine, who finally discovered the hardwired connection between the immune system and the central nervous system controlled by the brain. Although ideas of cellular structure and function had existed for some time, they could not be proven because it was impossible to observe submicroscopic compositions like viruses. Advances in technology, including the invention of the electron microscope, greatly expanded the verifiable. The Felten research team led the way in a new field named Psychoneuroimmunology, or PNI. Researchers used fluorescent stain to trace nerves from the brain to bone marrow, lymph nodes, and the spleen. They discovered a network of nerves leading to blood vessels as well as cells of the immune system. At last the connection was visible and scientific research had proven
that the mind could control the body’s susceptibility to disease.

In 1989 Dr. Michael Bishop and Dr. Harold Varmus won the Nobel Prize
in Physiology for their cancer discoveries. They established that mutated or damaged cells protect the body from their own dysfunction in three ways: they repair themselves, they halt the process of reproduction in order to buy {{pg|447|448}}time to remedy the defects, or if that fails, they can commit cell suicide (called “apoptosis”). If this doesn’t work, the result is uncontrolled proliferation of damaged cells, or cancer.

In a ''Harvard Magazine'' article which included excerpts from his book that
would be published later that year, Dr. Bishop quotes Norman Mailer, a fellow
alumnus. He refers to Mailer’s “cancer trigger” theory with a quote from
''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'': “None of the doctors have a feel for the subject.... The way I see the matter, it’s a circuit of illness with two switches.... Two terrible things have to happen before the crud can get its start. The first cocks the trigger. The other fires it. I’ve been walking around with the trigger cocked for forty-five years.” {{sfn|Mailer|1984|p=158}} Bishop further explains, “The speaker here was a smoker who died of lung cancer four pages later in Mailer’s novel . . .Mailer’s conservative estimate of two ‘triggers’ has since been revised upward for most cancers, but otherwise, the imagery is on target.” Dr. Bishop, completes the reference with “Norman Mailer gets it,” meaning that Norman Mailer understands how cancer works.{{sfn|Bishop|2003a|p=53}}

Anne Harrington, the chair of the History of Science Department at Harvard, writes in her book, The Cure Within, that Mailer authorized his defense lawyers to develop the argument that if he had repressed his rage,
instead of stabbing his wife Adele, he would have gone on to develop cancer.{{sfn|Harrington|2008|p=90-91}} She does not suggest that he thought fear of cancer allowed one to act out one’s rage, nor do his characters propose such violence. However, Mailer had no doubt that failure to act in a moment of great emotion causes the disease.

An estimated two million Americans have schizophrenia, a biological condition that affects a person’s ability to think clearly, distinguish reality from fantasy, manage emotions, make decisions, and relate to others. The World Health Organization has identified schizophrenia as one of the ten most debilitating diseases affecting humans. The fact that those who suffer from schizophrenia are a population of very heavy smokers (up to 88%) would lead one to expect that they had a high incidence of cancer. {{sfn|Hughes|Hatsukami|Mitchell|Dahlgren|1986|p=995}} However, the opposite is true. Norman Mailer believed that their mental illness protected them.

Researchers at National Institutes of Mental Health emphasize that many of the genes associated with schizophrenia are the same as those that are associated with cancer, but the disorders use them in opposite ways. While cancer results from changes in the genes that cause the cells to go into {{pg|448|449}} overdrive and multiply rapidly, the same genes cause cells in schizophrenia to slow to a crawl.

Dr. Amanda Law of the University of Oxford, who heads a team at National Institutes of Mental Health, explored specific pathways that cells use
to make basic decisions about their development and their fate. She says,<blockquote>“This is about basic decision making by cells—whether to multiply, move, or change their basic architecture....Cancer and schizophrenia may be strange bedfellows that have similarities at the molecular level. The differences lie in how cells respond to external stimuli: in cancer the molecular system functions to
speed up the cell and in schizophrenia the system is altered in such a way that causes the cell to slow down.” {{sfn|Bosworth|2008|p=401}}(qtd. in “Genetics”)</blockquote>

Dr. Daniel Weinberger of NIMH says, “It’s very curious that a brain disorder associated with very complicated human behavior has at a genetic and cellular level a striking overlap with cancer, a very non-behavior related disorder.
Understanding these pathways might provide us with some new strategies for thinking about cancer.”{{sfn|Reis|2007}} Dr. Weinberger adds that future research involving this information will explore ways to reverse these processes—speeding the system up in schizophrenia and slowing it down in cancer—with implications that may help in the treatment of both diseases. The most advanced research today is attempting to target cancer cells and turn down their genetic instructions to multiply, invade, occupy, and overcome all resistance by using the cell’s own dimmer switch.{{sfn|Dotinga|2008}} Turning
down the intensity of uncontrolled growth is a big step towards turning it off. The human cell, with the infinite complexity of its ultramicroscopic components, has been revealing its secrets to scientists who now envision
cancer vaccines made of cells from a victim’s own cancer.{{sfn|Reis|2007}}

But what about Mailer’s belief that schizophrenia affords protection from
cancer? Does any substantiation exist? Evidence in a study of the tumor suppressor gene APC (adenomatous polyposis coli), which protects people from cancer growth, indicates a significant association between APC and schizophrenia. This gene is thought to confirm susceptibility to schizophrenia and reduce vulnerability to cancer. {{sfn|Cui|Jiang|Jiang|Xu|Yao|2005|p=675}}

However, one fact must not be overlooked. Cancer is a disease of old age, and the mentally ill die earlier than the general population. In the article{{pg|449|450}}“Dying too Young; Cardiovascular Neglect of the Mentally Ill,” we learn that earlier studies of the mentally ill estimated their life spans to average 20% fewer years than the rest of the population. Recent figures vary from state to state, but are alarmingly higher. In Ohio schizophrenics average a loss of thirty-two years of life. As a rule, they take poor care of themselves, have an unhealthy lifestyle, and suffer from metabolic syndrome (idle, overweight, poor nutrition).{{sfn|Nasrallah|2007}} It is possible that many of them do not live long enough to suffer from cancer. Mailer’s newly discovered handwritten hypothesis, which connects “impotent
emotion” and cancer, draws attention to the feeling we are most likely to label “stress.” The bane of modern humankind, stress causes a myriad of toxic effects. “When the weight of impossible desire is suffered within, the tension becomes acute and the cells live at the edge of rebellion.” According to Mailer, they may “secede from the body or face their death.” It is an impossible situation. “Man is made of mind and body” and Mailer concludes, when the situation “becomes intolerable, either the mind or the body must divide itself from the whole.” {{sfn|Mailer|n.d.}}

It is interesting that a Dissociative State (a term used in mental illness) can be a temporary condition that follows a period of high stress. It may involve a sudden disappearance which includes travel or wandering and sometimes the establishment of a new identity. The missing period is called a Fugue. The Fugue is followed by a return to normal, often with no memories of the interim. This sounds very much like an “intolerable” situation, perhaps due
to an impossible desire, which drives the mind to separate itself from the body. The Dissociative State can become permanent, of course, or cyclical, like schizophrenia, bipolar, and other mental illnesses. When cells on the edge of rebellion don’t secede from the body, but instead they commit cell suicide, they become cancerous. In either case Norman Mailer’s “impotent
emotion” refers to a powerful force or experience which drives one to the edge of disaster and beyond. He understood the concept organically and was correct to relate human behavior to cellular activity.

From 1989 to 2003 researchers mapped more than the 20,000 genes each person carries in the hope of comparing defective and healthy ones in order
to reveal the secrets of diseases like cancer. The human genome is the DNA blueprint for the body. The equivalent of hundreds of volumes of instructions exists on each genome to direct how cells are assembled and work together.{{sfn|Beil|2008}} There is as much mystery in the cell as there is in outer space. {{pg|450|451}} Norman Mailer was actively interested in all of it and we know this by the passion of his opinions.

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

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite journal |last=Ader |first=Dr. Robert |title=On the Clinical Relevance of Psychoneuroimmunology |journal=Clinical Immunology and Immunopathology |volume=64.1 |date=1992|pages=6-8 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Ader |first=Dr. Robert |authormask=1 |editor1=N. Cohen |editor2=Dr. David Felton|date=2001 |title=Psychoneuroimmunology |edition=3 |location=New York |publisher=Academic Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Beil |first=Laura |date=2008 |title=Medicine’s New Epicenter? Epigenetics |journal=Cure: Cancer Updates, Research & Education ||volume=Winter 2008|publisher=CURE Media Group |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Bishop |first=J. Michael |date=2003a |title=How to Win the Nobel Prize: An Unexpected Life in Science |location=Cambridge |publisher=Harvard |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Bishop |first=J. Michael |authormask=1 |date=2003b |title=What Causes Cancer; Genetic Sloppiness, the Cellular ‘Social Contract’ and Malignancy |magazine=Harvard Magazine ||volume=March-April |pages=49+ |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Bosworth |first=Patricia |date=2008 |title=Mailer’s Movie Madness |magazine=Vanity Fair |pages=397+ |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last1=Cui |first1=D.H. |last2=Jiang |first2=K.D. |last3=Jiang |first3=S.D. |last4=Xu |first4=Y.F. |last5=Yao |first5=H. |date=2005 |title=The Tumor Suppressor Adenomatous Polyposis Coli Gene Is Associated With Susceptibility to Schizophrenia |journal=Molecular Psychiatry ||volume=10.7 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Dotinga |first=Randy |date=1 July 2008 |title=Scientists Find Way to Dim Cancer Switch |magazine=The Washington Post |publisher=Washington Post Company |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |date=8 December 2007 |title=Genetics Might Explain Why Schizophrenics Have Lower Cancer Rates |magazine=Science 2.0 |publisher=ION Publications LLC |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Harrington |first=Anne |date=2008 |title=The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine |location=New York |publisher=W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hoyt |first=J.K. |date=1896 |title=The Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations: English, Latin, and Modern Foreign Languages |location=New York |publisher=Funk and Wagnalls |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last1=Hughes |first1=J.R. |last2=Hatsukami |first2=D.K. |last3=Mitchell |first3=J.E. |last4=Dahlgren |first4=L.A. |date=1986 |title=Prevalence of Smoking Among Psychiatric Outpatients |journal=American Journal of Psychiatry ||volume=143.8 |pages=993-997 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1988 |chapter=An Interview with Norman Mailer |title=Conversations with Norman Mailer |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael|location=Jackson |publisher=UP of Mississippi |pages=39-51|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=n.d. |title=Note on Cancer |publisher=Collection of J. Michael Lennon |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1984|title=Tough Guy's Don't Dance|location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Nasrallah |first=Henry A. |date=2007 |title=Dying Too Young: Cardiovascular Neglect of the Mentally Ill |journal=Current Psychiatry Online. ||volume=January 2007 |publisher=Quadrant HealthCom Inc|ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Reis |first=Sharon|date=10 December 2007 |title=Genetic Links between Schizophrenia and Cancer |magazine=Medical News Today |publisher=MediLexicon International Ltd. |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics

2025-04-12T19:08:06Z

JKilchenmann: works cited in progress

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{Byline |last=O'Neill Hooker |first=Maureen |abstract=Cancer is a recurring theme in Mailer’s fiction. He believed that malignancy begins with a single defective cell that attacks a healthy body from inside. Mailer believed that spontaneous action requires courage, a feeling synonymous with guts and bravery and audacity. He also believed that the failure to act, or the failure of a courageous attempt to act, causes cancer.|url=...}}

{{dc|dc=T|HERE IS NO QUESTION THAT NORMAN MAILER BELIEVED}} in the toxic effects of anger unexpressed. Why else would he, a talented handyman and carpenter, build his own orgone accumulator? In the six-foot tall phone booth-sized box, lined and padded with foam rubber, he wailed and banged out his personal version of scream therapy in order to de-stress from life in the fast lane.{{sfn|Bosworth|2008|p=401}} It is entirely possible that this activity protected his health in two important ways: first, it reduced his stress, and second, he ''believed'' that it reduced his stress. It may have even helped to clarify his thoughts regarding the origin of cancer and its infrequency in schizophrenics.

J. Michael Lennon recently made a startling discovery. It was a single page of twenty-five lines, handwritten by Mailer, probably in the early 1960s, which hypothesized that impotent emotion causes cancer. As examples of impotent emotion, Mailer described an ugly woman who waited in vain for a beautiful lover, a poor man who wished disaster upon his rich relatives, and a person who carried within his heart a desire to murder, an obsession he would never translate into action. Mailer stated that when inner tension becomes acute, cells exist at the edge of rebellion and the violence they cannot express is suffered within. He claimed that stress caused by unexpressed anger results in cancer.{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.}} Decades before it was scientifically studied and confirmed, he wrote of the existence of switches that activate the disease.{{pg|445|446}}
In fact, cancer is a recurring theme in Mailer’s fiction. He believed that
malignancy begins with a single defective cell which attacks a healthy body from inside. Dougy Madden, in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'', knew immediately when his cancer began. After being shot, he chased his assailant for six blocks; when he found himself in front of St. Vincent’s Hospital, he stopped. Instead of continuing the chase, Dougy went inside and grabbed an orderly by the collar.

“[J]ust at the moment when I got tough with that punk in the white jacket was when I felt the first switch get thrown in the cancer.”{{sfn|Mailer|1984|p=158}} In that instant, according to Dougy’s self-revelation, he “lost his balls” and became the victim of impotent emotion.

A ''Mademoiselle'' magazine interview by Eve Auchincloss and Nancy Lynch in February of 1961 is featured in “Conversations with Norman Mailer,” edited by J. Michael Lennon. It quotes Mailer saying, “It’s not living in certain courageous moments that gives one cancer.” He continues,
<blockquote>The tragedy of it all is that if you choose to be brave at a certain moment and you fail, that’s even more likely to give you cancer than not doing anything at all. And since everyone has lost faith and a sense of certain values nobody acts any more. And more and more courageous moments are being lost all over the world, particularly in this country. And for that reason cancer is spreading. One of the causes of cancer must be the absence of action.{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=42-43}}</blockquote>
Later in the ''Mademoiselle'' interview, Mailer suggests that Americans no longer believe in their innate ability to rise to the demands of the moment. He associates their lack of confidence to a generation’s lack of courage and
ties both to the increasing prevalence of cancer. Courage is an instinctive reaction that occurs in a moment fraught with danger and risk when there is
no time for preparation and the outcome is uncertain. If an ax-wielding
madman chases you across a bridge and you throw yourself over the side in time to land on the deck of a passing barge, your courage has saved you. But the opportunity to jump existed in a flash of wild exhilaration and would have disappeared if you had hesitated for an instant to consider the impulse.

Mailer believed that spontaneous action requires courage, a feeling{{pg|446|447}}synonymous with guts and bravery and audacity. He also believed that the failure to act, or the failure of a courageous attempt to act, causes cancer.

In 1974 Dr. Robert Ader, an experimental psychologist, gave lab rats sugar water and a nausea inducing drug called Cytoxin. As soon as the rats were conditioned to associate sweet water with a stomachache, the Cytoxin was
eliminated. Thereafter, the rats became sick when they drank plain sugar water. Dr. Ader watched and waited to determine how long it would take the rodents to forget that sweet water made them nauseous. In the second month, the rats surprised him by dying.

Noting that one of the side effects of Cytoxin is suppression of the immune system, Dr. Ader observed that although the dead rats were not receiving the drug, they thought that they were. That thought shut down their immune systems and left them vulnerable to the ordinary germs which killed them. Obviously a critical connection existed between the rats’ minds and their immune systems. {{sfn|Ader|1992|p=6-8}} Practical wisdom has always known that there is a connection between the will and the cure. It took an additional six
years to prove what the stoic Lucius Seneca said near the time of Christ, “It is part of the cure to wish to be cured.”{{sfn|Hoyt|1896|p=668}}

In 1981 it was Neurobiologist Dr. David Felten, (currently a Research and Medical Director at the Beaumont Hospital Research Institute and a former recipient of the MacArthur Foundation genius award), a leading researcher in mind-body medicine, who finally discovered the hardwired connection between the immune system and the central nervous system controlled by the brain. Although ideas of cellular structure and function had existed for some time, they could not be proven because it was impossible to observe submicroscopic compositions like viruses. Advances in technology, including the invention of the electron microscope, greatly expanded the verifiable. The Felten research team led the way in a new field named Psychoneuroimmunology, or PNI. Researchers used fluorescent stain to trace nerves from the brain to bone marrow, lymph nodes, and the spleen. They discovered a network of nerves leading to blood vessels as well as cells of the immune system. At last the connection was visible and scientific research had proven
that the mind could control the body’s susceptibility to disease.

In 1989 Dr. Michael Bishop and Dr. Harold Varmus won the Nobel Prize
in Physiology for their cancer discoveries. They established that mutated or damaged cells protect the body from their own dysfunction in three ways: they repair themselves, they halt the process of reproduction in order to buy {{pg|447|448}}time to remedy the defects, or if that fails, they can commit cell suicide (called “apoptosis”). If this doesn’t work, the result is uncontrolled proliferation of damaged cells, or cancer.

In a ''Harvard Magazine'' article which included excerpts from his book that
would be published later that year, Dr. Bishop quotes Norman Mailer, a fellow
alumnus. He refers to Mailer’s “cancer trigger” theory with a quote from
''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'': “None of the doctors have a feel for the subject.... The way I see the matter, it’s a circuit of illness with two switches.... Two terrible things have to happen before the crud can get its start. The first cocks the trigger. The other fires it. I’ve been walking around with the trigger cocked for forty-five years.” {{sfn|Mailer|1984|p=158}} Bishop further explains, “The speaker here was a smoker who died of lung cancer four pages later in Mailer’s novel . . .Mailer’s conservative estimate of two ‘triggers’ has since been revised upward for most cancers, but otherwise, the imagery is on target.” Dr. Bishop, completes the reference with “Norman Mailer gets it,” meaning that Norman Mailer understands how cancer works.{{sfn|Bishop|2003a|p=53}}

Anne Harrington, the chair of the History of Science Department at Harvard, writes in her book, The Cure Within, that Mailer authorized his defense lawyers to develop the argument that if he had repressed his rage,
instead of stabbing his wife Adele, he would have gone on to develop cancer
(Harrington 90-91). She does not suggest that he thought fear of cancer allowed one to act out one’s rage, nor do his characters propose such violence. However, Mailer had no doubt that failure to act in a moment of great emotion causes the disease.

An estimated two million Americans have schizophrenia, a biological condition that affects a person’s ability to think clearly, distinguish reality from fantasy, manage emotions, make decisions, and relate to others. The World Health Organization has identified schizophrenia as one of the ten most debilitating diseases affecting humans. The fact that those who suffer
from schizophrenia are a population of very heavy smokers (up to 88%) would lead one to expect that they had a high incidence of cancer {{sfn|Bosworth|2008|p=401}}(Hughes et al. 995). However, the opposite is true. Norman Mailer believed that their
mental illness protected them.

Researchers at National Institutes of Mental Health emphasize that many
of the genes associated with schizophrenia are the same as those that are associated with cancer, but the disorders use them in opposite ways. While cancer results from changes in the genes that cause the cells to go into {{pg|448|449}} overdrive and multiply rapidly, the same genes cause cells in schizophrenia to slow to a crawl.

Dr. Amanda Law of the University of Oxford, who heads a team at National
Institutes of Mental Health, explored specific pathways that cells use
to make basic decisions about their development and their fate. She says,
<blockquote>“This is about basic decision making by cells—whether to multiply, move, or change their basic architecture. . . .Cancer and schizophrenia may be strange bedfellows that have similarities at the molecular level. The differences lie in how cells respond to external stimuli: in cancer the molecular system functions to
speed up the cell and in schizophrenia the system is altered in such a way that causes the cell to slow down.” {{sfn|Bosworth|2008|p=401}}(qtd. in “Genetics”)</blockquote>

Dr. Daniel Weinberger of NIMH says, “It’s very curious that a brain disorder associated with very complicated human behavior has at a genetic and cellular level a striking overlap with cancer, a very non-behavior related disorder.
Understanding these pathways might provide us with some new strategies for thinking about cancer” {{sfn|Bosworth|2008|p=401}}(qtd. in Reis). Dr. Weinberger adds that future research involving this information will explore ways to reverse these processes—speeding the system up in schizophrenia and slowing it down in cancer—with implications that may help in the treatment of both diseases.
The most advanced research today is attempting to target cancer cells and
turn down their genetic instructions to multiply, invade, occupy, and overcome
all resistance by using the cell’s own dimmer switch (Dotinga). Turning
down the intensity of uncontrolled growth is a big step towards turning
it off. The human cell, with the infinite complexity of its ultramicroscopic
components, has been revealing its secrets to scientists who now envision
cancer vaccines made of cells from a victim’s own cancer {{sfn|Bosworth|2008|p=401}}(Reis).

But what about Mailer’s belief that schizophrenia affords protection from
cancer? Does any substantiation exist? Evidence in a study of the tumor suppressor gene APC (adenomatous polyposis coli), which protects people from cancer growth, indicates a significant association between APC and schizophrenia. This gene is thought to confirm susceptibility to schizophrenia and reduce vulnerability to cancer {{sfn|Bosworth|2008|p=401}}(Cui et al. 675).

However, one fact must not be overlooked. Cancer is a disease of old age, and the mentally ill die earlier than the general population. In the article{{pg|449|450}}“Dying too Young; Cardiovascular Neglect of the Mentally Ill,” we learn that earlier studies of the mentally ill estimated their life spans to average 20% fewer years than the rest of the population. Recent figures vary from state to state, but are alarmingly higher. In Ohio schizophrenics average a loss of
thirty-two years of life. As a rule, they take poor care of themselves, have an unhealthy lifestyle, and suffer from metabolic syndrome (idle, overweight,
poor nutrition).{{sfn|Nasrallah|2007}} It is possible that many of them do not live long enough to suffer from cancer.
Mailer’s newly discovered handwritten hypothesis, which connects “impotent
emotion” and cancer, draws attention to the feeling we are most likely
to label “stress.” The bane of modern humankind, stress causes a myriad of
toxic effects. “When the weight of impossible desire is suffered within, the tension becomes acute and the cells live at the edge of rebellion.” According to Mailer, they may “secede from the body or face their death.” It is an impossible situation. “Man is made of mind and body” and Mailer concludes, when the situation “becomes intolerable, either the mind or the body must divide itself from the whole.” {{sfn|Mailer|n.d.}}

It is interesting that a Dissociative State (a term used in mental illness) can be a temporary condition that follows a period of high stress. It may involve a sudden disappearance which includes travel or wandering and sometimes the establishment of a new identity. The missing period is called a Fugue.
The Fugue is followed by a return to normal, often with no memories of the
interim. This sounds very much like an “intolerable” situation, perhaps due
to an impossible desire, which drives the mind to separate itself from the
body. The Dissociative State can become permanent, of course, or cyclical,
like schizophrenia, bipolar, and other mental illnesses. When cells on the
edge of rebellion don’t secede from the body, but instead they commit cell
suicide, they become cancerous. In either case Norman Mailer’s “impotent
emotion” refers to a powerful force or experience which drives one to the
edge of disaster and beyond. He understood the concept organically and was correct to relate human behavior to cellular activity.

From 1989 to 2003 researchers mapped more than the 20,000 genes each
person carries in the hope of comparing defective and healthy ones in order
to reveal the secrets of diseases like cancer. The human genome is the DNA
blueprint for the body. The equivalent of hundreds of volumes of instructions
exists on each genome to direct how cells are assembled and work together
(Beil). There is as much mystery in the cell as there is in outer space.
{{pg|450|451}}
Norman Mailer was actively interested in all of it and we know this by the
passion of his opinions.

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

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite journal |last=Ader |first=Dr. Robert |title=On the Clinical Relevance of Psychoneuroimmunology |journal=Clinical Immunology and Immunopathology |volume=64.1 |date=1992|pages=6-8 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Bell |first=Laura |date=2008 |title=Medicine’s New Epicenter? Epigenetics |journal=Cure: Cancer Updates, Research & Education ||volume=Winter 2008|publisher=CURE Media Group |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Bishop |first=J. Michael |date=2003a |title=How to Win the Nobel Prize: An Unexpected Life in Science |location=Cambridge |publisher=Harvard |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Bishop |first=J. Michael |authormask=1 |date=2003b |title=What Causes Cancer; Genetic Sloppiness, the Cellular ‘Social Contract’ and Malignancy |magazine=Harvard Magazine ||volume=March-April |pages=49+ |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Bosworth |first=Patricia |date=2008 |title=Mailer’s Movie Madness |magazine=Vanity Fair |pages=397+ |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hoyt |first=J.K. |date=1896 |title=The Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations: English, Latin, and Modern Foreign Languages |location=New York |publisher=Funk and Wagnalls |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Nasrallah |first=Henry A. |date=2007 |title=Dying Too Young: Cardiovascular Neglect of the Mentally Ill |journal=Current Psychiatry Online. ||volume=January 2007 |publisher=Quadrant HealthCom Inc|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1988 |chapter=An Interview with Norman Mailer |title=Conversations with Norman Mailer |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael|location=Jackson |publisher=UP of Mississippi |pages=39-51|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=n.d. |title=Note on Cancer |publisher=Collection of J. Michael Lennon |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1984|title=Tough Guy's Don't Dance|location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics

2025-04-12T18:18:08Z

JKilchenmann: added body text

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{Byline |last=O'Neill Hooker |first=Maureen |abstract=Cancer is a recurring theme in Mailer’s fiction. He believed that malignancy begins with a single defective cell that attacks a healthy body from inside. Mailer believed that spontaneous action requires courage, a feeling synonymous with guts and bravery and audacity. He also believed that the failure to act, or the failure of a courageous attempt to act, causes cancer.|url=...}}

{{dc|dc=T|HERE IS NO QUESTION THAT NORMAN MAILER BELIEVED}} in the toxic effects of anger unexpressed. Why else would he, a talented handyman and carpenter, build his own orgone accumulator? In the six-foot tall phone booth-sized
box, lined and padded with foam rubber, he wailed and banged out his personal version of scream therapy in order to de-stress from life in the fast lane(Bosworth 401). It is entirely possible that this activity protected his health in two important ways: first, it reduced his stress, and second, he ''believed''
that it reduced his stress. It may have even helped to clarify his thoughts regarding the origin of cancer and its infrequency in schizophrenics.

J. Michael Lennon recently made a startling discovery. It was a single page of twenty-five lines, handwritten by Mailer, probably in the early 1960s, which hypothesized that impotent emotion causes cancer. As examples of impotent emotion, Mailer described an ugly woman who waited in vain for a beautiful lover, a poor man who wished disaster upon his rich relatives,
and a person who carried within his heart a desire to murder, an obsession he would never translate into action. Mailer stated that when inner tension becomes acute, cells exist at the edge of rebellion and the violence they cannot express is suffered within. He claimed that stress caused by unexpressed anger results in cancer (Mailer, “Note”). Decades before it was scientifically
studied and confirmed, he wrote of the existence of switches that activate the disease.{{pg|445|446}}
In fact, cancer is a recurring theme in Mailer’s fiction. He believed that
malignancy begins with a single defective cell which attacks a healthy body from inside. Dougy Madden, in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'', knew immediately when his cancer began. After being shot, he chased his assailant for six blocks;
when he found himself in front of St. Vincent’s Hospital, he stopped. Instead of continuing the chase, Dougy went inside and grabbed an orderly by the collar.

“[J]ust at the moment when I got tough with that punk in the white jacket was when I felt the first switch get thrown in the cancer” (Tough 158). In that
instant, according to Dougy’s self-revelation, he “lost his balls” and became the victim of impotent emotion.

A ''Mademoiselle'' magazine interview by Eve Auchincloss and Nancy Lynch in February of 1961 is featured in “Conversations with Norman Mailer,” edited by J. Michael Lennon. It quotes Mailer saying, “It’s not living in certain
courageous moments that gives one cancer.” He continues,
<blockquote>The tragedy of it all is that if you choose to be brave at a certain moment and you fail, that’s even more likely to give you cancer than not doing anything at all. And since everyone has lost faith and a sense of certain values nobody acts any more. And more and more courageous moments are being lost all over the world, particularly in this country. And for that reason cancer is spreading. One of the causes of cancer must be the absence of action. (“Interview” –)</blockquote>
Later in the ''Mademoiselle'' interview, Mailer suggests that Americans no longer believe in their innate ability to rise to the demands of the moment. He associates their lack of confidence to a generation’s lack of courage and
ties both to the increasing prevalence of cancer. Courage is an instinctive reaction
that occurs in a moment fraught with danger and risk when there is
no time for preparation and the outcome is uncertain. If an ax-wielding
madman chases you across a bridge and you throw yourself over the side in time to land on the deck of a passing barge, your courage has saved you. But the opportunity to jump existed in a flash of wild exhilaration and would have disappeared if you had hesitated for an instant to consider the impulse.

Mailer believed that spontaneous action requires courage, a feeling
{{pg|446|447}}synonymous with guts and bravery and audacity. He also believed that the failure to act, or the failure of a courageous attempt to act, causes cancer.

In 1974 Dr. Robert Ader, an experimental psychologist, gave lab rats sugar water and a nausea inducing drug called Cytoxin. As soon as the rats were conditioned to associate sweet water with a stomachache, the Cytoxin was
eliminated. Thereafter, the rats became sick when they drank plain sugar water. Dr. Ader watched and waited to determine how long it would take the rodents to forget that sweet water made them nauseous. In the second month, the rats surprised him by dying.

Noting that one of the side effects of Cytoxin is suppression of the immune system, Dr. Ader observed that although the dead rats were not receiving the drug, they thought that they were. That thought shut down their immune systems and left them vulnerable to the ordinary germs which killed them. Obviously a critical connection existed between the rats’ minds and their immune systems (Ader 6-8). Practical wisdom has always known that there is a connection between the will and the cure. It took an additional six
years to prove what the stoic Lucius Seneca said near the time of Christ, “It is part of the cure to wish to be cured” (Hoyt 668).

In 1981 it was Neurobiologist Dr. David Felten, (currently a Research and Medical Director at the Beaumont Hospital Research Institute and a former recipient of the MacArthur Foundation genius award), a leading researcher in mind-body medicine, who finally discovered the hardwired connection between the immune system and the central nervous system controlled by the brain. Although ideas of cellular structure and function had existed for some time, they could not be proven because it was impossible to observe submicroscopic compositions like viruses. Advances in technology, including the invention of the electron microscope, greatly expanded the verifiable. The Felten research team led the way in a new field named Psychoneuroimmunology, or PNI. Researchers used fluorescent stain to trace nerves from the brain to bone marrow, lymph nodes, and the spleen. They discovered a network of nerves leading to blood vessels as well as cells of the immune system. At last the connection was visible and scientific research had proven
that the mind could control the body’s susceptibility to disease.

In 1989 Dr. Michael Bishop and Dr. Harold Varmus won the Nobel Prize
in Physiology for their cancer discoveries. They established that mutated or
damaged cells protect the body from their own dysfunction in three ways:
they repair themselves, they halt the process of reproduction in order to buy
{{pg|447|448}}time to remedy the defects, or if that fails, they can commit cell suicide (called “apoptosis”). If this doesn’t work, the result is uncontrolled proliferation of damaged cells, or cancer.

In a ''Harvard Magazine'' article which included excerpts from his book that
would be published later that year, Dr. Bishop quotes Norman Mailer, a fellow
alumnus. He refers to Mailer’s “cancer trigger” theory with a quote from
''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'': “None of the doctors have a feel for the subject. . . . The way I see the matter, it’s a circuit of illness with two switches. . . . Two terrible
things have to happen before the crud can get its start. The first cocks
the trigger. The other fires it. I’ve been walking around with the trigger
cocked for forty-five years” (158). Bishop further explains, “The speaker here was a smoker who died of lung cancer four pages later in Mailer’s novel . . .Mailer’s conservative estimate of two ‘triggers’ has since been revised upward for most cancers, but otherwise, the imagery is on target.” Dr. Bishop, completes the reference with “Norman Mailer gets it,” meaning that Norman Mailer understands how cancer works (Bishop 53).

Anne Harrington, the chair of the History of Science Department at Harvard, writes in her book, The Cure Within, that Mailer authorized his defense lawyers to develop the argument that if he had repressed his rage,
instead of stabbing his wife Adele, he would have gone on to develop cancer
(Harrington 90-91). She does not suggest that he thought fear of cancer allowed one to act out one’s rage, nor do his characters propose such violence. However, Mailer had no doubt that failure to act in a moment of great emotion causes the disease.

An estimated two million Americans have schizophrenia, a biological condition that affects a person’s ability to think clearly, distinguish reality from fantasy, manage emotions, make decisions, and relate to others. The World Health Organization has identified schizophrenia as one of the ten most debilitating diseases affecting humans. The fact that those who suffer
from schizophrenia are a population of very heavy smokers (up to 88%) would lead one to expect that they had a high incidence of cancer (Hughes et al. 995). However, the opposite is true. Norman Mailer believed that their
mental illness protected them.

Researchers at National Institutes of Mental Health emphasize that many
of the genes associated with schizophrenia are the same as those that are associated with cancer, but the disorders use them in opposite ways. While cancer results from changes in the genes that cause the cells to go into {{pg|448|449}} overdrive and multiply rapidly, the same genes cause cells in schizophrenia to slow to a crawl.

Dr. Amanda Law of the University of Oxford, who heads a team at National
Institutes of Mental Health, explored specific pathways that cells use
to make basic decisions about their development and their fate. She says,
<blockquote>“This is about basic decision making by cells—whether to multiply, move, or change their basic architecture. . . .Cancer and schizophrenia may be strange bedfellows that have similarities at the molecular level. The differences lie in how cells respond to external stimuli: in cancer the molecular system functions to
speed up the cell and in schizophrenia the system is altered in such a way that causes the cell to slow down.” (qtd. in “Genetics”)</blockquote>

Dr. Daniel Weinberger of NIMH says, “It’s very curious that a brain disorder associated with very complicated human behavior has at a genetic and cellular level a striking overlap with cancer, a very non-behavior related disorder.
Understanding these pathways might provide us with some new strategies for thinking about cancer” (qtd. in Reis). Dr. Weinberger adds that future research involving this information will explore ways to reverse these processes—speeding the system up in schizophrenia and slowing it down in cancer—with implications that may help in the treatment of both diseases.
The most advanced research today is attempting to target cancer cells and
turn down their genetic instructions to multiply, invade, occupy, and overcome
all resistance by using the cell’s own dimmer switch (Dotinga). Turning
down the intensity of uncontrolled growth is a big step towards turning
it off. The human cell, with the infinite complexity of its ultramicroscopic
components, has been revealing its secrets to scientists who now envision
cancer vaccines made of cells from a victim’s own cancer (Reis).

But what about Mailer’s belief that schizophrenia affords protection from
cancer? Does any substantiation exist? Evidence in a study of the tumor suppressor gene APC (adenomatous polyposis coli), which protects people from cancer growth, indicates a significant association between APC and schizophrenia. This gene is thought to confirm susceptibility to schizophrenia and reduce vulnerability to cancer (Cui et al. 675).

However, one fact must not be overlooked. Cancer is a disease of old age, and the mentally ill die earlier than the general population. In the article{{pg|449|450}}“Dying too Young; Cardiovascular Neglect of the Mentally Ill,” we learn that earlier studies of the mentally ill estimated their life spans to average 20% fewer years than the rest of the population. Recent figures vary from state to state, but are alarmingly higher. In Ohio schizophrenics average a loss of
thirty-two years of life. As a rule, they take poor care of themselves, have an unhealthy lifestyle, and suffer from metabolic syndrome (idle, overweight,
poor nutrition) (Nasrallah). It is possible that many of them do not live long enough to suffer from cancer.
Mailer’s newly discovered handwritten hypothesis, which connects “impotent
emotion” and cancer, draws attention to the feeling we are most likely
to label “stress.” The bane of modern humankind, stress causes a myriad of
toxic effects. “When the weight of impossible desire is suffered within, the tension becomes acute and the cells live at the edge of rebellion.” According to Mailer, they may “secede from the body or face their death.” It is an impossible situation. “Man is made of mind and body” and Mailer concludes, when the situation “becomes intolerable, either the mind or the body must divide itself from the whole” (Mailer, “Note”).

It is interesting that a Dissociative State (a term used in mental illness) can be a temporary condition that follows a period of high stress. It may involve a sudden disappearance which includes travel or wandering and sometimes the establishment of a new identity. The missing period is called a Fugue.
The Fugue is followed by a return to normal, often with no memories of the
interim. This sounds very much like an “intolerable” situation, perhaps due
to an impossible desire, which drives the mind to separate itself from the
body. The Dissociative State can become permanent, of course, or cyclical,
like schizophrenia, bipolar, and other mental illnesses. When cells on the
edge of rebellion don’t secede from the body, but instead they commit cell
suicide, they become cancerous. In either case Norman Mailer’s “impotent
emotion” refers to a powerful force or experience which drives one to the
edge of disaster and beyond. He understood the concept organically and was correct to relate human behavior to cellular activity.

From 1989 to 2003 researchers mapped more than the 20,000 genes each
person carries in the hope of comparing defective and healthy ones in order
to reveal the secrets of diseases like cancer. The human genome is the DNA
blueprint for the body. The equivalent of hundreds of volumes of instructions
exists on each genome to direct how cells are assembled and work together
(Beil). There is as much mystery in the cell as there is in outer space.
{{pg|450|451}}
Norman Mailer was actively interested in all of it and we know this by the
passion of his opinions.

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite journal |last=Ader |first=Dr. Robert |title=On the Clinical Relevance of Psychoneuroimmunology |journal=Clinical Immunology and Immunopathology |volume=64.1 |date=1992|pages=6-8 |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

Talk:The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010

2025-04-12T17:28:45Z

JKilchenmann: volunteered for another article

===Article Assignments, Vol. 4===
You will need to request an article and user name for {{PM}}. You may click the link to your article below to begin your edits. Status indicators: {{tick}} = complete (ready for final edits and banner removal); {{yellow tick}} = in process; {{cross}} = not started.

{| class="wikitable sortable" style="width: 100%;"
|-
! Author !! Article !! Editor !! Status
|-
| Mailer || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Postscript to the Fourth Advertisement for Myself|Postscript to the Fourth Advertisement for Myself]] || [[User:Grlucas]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Mailer || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Hemingway Revisited|Hemingway Revisited]] || [[User:Grlucas]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Lennon || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Hemingway to Mailer — A Delayed Response to The Deer Park|Hemingway to Mailer]] || [[User:Hobbitonya]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Hemingway || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman, Ernest, and Greg|Norman, Ernest, and Greg]] || [[User:Grlucas]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Begiebing || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Ernest and Norman: A Dialogue in Two Acts|Ernest and Norman]] || [[User:DSánchez]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Bufithis & Curnutt || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway|A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway]] || [[User:Grlucas]] || {{yellow tick}}
|-
| Meredith || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/The American Civil War in The Naked and the Dead and Across the River and Into the Trees|The American Civil War]] || [[User:KaraCroissant]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Shuman || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman vs. Ernest: Influence and Identity|Norman vs. Ernest]] || [[User:MSeleb]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Lowenburg || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Hooking Off the Jab: Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway and Boxing|Hooking Off the Jab]] || [[User:ASpeed]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Cirino || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman Mailer's The Fight: Hemingway, Bullfighting, and the Lovely Metaphysics of Boxing|Norman Mailer's ''The Fight'']] || [[User:TWietstruk]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Boddy || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing]] || [[User:JBrown]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Leeds || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer|Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer]] || [[User:CVinson]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Plath || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Jive-Ass Aficionado: Why Are We in Vietnam? and Hemingway's Moral Code|Jive-Ass Aficionado]] || [[User:ADear]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Cappell || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Hemingway's Jewish Progeny: Roth and Goldstein in ''The Naked and the Dead''|Hemingway's Jewish Progeny]] || [[User:THarris]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Peppard || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and the “Reds”|Mailer, Hemingway, and the “Reds”]] || [[User:KWatson]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Kaufmann || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Ernest and Norman (Exit Music)|Ernest and Norman (Exit Music)]] || [[User:Flowersbloom]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Justice || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation]] || [[User:APKnight25]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Josephs || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer's "Footnote to Death in the Afternoon"|Mailer's "Footnote to Death in the Afternoon"]] || [[User:KForeman]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Hays || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Battles for Regard, Writerly and Otherwise|Battles for Regard]] || [[User:ALedezma]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Gladstein || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman|Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman]] || [[User:ALedezma]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Batchelor || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Looking at the Past: Nostalgia as Technique in The Naked and the Dead and For Whom the Bell Tolls|Looking at the Past]] || [[User:DBond007]] || {{yellow tick}}
|-
| Robinson || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead|Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures]] ||[[User:Priley1984]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Sanders || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing|Death, Art, and the Disturbing]] || [[User:JBawlson]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Stoneback || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/"Oohh Normie — You're Sooo Hemingway": Mailer Memories and Encounters|Mailer Memories and Encounters]] || [[User:Tbara4554]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Gordon || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Encounters with Mailer|Encounters with Mailer]] || [[User:Priley1984]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Vince || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer|Rumors of Grace]] || [[User:Sherrilledwards]] || {{yellow tick}}
|-
| Apple || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]] || [[User:Chelsey.brantley]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Sinclair || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman Mailer: An Expected Encounter in an Unexpected Place|An Expected Encounter]] || [[User:Wverna]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Klavan || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/On Reading Mailer Too Young|On Reading Mailer Too Young]] || [[User:Essence903m]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Miele || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/What Norman Mailer Taught Me about Combat|What Norman Mailer Taught Me about Combat]] || [[User:TBorel]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Vernon || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches|Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches]] || ? || {{cross}}
|-
| Hooker || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics|From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics]] || [[User:JKilchenmann]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Hinton || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Advertisements for Others: The Blurbs of Norman Mailer|Advertisements for Others]] || ? || {{cross}}
|-
| Hicks || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway|''Harlot’s Ghost'', ''Bildungsroman'', Masculinity and Hemingway]] || [[User:JKilchenmann]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Mercer || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Automatons and the Atomic Abyss: The Naked and the Dead|Automatons and the Atomic Abyss]] || ? || {{cross}}
|-
| Westaway || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator|“A Noble Pursuit”]] || ? || {{cross}}
|-
| Fox || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norris Church Mailer|Norris Church Mailer]] || [[User:Kamyers]] || {{tick}}
|}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman

2025-04-09T02:49:51Z

JKilchenmann: cite listed twice

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}{{Byline|last=Gladstein|first=Mimi Reisel|abstract=Hemingway and Mailer had many similarities. In the cases of Catherine Barkley for Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe for Mailer, both writers allowed themselves for imaginative privileges that they did not have in life. Both characterizations are a certain kind of dream fantasy woman, a projection of autoerotic impulses. Whereas life may not have afforded either Hemingway or Mailer the realization of some of their fantasies, as authors, they can,to borrow a phrase from Seinfeld,be “masters of their own domain.”|url=...}}
{{Working}} 
{{dc|dc=C|HARACTERIZATIONS OF THE HEMINGWAY/MAILER CONNECTION ARE MANY.}} Hortense Calisher once quipped that Norman mailer was one of those writers who too early got caught up in Hemingway's jockstrap.{{sfn|Wilt|1999 |p=188}}{{efn|This was in the context of a review of the lack of women writers in the cannon.}} For Peter Schwenger, Hemingway and Mailer are catalogued as writers of the School of Virility{{sfn |Schwenger |1984}}{{efn|Swenger's focus is their fascination with the bullfight.}}. Jeffrey Meyers names Mailer as Hemingway's "most important disciple" in what he identifies as the "hardboiled" school of writers{{sfn |Meyers |1999}}{{efn|Myers writes that"Mailer was obsessed with Hemingway, fastened onto the son after he had failed to meet the father"{{sfn |Meyers |1999 |p=570}}}}. Indeed, a linking of the two is almost a cliche by this time, the younger Mailer referencing Hemingway often, not only in interviews, but also in his writing. One of mailer's biographers, Carl Rollyson, contends that mailer saw Hemingway as a role model in that he "had shown how a writer could become his own man"{{sfn |Rollyson, Jr. |1991}}. When Gregory Hemingway wrote his remembrance of his father, ''Papa: A Personal Memoir'', mailer wrote the Preface. The connections are numerous and varied. In another sense the relationship could be characterized as an ongoing ''mano a mano'', almost Oedipal contest, as the younger writer attempted to emulate and outdo the master in myriad manners; the creation f a larger-than life celebrity persona, drinking, brawling, and challenging peers to boxing matches both literal and figuratve. Both had war experiences when young and both used those experiences to feed their fiction. Hemingway wrote the quintessential World War I novel, ''A Farewell to Arms''; Mailer's ''The Naked and the Dead'' occupies a similar status as the definitive war novel of World War II. Both married multiple times, Mailer beating Hemingway by two wives. Both became favorite whipping boys for feminist critics, condemned for their misogynistic portrayals of {{pg |288|289}}
women and chauvinistic notions about relationships between the sexes. Kate Millett's ''Sexual Politics'' devotes a chapter to Mailer, whom she characterizes as "a prisoner of the virility cult"{{sfn |Millett | 1969}}, one who sees sex as war and war as sexual. Judith Fetterley's ''The Resisting Reader: a Feminist Approach to American Fiction'' includes chapters on both Hemingway and Mailer. And while I do not disagree with much of the criticism, in my appreciation for the major talents of these two writers I must invoke Norris Church Mailer, who comments on the tensions of living with Mailer: {{cquote|"Part of him was this wonderful, sweet, intelligent, terrific, funny guy that I was in love with. And another part, I just couldn't stand."{{sfn |Newman | 2010}}}} It is a tension applicable to my situation as a professor of literature, one who recognizes and teaches the brilliance of these men as writers, while never loath to point out some of the less than savory aspects of their personalities and artistic creations.
In keeping with that perspective of appreciating the talents while acknowledging alternative readings, this essay identifies another similarity in the writings of Hemingway and Mailer, one that perhaps springs from an analogous impulse of these two self-absorbed and often ego-maniacal writers-their creation of a certain kind of dream fantasy woman, a projection of autoerotic impulses, by which they allow themselves, imaginatively, privileges that they did not have in life. In their fiction, they create a fulfillment that privileges male satisfaction; man is the subject, woman an object, a means to that end. Whereas life may not have afforded them realization of certain of their fantasies, they can, to borrow a phrase from Seinfeld, be "masters of their own domain" in writing or following from the egocentric nature of the two, they can accomplish in their writings a fantasy fulfillment, for as Woody Allen quips in ''Annie Hall'': "Don't knock masturbation: it's sex with someone I love"{{efn |Thanks to my colleague Ezra Cappell for reminding of this scene.}} my hypothesis is validated in ''The Spooky Art'' where Mailer makes the connection explicit, noting that "[t]he act of writing is so close to the psychic character of masturbation that if we are going to discuss the world of the writer, then we ought to deal with this as well"{{sfn |Mailer |2003}}.

The cases in point for this study are Catherine Barkley for Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe for Mailer.{{efn |A longer study could survey a number of their texts interpolating the auto-erotic construction of others of these writers' fantasy women, but for this shorter study, the primary focus will be on one character for each.}} These choices may strike some as an odd pairing, perhaps inappropriate. After all, one is a fictional character and the other was a real woman. Not withstanding that demurrer, in terms of the authors' autoerotic uses of these women, the comparison is justified. Hemingway took the real Agnes Von Kurowsky, the woman who, in the words of Harry, his alter-ego writer of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," was "the first one,{{pg |289|290}}
the one who left him" and formed a fictional daydream who could never get away{{sfn|Hemingway|2003d|p=48}}. Various members of Hemingway's family and biographers have written of the traumatic effect on him of Kurowsky's "Dear Ernest" letter. But, while the actual woman may have gotten away in his life, the author captures her forever on the pages of his daydream projection in ''A Farewell to Arms'' On the other hand, Marilyn Monroe was a real woman, but one who recreated herself as a fictional character, a characterization Mailer validates: "Marilyn had been polishing her fables for years"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=18}}. Just as Agnes Von Jurowsky is the one who left Hemingway, who metaphorically got away, Marilyn is one who got away from Mailer, as he was never invited to meet her when she and Arthur Miller were his neighbors in Connecticut. In his review of the Marilyn biography, Dean MacCannell theorizes that "Mailer is burned up about this, fantasizing that Miller did not have him over out of fear that he would steal Marilyn"{{sfn |MacCannell |1987}}. It is a view supported by Mailer, who acknowledges in his introductory chapter that " in all his vanity he thought on one was so well suited to ring out the best in her as himself, a conceit which fifty million other men may also have held"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |pages=19-20}}. However, as a skilled writer the older Mailer can rectify the missed opportunity. What did not happen in real life can be played over and over in the reel life of his fictional fantasy.{{efn |As a side note, Norris Church Mailer makes an observation about the fantasy connection between Hemingway and Marilyn for Norman Mailer. when they visit the finca in Cuba, she writes: "I was a little sad, seeing Norman poking about in Hemingway's house, wondering what they might have said to each other if they had indeed ever met. Kind of like the phantom affair he might have had with Marilyn Monroe, if they had ever met, which they didn't"{{sfn |Mailer |2010 |p=305}}}}

Generations of critics have analyzed and dissected the character of Catherine Barkley.{{efn |Sandra Whipple Spanier catalogs
them in "Hemingway's Unknown Soldier: Catherine Barkley, the Critics, and the Great War."}} Their conclusions run the spectrum from the " Catherine is the real hero" minions to those who see Hemingway's female characters as "a convenience and a technique to turn a monologue into a dialogue" contingent{{sfn |Tharp |1960 |p=191}}. The latter diagnosis is supportive of my hypothesis that in his creation of Catherine Barkley, Hemingway in addition to turning his monologue into a dialogue, creates an ideal masturbatory fantasy, a technique to allow him to tell himself what he wants to hear; he gets both his say and the opportunity to put satisfactory words into her mouth. Hemingway, as writer, in the assertive role of creation, uses the phallic pen to fulfill his erotic fantasies as his surrogate Frederick lies flat on his back and is ministered to by the "fresh," "young," and "beautiful" Catherine.

Frederick's selfish behavior toward Catherine enhances the connotations of autoeroticism; he is not concerned that she has work to do or may be tired, his satisfaction is all that matters. "Come back to bed" he tells her when she says she has charts to fill, work to do. Although she is on duty the day Doctor Valentini visits him, Frederick implores, "And can you be on night {{pg |290|291}}
duty tonight?" Like the selfish boy that he is, he cajoles, "You don't really love me or you'd come back again"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=102}}. The autoerotic state is one of complete self-absorption and Frederick is nothing if not totally self-centered. The narrator (Frederick after the fact) comments on how popular Catherine is with the other nurses "because she would do night duty indefinitely"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=108}}, and she does it indefinitely because of Frederick's demands.

Hemingway, when he distances himself as author, is aware of Frederick's selfishness and to his credit creates a scene where Ferguson reminds him of it. "You might give her just a little rest," she suggests, although doubtful that he will{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=109}}. She even reminds him that while he is sleeping, Catherine, after having fulfilled his sexual needs, is still working. Still, lest reality intrude too much on this remonstrance, there is an element of boasting involved; the implication is that he is so potent and insatiable that Catherine never gets to rest. Hemingway does end the scene with Miss Gage coming into the room, having a drink with Frederick and assuring him no less than four times in the space of one page, "I'm your friend," thus providing a modicum of absolution{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=110}}. In the end the three nights that Catherine is off duty serve only to add further piquancy to the resumption of their lovemaking and can be read as an Epicurean enhancement to the pure Hedonism of Frederick's self-indulgence. Absence acts to increase the appetite. Holding off is just another way to add potency to the reunion.

Hemingway creates Catherine/Agnes as compliant, docile, and anxious to please. "I'll say just what you wish and I'll do what you wish," says the fantasy woman{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=105}}. It is hard to imagine that the twenty-six year old veteran nurse would speak to the nineteen-year-old "kid," as she called him in such a servile manner.{{efn |Jean Wyrick, exploring Catherine's credibility as a twentieth-century woman, observes: "Few women, if any, live only to serve, their wish to deny their own personalities and to assume those of their lovers"{{sfn |Wyrick |1973 | p=43}}.}} Then, having given him an enema and prepared him for surgery, she is summoned back to his bed: "You see," she said. "I do anything you want." The most telling exchange in this scene is when she says: "I want what you want. There isn't any me any more. Just what you want"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=106}}. And, indeed there isn't any woman there, just what the Hemingway's surrogate figure wants. The reality of a masturbatory fantasy is a lone individual, doing just what he wants. His only limitations are those of his imagination.

To further enhance the argument that, at one level of this novel, Hemingway is engaging in an autoerotic fantasy, there is Catherine's insistence that she does not exist as a separate entity. "There isn't any me. I'm you," she insists. "Don't make up a separate me"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=115}}. The oneness of the two is reinforced by Ferguson, "You're two of the same thing," she proclaims, citing {{pg |291|292}}
in particular that they both have no shame and no honor and are equally sneaky{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=247}}. Of course, like the good little autoerotic fantasy that she is, Catherine often assures Frederick of her lack of any will separate from his: "I'll go any place any time you wish," which of course she will, since as a creation in Frederick's memory and Hemingway's fantasy, she has no autonomy outside of their needs and minds{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=252}}.

In the published photos of Agnes Von Kurowsky during her time in Italy, her hair is very neatly situated under her nurse's cap, so it is difficult to know what it looked like unconfined. In Hemingway's fantasy, however, he makes full use of the erotic resonance of woman's hair in the sexual encounter, hair being a traditional and timeworn symbol of female sexuality. It is not coincidental that Brett Ashley, one of Hemingway's most castrating women, has short hair, hair that her young love Pedro Romero wants her to grow so she will be more womanly.

Catherine's hair is a key component of her attractiveness for him: "She had wonderfully beautiful hair and I would lie sometimes and watch her twisting it up in the light"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=114}}. There is a voyeuristic quality to his description of these scenes: "I watched her brushing her hair, holding her head so the weight of her hair all came on one side"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=258}}. Watching her brush with the light shining on her hair, he remarks that the sight makes him feel faint. In a particularly sensual image, Frederick remembers taking the pins out of her hair so that it cascades down around the two of them, making him feel as if they are either "inside a tent or behind a falls"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=114}}. A number of scholars have written about Hemingway's hair fetishes and I won't rehearse them here; however, the impact of hair on Frederick's sexual responses is evident in a scene where he watches Catherine having her hair done in a beauty salon.{{efn |A key text is Carl Eby's ''Hemingway's Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood.'' Binghamton: SUNY Press, 1999.}} While most men would be annoyed having to wait while a woman gets her hair curled, Frederic finds it "exciting to watch." He finds it so arousing that his "voice was a little thick from being excited"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=292}}. In Hemingway, we must read between the lines and what Hemingway does not make explicit is exactly what the woman who runs the salon sees. But it is obvious that she notices something out of the ordinary and the reader can readily interpret that there must have been evidence of arousal as the salon owner is moved to comment, "Monsieur was very interested. Were you not, monsieur?"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=293}}. This is followed by a smile, further confirmation that the owner saw something that is not made explicit for the reader. If further {{pg |292|293}}

corroboration of the importance of hair as trigger in Hemingway's autoerotic arsenal is needed, this scene is ample proof.

In still another scene, the sexual connotations of hair are coupled with Catherine's desire to merge with Frederick. She suggests that he grow his hair longer and that she cut hers so "we'd be just alike only one of us blonde and one of us dark"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=299}}. Though he tells her he likes her hair as it is and does not want her to cut it, she argues for the change so that they would both be alike. "Oh, darling, I want you so much I want to be you too" is the language Hemingway gives her, to which Frederick, making my argument, responds: "You are. We're the same one"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=299}}. Reading the strong autoerotic nature of this recreation of Hemingway's first serious love affair, it is obvious that they are one and the one is Hemingway, indulging his fantasy. Furthermore, Catherine adds, " I don't live at all when I'm not with you," as the Catherine character has no existence outside of Hemingway's self indulgence{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=300}}.

Hemingway, as a novelist, has great latitude in his creation of characters. he can use real-life models and situations, and as a fiction writer recreate persons and places to fit his plot and interpretation. Judith Wilt, in explaining the romantic appeal of Ayn Rand's writing, theorizes that a particular allure for the romantic writer of creating a fantasy is being allowed to live in it while one is creating it{{sfn|Wilt|1999 |pages=173-74}}. Hemingway's romantic fantasy operates in a similar vein. While ''A Farewell to Arms'' can be lauded for its hard-hitting realism, it is also Romance with a capital R. Hemingway can recreate his love affair with Agnes Von Kurowsky to his liking and live in it while he is creating it. All the elements are there, a love story that prefigures Erich Segal's ''Love Story'' and a war story Hollywood could not resist making and remaking.{{efn |The first film version was in 1932, starring Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes, directed by Frank Borzage. In 1957 Charles Vidor directed Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones. Even a scholarly book on the subject inspired a Hollywood production. Richard Attenborough's ''In Love and War'' was inspired by James Nagel and Henry S. Villard's ''Hemingway in Love and War.''}} Furthermore, Wilt suggests, if a writer creates a fantasy and can live in it while writing, it is Romance, and if the writer can live in it after having created it, it is philosophy, creating the "sublime equipoise"{{sfn|Wilt|1999 |pages=173-74}}. Hemingway has created the "sublime equipoise" in ''A Farewell To Arms''. The strong stoical contents cushion the fantasy, lifted it beyond the realm of pure autoeroticism. At the same time Hemingway has a philosophical rationalization for killing the "one who left him." Catherine cannot live in the theoretical structural design because she must fulfill Frederick's philosophy of the "biological trap." She is the one who is caught off base, the brave one who may have died many times before her death, but she barely mentions it. Hemingway can recreate his war experiences and love affair, but can, at the same {{pg |293|294}}
time, assuage his wounded pride at having been left by Agnes in the creation of a Catherine who is devoted unto death.{{efn |Hemingway's masterful ability to amalgamate his experience, historical data, and fiction are nowhere more in evidence than in the retreat from Caporetto scenes of ''A Farewell to Arms''{{sfn |Reynolds |1976 |pages=105-180}}}}

The reader must construct a mental image of Hemingway's dream girl from narrator's description of a "quite tall," blonde with "tawny skin and grey eyes" who Frederick thinks is "very beautiful"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=18}}. Mailer's fantasy woman poses no such problem, for her image is world-famous and she probably served and may well still do duty as an instrument for millions of men in autoerotic contexts. She is so well known that Mailer needs only her first name for the title of his biography. But, in the event that the reader does not have a strong imagination, Mailer is nothing if not generous in that he supplies the visual as well as the verbal tools to implement the fantasy.{{efn |I am not unmindful of the fact that the book began with Lawrence Schiller's photographs and Mailer's participation grew as he warmed to the subject. However, I would contend that this strengthens my argument.}} Marilyn's life-size face, mouth slightly open, eyes in a sleepily half-open position, stares out from the cover, invitingly. Inside there are numerous photos, pictures taken from the time she was an unknown starlet, throughout her career and from her last photo-shoot. In many of them she is posed naked-Marilyn stretched out on red satin, tangled in white sheets, and climbing out of a swimming pool, one leg swung up so that her genital area is probably spread wide where the mind's eye but not the camera can venture.

Mailer gives permission for a wide latitude of readings by calling his work a novel biography, "a ''species'' of novel ready o play by the rules of biography"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=20}}. Quoting Virginia Woolf to the effect that a biography may capture six or seven of a person's selves, where there may be as many as a thousand in the individual's reality, Mailer rationalizes his portrayal. And in his argument that none of the extant biographies of the time had provided a complete and satisfactory portrayal, it is worth nothing that he references Carlos Baker's biography of Hemingway{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |pages=18-20}}. Mailer underlines his qualification to accomplish this "novel" of Marilyn Monroe by arguing that as a literary man he is best equipped to achieve an imaginative act of appropriation by the exercise of his skill. Appropriation is the telling word here, helping to make my argument about his use of her for his autoerotic fantasy.

That Mailer considers Marilyn an instrument for sexual flights of the imagination is evidenced by the initial images he uses to describe her. In the first paragraph of his book he likens her to a violin, calling her "a very Stradivarius of sex." Continuing the violin metaphor he rhapsodizes, "the sugar of sex came up from her like a resonance of sound in the clearest grain of a violin"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=15}}. Moreover, for those male readers who might shrink from the {{pg |294|295}}
possibility of intercourse with this larger than life icon of sexual appeal, he promises that "even the most mediocre musician would relax his lack of art in the dissolving magic of her violin"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=15}}. "Come," his sub-text reads, "any and all, from the sex maven like me to the pimply faced nerd, all are welcome to use this book for their masturbatory stimulation tool. Marilyn is our instrument." In addition, he saw his writing about her as an instrument for erotic attraction, a kind of aphrodisiac. In his inscription of the book to Barbara Davis (Norris Church Mailer) early in their relationship, he confirms that he "he knew when I wrote this book that someone I had not yet met would read it and be with me"{{sfn |Mailer|2010|p=89}}.

The facts or factoids, as Mailer calls them, about Norma Jean/Marilyn are mostly culled from Fred Lawrence Guiles, with regular citations from Maurice Zolotow; here and there he does quote from Diane Trilling and Norman Rosten. Mailer is acutely conscious of the impossibility of knowing the "truth" and does not pretend that he will arrive at it, only as Rollyson explains, an attempt to create a whole person, "while a the same time conceding that the search for wholeness is elusive and problematical"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=49}}. For my purposes here, the focus will be those instances in the narrative when Mailer is indulgin his sexual fantasies.{{efn |To that end I will avoid discussion of Mailer's interesting takes on her search for a true self, issues of how her personality was molded by the traumas and privations of her childhood, her survival techniques.}} In one such instance he imagines a studio executive questioning Marilyn about the nude calendar pose. The questions are salaciously pointed: "Did you spread your legs?"...Is your asshole showing?...Any animals in it with you?"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=92}}.

If, as many reviewers complain, Mailer's ''Marilyn'' is nothing but a thinly disguised commercial maneuver, I would argue that it is not as Robert D. Callahan opines, "wasting square miles of forest in a Brobdingnagian mercantile enterprise"{{sfn |Callahan |1974 |p=50}}. A cursory reading reveals how much fun and personal satisfaction Mailer is getting as he lives in his fantasy. And why shouldn't a writer be allowed his autoerotic daydreams? On the distaff side are those like the ''Booklist'' reviewer who likens Mailer's appropriation to feeding on dead flesh and is disgusted by his "self-satisfied prose" and the reduction of the woman to a "figment in Mailer's stylishly lurid dreams"{{sfn |Booklist |1973 |p=363}}. Hugh Leonard's view is harsher and lends further support to my thesis that Mailer is using Marilyn for his autoerotic pleasure. Leonard detests the book and calls it "an exercise in necrophilia"{{sfn |Leonard |1974 |p=80}}.

Whereas Hemingway sets time limits to his autoerotic fantasy as he is reinventing a particular time period in his life, Mailer gives his wide scope. His being a biography of the whole life of a woman he never met, he can {{pg |295|296}}
give his imagination full range to satisfy any number of his fantasies by recalling scenes from a wide array of Marilyn's sexual experiences, lovers, husbands, and final days. As early as in his description of the sixteen-year-old bride, Mailer indulges his sexual visualizing: "We close our eyes, and see the movement of her hips"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=46}}. He interrupts the presentation of facts to gratify his libidinous daydream, "Her wedding peels off like a stripper kicking a gown""{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=46}} Writing about her activities and weight training, he cannot resist picturing how "[h]er plumped breasts bounce like manifests of the great here!""{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=49}}ler theorizes that Jim Dougherty, her first husband, was feeling threatened by Marilyn's maturing sexuality, "feeling the natural discomfort of any man when his prize is capable of getting him into murderous fights""{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=50}}.

Throughout the text, Mailer makes little attempt to disguise the autoerotic nature of his enterprise. Acknowledging the nature of his imaginings, he writes: "It is not too great a demand on our ''voyeurism'' (emphasis mine) to see a young husband in bed"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=53}}. Inviting the reader along on this escapade of indulgence, he assures us that "we may as well enjoy one more situation where we can have no certainty""{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=60}}. His sentences may begin with a "why not assume" or, after a rhapsodic stint of theorizing about how a lie becomes a script for an actor and whether or not Marilyn was telling the truth to one of her early lovers, or just acting a script, acknowledges: "Let us return then to the ''little'' (emphasis mine) of which we can be certain""{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=58}}.

In his musings about writing, Mailer acknowledges his understanding of the connection between creation and autoeroticism. In another instance he likens writing to psychic excretion"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |title=The Spooky Art |p=140}}. Paradoxically, he also inveighs against masturbation, because he claims the "ultimate direction of masturbation always has to be insanity" {{sfn |Mailer |1973 |title=The Spooky Art |p=137}}. Nonetheless, it is difficult to take Mailer at his word, for if he rationalizes his stance that masturbation is bad because "everything that's beautiful and good in one goes up the hand"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |title=The Spooky Art |p=137}}, he seems not to mind if it is someone else's hand. Carole Mallory writes of his taking her to a pornographic movie, watching the screen mesmerized and then reaching for her to put in his unzipped pants{{sfn |Mallory |2010 |p=171}}. She comments on her awareness that at that moment she is nothing but an object for his satisfaction.

In one area of the presentation of autoerotic fantasy, at least the published ones, Mailer has considerable advantage over Hemingway. Although he may have fought for the right to use more realistic language, Hemingway wrote {{pg |296|297}}

in an era of strict censorship, coming up with his own clever way of conveying his meaning while still abiding by the strictures of publishing in his day. Since he could not print the obscenity and since much of what his peasant characters in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' say is unprintable, Hemingway devised the cunning stratagem of writing "obscenity" or "unprintable" whenever one of his characters uses a forbidden word. thus his gypsies utter such oddities as "I obscenity in the milk of thy mother" or go "unprint thyself." Only when he has the freedom of writing in Spanish can Hemingway's characters curse openly. Thus Robert Jordan swears at the gypsy, "You ''hijo de la gran puta''!" which can be loosely translated "son of the great whore," equivalent to son of a bitch{{sfn |Hemingway|2003b|p=274}}. When Jordan and Pilar hear the planes attacking El Sordo's enclave, Pilar asks Jordan if she thinks Sordo is ''jodido''{{sfn |Hemingway|2003b|p=298}}. Hemingway could not have used "fucked," an English equivalent. Hemingway developed this two-prolonged method of surmounting he censorship challenge for his Spanish Civil War book, but, maybe because his characters are both English speakers, or maybe because the context is so different, his language in this earlier book remains within the bounds of propriety in most instances. There is the moment when Frederick returns from the hospital in Milan and Rinaldi is teasing him, offering to take out his liver and replace it with a good Italian liver. Frederick responds, "Go something yourself"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=169}}, which while it has the same obvious connotation is not nearly as powerful as "Go obscenity yourself."

In the Caporetto retreat, after they have picked up the two young girls, Hemingway again depends on what is not printed, but suggested by the blank line: _____________. Aymo tries to reassure one, saying "Don't worry...No danger of ____________,"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=196}}. In case the reader should miss the implication of the blank, Frederick tells us that Aymo used the vulgar word.

Mailer began his writing career when such strictures were still in place and following in Hemingway's footsteps, he developed his own strategy for conveying the language of the American fighting man in the ''The Naked and the Dead''. Since he could not use the four-letter word that is the mainstay of a soldier's vocabulary, he invented a three-letter word as a substitute. His fighting men use "fug," phonetically similar, but able to pass the censor's inspection. The civil rights movements of the 60s and early 70s also liberated language and by the time he was writing ''Marilyn'',Mailer had wide latitude not only about what he could write, but also in the language he could use to write about it. Gone was the constriction f having to use fug instead of fuck.{{pg |297|298}}
Thus, in describing the allure of Marilyn's publicity stills, Mailer explains, that for a man looking at the pictures it is as if she is whispering, "You can fuck me if you're lucky"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=91}}. In the crudest language he is free to write derisively about Marilyn's having been reputed to be Schenek's or Hyde's girl first; therefore bedding her was not any "glory" to Darryl Zanuck's "sausage." he explains that Zanuck had the reputation of stamping female actresses by putting "his own meat into a star's meat"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=90}}. Mailer can unreservedly write about blowjobs, anal sex, and use any and all obscenities. Hemingway's sexual iceberg is very much seven-eighths under water. When Rinaldi asks Frederick, if he is in love and married, he expresses sympathy, asking "Is she good to you?" When Frederick's positive response comes too easily, Rinaldi clarifies, using a euphemism, "I mean is she good to you practically speaking?"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=169}}. We know this is a sexual euphemism because Frederick tells Rinaldi to "shut up." Rather than being explicit, Rinaldi asks, “Does she ——?”{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=169}}. Again, Hemingway does not fill in the blank and we can only surmise from Frederick's angry response that he is asking sexually explicit questions. In the exchange that follows, Rinaldi claims not to have any sacred objects, so Frederick asks, "I can say this about your mother and that about your sister?" {{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=170}}. Once more Hemingway avoids the actual language and evades the censors. Mailer, on the other hand, is so liberated from any restraints to his fantasies and/or language that he even creates his own obscenity. In trying to find a way to describe how physically appealing Monroe looked during the time she was married to Joe Dimaggio, Mailer searches for the appropriate metaphor or adjective. First he writes, "She looks fed on sexual candy"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=102}}. However, that does not satisfy him. Therefore he decides to "examine a verb through its adverb" and resorts to creating the word "fucky" to describe the sexual energy she was emitting. No, he proclaims, never again "will she appear so fucky"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=102}}.

In what each man is allowed or allows himself to write of his autoerotic fantasy, their styles could not be more opposite. Hemingway is controlled, using few adjectives; there are no specific descriptions of either the genitalia or the sex act itself. It would not be until ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' that he created the "earth moved" metaphor to describe orgasm{{sfn |Hemingway|2003b|p=174}}.{{efn |It should be noted that the "earth moved" metaphor has maintained a place in the cultural lexicon.}} Mailer, ''au contraire'', indulges in florid flights of linguistic high jinks. Everything is explicit. He repeats an apocryphal story about Marilyn's comment when she finally signed a contract with the studio: "Well, that's the last cock I suck" {{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=78}} He envisions some of her modeling photos as suggesting, "Take me from"
{{pg |298|299}}
behind"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=79}}. He is even detailed about her gynecological history, speculating on painful periods, many abortions, and whether or not she used a diaphragm{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |pages=171-3}}.

It should be noted at this juncture that if both men created desirable and docile fantasy women for their erotic fantasies, their writing is not without their opposites, bitch women, destroyers of male potency, not the women of dreams, but those who inhabit their fictional nightmares. Hemingway's Margot Macomber is a bitch goddess of the first order, turning her husband, the great American boy-man into a whining cuckold before she finally does away with him altogether with the eponymous named Mannlicher rifle.{{efn |I am not unaware of the debate about whether or not Margot killed her husband on purpose or accidentally. For purposes of this study I will take my cue from Hemingway's comment that he saw her as "a bitch for the full course." I developed the characterization more fully in ''The Indestructible Woman in Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck'',{{sfn |Gladstein |1986 |pages=62-64}}.
}} Mailer's consummate bitch is the Jewess of "The Time of Her Time," who if she doesn't turn him into a boy-man, accuses him of being a man who loves boys when she categorizes him as a latent homosexual{{sfn |Mailer |1959 |title=The Time of Her Time |pages=503}}. But that is another article.

A philosopher colleague and I were once discoursing on the differences between men and women in their choices of characteristics for an ideal fantasy partner.{{efn |David Hall and I created and team-taught a course in Sexuality at the University of Texas at El Paso. He is the author of, among other books, ''Eros and Irony''.}} Besides the physical and sexual qualities Hall listed, he added that a major component of the ideal fantasy woman's appeal is annoying because the man has to deal with her once his satisfaction has been achieved; she may demand consideration and attention from him. A fantasy woman is all satisfaction and no responsibility. For Hemingway and Mailer, the ultimate disappearance is achieved. They can creatively enjoy their fantasy women with no possibility of the women becoming demanding, because the women deceased, one done away in fiction, the other dead in real life. Hemingway wrote a number of possible endings for ''A Farewell to Arms''. In one both Catherine and the baby survive. In another Catherine survives, but the baby does not; in another the survives but Catherine doesn't. His choice, artistically and autoerotically gratifying is to free Frederick of all responsibility, leaving him with memories of a compliant, devoted Catherine who is on call for instant replay in his memory. Whatever the aesthetic justifications, Hemingway did choose to tell the story as Frederick's recreation of the past. Catherine is dead when he begins the story, but their lovemaking is resurrected at his choice. Let me add here that Agnes von Kurowsky, Hemingway's Catherine model, was far from dead when he rewrote their history. She lived a long full life and seems never to have regretted his loss. Like Frederick's Catherine who is dead before his narration

{{pg |299|300}}
begins, so Mailer's Marilyn is likewise a memory, having been dead a decade when Mailer's rapturous portrait is published.

Sexologists tell us that most human beings fantasies when they are having sexual relations. At sperm banks male clients are given pornographic materials to help them achieve their goal. Writers have a power that most of us do not. They can not only create their own sexual fantasy to please themselves, but they can also sell it to us. My argument here is that on one level that is exactly what Hemingway and Mailer do.

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

==Citations==
{{reflist}}

==Work Cited==
{{Refbegin |indent=1 |20em}}

*{{cite AV media |people= Allen, Woody (director), Perf. Allen,Woody (actor), Keaton,Diane (actress)|date=1977 |title=Anne Hall|publisher=United Artists |work=film |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |last=Calisher |first= Hortense |date=February 1970 |title= No Important Woman Writer|magazine=''Mademoiselle'' |pp=188+ |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |last=Callahan|first=Robert D. |date=January 1974 |title= Rev. of ''Marilyn'' |magazine=''West Coast Review'' |pages=50-51 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Fetterley |first=Judith |date=1978 |title=The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction |location=Bloomington|publisher=U of Indiana P |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Gladstein |first= Mimi Reisel |date=1986 |title= The Indestructible Woman in Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck |location=Ann Arbor|publisher= UMI Research Press |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003a |title=A Farewell to Arms |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=2003b |title=For Whom the Bell Tolls|location=New York |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|editor-last1 =Vigia
|editor-first1=Finca |date=2003c |title=The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber |script-title=The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=5-28 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|editor-last1 =Vigia
|editor-first1=Finca |date=2003d |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro |script-title=The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=39-56 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |last=Leonard |first=Hugh |date=1974 |title=At the Flicks Again |script-title=Rev. of Marilyn by Norman Mailer |magazine=Books and Bookmen |series=19.7 |pages=80-82 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |last=MacCannell |first=Dean |date=1987 |title=Marilyn Monroe Was Not a Man |script-title= Rev. of ''Marilyn'', by Norman Mailer, ''MarilynNorma Jeane'', by Gloria Steinem, ''Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe'', by Anthony Summers, and ''Marilyn in Art'', by Roger G. Taylor |magazine=Diacritics |series=17.2 |pages=114-127|ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1973 |title=Marilyn |location=New York |publisher=Grossett & Dunlap |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman|author-mask=1|date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart and Company, Inc. |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |last2=Hemingway |first2=Gregory |date=1976 |title=Papa: A Personal Memoir |location=Boston |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |pages=xi-xiii |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=2003 |title=The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |script-title=The Time of Her Time |location=New York |publisher=G.P. Putnam's Sons |pages=478-503 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norris Church |date=2010 |title=A Ticket to the Circus |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mallory |first=Carole |date=2010 |title=Loving Mailer |location=Beverly Hills |publisher=Phoenix Books |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Meyers |first=Jeffrey |date=1999 |title=Hemingway: A Biography |location=Cambridge |publisher=Da Capo Press |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Millett |first=Kate |date=1969 |title=Sexual Politics |location=Urbana |publisher=U of Illinois P |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |last=Newman |first=Judith |date= April 2010 |title=A Norman Life |via=Rev. of A Ticket to the Circus by Norris Church Mailer |magazine=O, The Oprah Magazine |p=128 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |title=Rev. of ''Marilyn'', by Norman Mailer |date=1973 |magazine=Booklist |series=70.7|p=363 |ref={{harvid|Booklist|1973}}}}

*{{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1976 |title=Hemingway's First War |location=Princeton |publisher= Princeton UP |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Rollyson, Jr. |first=Carl E. |date=1991 |title=The Lives of Norman Mailer |location=New York|publisher=Paragon House |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |last=Rollyson, Jr. |first=Carl E.|author-mask=1 |date=1978 |title=Marilyn: Mailer's Novel Biography|magazine=Biography |series=1.4 |pages=49-67 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite journal |last=Spanier |first=Sandra Whipple |date=1990 |title=Hemingway's Unknown Soldier: Catherine Barkley, the Critics, and the Great War|pages=75-108 |editor-last1=Donladson |editor-first1=Scott |publisher=Cambridge: Cambridge UP |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Schwenger |first=Peter |date=1984 |title=Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth Century Literature |url=https://www.routledge.com/Phallic-Critiques-Routledge-Revivals-Masculinity-and-Twentieth-Century-Literature/Schwenger/p/book/9781138830196 |location=London|publisher=Routledge and Kegan Paul |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Tharp |first=Willard |date=1960 |title=American Writing in the Twentieth Century |location=Cambridge|publisher=Harvard UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite journal |last=Wilt |first= Judith |title= "The Romances of Ayn Rand." |url=https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-01830-5.html |journal=Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand |date=1999 |pages=173-198 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite journal |last=Wyrick |first=Jean |title=Fantasy as Symbol: Another Look at Hemingway's Catherine |journal=Massachusetts Studies in English |series=4.2 |date=1973 |pages=42-47 |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman

2025-04-09T02:46:54Z

JKilchenmann: more fixes

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}{{Byline|last=Gladstein|first=Mimi Reisel|abstract=Hemingway and Mailer had many similarities. In the cases of Catherine Barkley for Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe for Mailer, both writers allowed themselves for imaginative privileges that they did not have in life. Both characterizations are a certain kind of dream fantasy woman, a projection of autoerotic impulses. Whereas life may not have afforded either Hemingway or Mailer the realization of some of their fantasies, as authors, they can,to borrow a phrase from Seinfeld,be “masters of their own domain.”|url=...}}
{{Working}} 
{{dc|dc=C|HARACTERIZATIONS OF THE HEMINGWAY/MAILER CONNECTION ARE MANY.}} Hortense Calisher once quipped that Norman mailer was one of those writers who too early got caught up in Hemingway's jockstrap.{{sfn|Wilt|1999 |p=188}}{{efn|This was in the context of a review of the lack of women writers in the cannon.}} For Peter Schwenger, Hemingway and Mailer are catalogued as writers of the School of Virility{{sfn |Schwenger |1984}}{{efn|Swenger's focus is their fascination with the bullfight.}}. Jeffrey Meyers names Mailer as Hemingway's "most important disciple" in what he identifies as the "hardboiled" school of writers{{sfn |Meyers |1999}}{{efn|Myers writes that"Mailer was obsessed with Hemingway, fastened onto the son after he had failed to meet the father"{{sfn |Meyers |1999 |p=570}}}}. Indeed, a linking of the two is almost a cliche by this time, the younger Mailer referencing Hemingway often, not only in interviews, but also in his writing. One of mailer's biographers, Carl Rollyson, contends that mailer saw Hemingway as a role model in that he "had shown how a writer could become his own man"{{sfn |Rollyson, Jr. |1991}}. When Gregory Hemingway wrote his remembrance of his father, ''Papa: A Personal Memoir'', mailer wrote the Preface. The connections are numerous and varied. In another sense the relationship could be characterized as an ongoing ''mano a mano'', almost Oedipal contest, as the younger writer attempted to emulate and outdo the master in myriad manners; the creation f a larger-than life celebrity persona, drinking, brawling, and challenging peers to boxing matches both literal and figuratve. Both had war experiences when young and both used those experiences to feed their fiction. Hemingway wrote the quintessential World War I novel, ''A Farewell to Arms''; Mailer's ''The Naked and the Dead'' occupies a similar status as the definitive war novel of World War II. Both married multiple times, Mailer beating Hemingway by two wives. Both became favorite whipping boys for feminist critics, condemned for their misogynistic portrayals of {{pg |288|289}}
women and chauvinistic notions about relationships between the sexes. Kate Millett's ''Sexual Politics'' devotes a chapter to Mailer, whom she characterizes as "a prisoner of the virility cult"{{sfn |Millett | 1969}}, one who sees sex as war and war as sexual. Judith Fetterley's ''The Resisting Reader: a Feminist Approach to American Fiction'' includes chapters on both Hemingway and Mailer. And while I do not disagree with much of the criticism, in my appreciation for the major talents of these two writers I must invoke Norris Church Mailer, who comments on the tensions of living with Mailer: {{cquote|"Part of him was this wonderful, sweet, intelligent, terrific, funny guy that I was in love with. And another part, I just couldn't stand."{{sfn |Newman | 2010}}}} It is a tension applicable to my situation as a professor of literature, one who recognizes and teaches the brilliance of these men as writers, while never loath to point out some of the less than savory aspects of their personalities and artistic creations.
In keeping with that perspective of appreciating the talents while acknowledging alternative readings, this essay identifies another similarity in the writings of Hemingway and Mailer, one that perhaps springs from an analogous impulse of these two self-absorbed and often ego-maniacal writers-their creation of a certain kind of dream fantasy woman, a projection of autoerotic impulses, by which they allow themselves, imaginatively, privileges that they did not have in life. In their fiction, they create a fulfillment that privileges male satisfaction; man is the subject, woman an object, a means to that end. Whereas life may not have afforded them realization of certain of their fantasies, they can, to borrow a phrase from Seinfeld, be "masters of their own domain" in writing or following from the egocentric nature of the two, they can accomplish in their writings a fantasy fulfillment, for as Woody Allen quips in ''Annie Hall'': "Don't knock masturbation: it's sex with someone I love"{{efn |Thanks to my colleague Ezra Cappell for reminding of this scene.}} my hypothesis is validated in ''The Spooky Art'' where Mailer makes the connection explicit, noting that "[t]he act of writing is so close to the psychic character of masturbation that if we are going to discuss the world of the writer, then we ought to deal with this as well"{{sfn |Mailer |2003}}.

The cases in point for this study are Catherine Barkley for Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe for Mailer.{{efn |A longer study could survey a number of their texts interpolating the auto-erotic construction of others of these writers' fantasy women, but for this shorter study, the primary focus will be on one character for each.}} These choices may strike some as an odd pairing, perhaps inappropriate. After all, one is a fictional character and the other was a real woman. Not withstanding that demurrer, in terms of the authors' autoerotic uses of these women, the comparison is justified. Hemingway took the real Agnes Von Kurowsky, the woman who, in the words of Harry, his alter-ego writer of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," was "the first one,{{pg |289|290}}
the one who left him" and formed a fictional daydream who could never get away{{sfn|Hemingway|2003d|p=48}}. Various members of Hemingway's family and biographers have written of the traumatic effect on him of Kurowsky's "Dear Ernest" letter. But, while the actual woman may have gotten away in his life, the author captures her forever on the pages of his daydream projection in ''A Farewell to Arms'' On the other hand, Marilyn Monroe was a real woman, but one who recreated herself as a fictional character, a characterization Mailer validates: "Marilyn had been polishing her fables for years"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=18}}. Just as Agnes Von Jurowsky is the one who left Hemingway, who metaphorically got away, Marilyn is one who got away from Mailer, as he was never invited to meet her when she and Arthur Miller were his neighbors in Connecticut. In his review of the Marilyn biography, Dean MacCannell theorizes that "Mailer is burned up about this, fantasizing that Miller did not have him over out of fear that he would steal Marilyn"{{sfn |MacCannell |1987}}. It is a view supported by Mailer, who acknowledges in his introductory chapter that " in all his vanity he thought on one was so well suited to ring out the best in her as himself, a conceit which fifty million other men may also have held"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |pages=19-20}}. However, as a skilled writer the older Mailer can rectify the missed opportunity. What did not happen in real life can be played over and over in the reel life of his fictional fantasy.{{efn |As a side note, Norris Church Mailer makes an observation about the fantasy connection between Hemingway and Marilyn for Norman Mailer. when they visit the finca in Cuba, she writes: "I was a little sad, seeing Norman poking about in Hemingway's house, wondering what they might have said to each other if they had indeed ever met. Kind of like the phantom affair he might have had with Marilyn Monroe, if they had ever met, which they didn't"{{sfn |Mailer |2010 |p=305}}}}

Generations of critics have analyzed and dissected the character of Catherine Barkley.{{efn |Sandra Whipple Spanier catalogs
them in "Hemingway's Unknown Soldier: Catherine Barkley, the Critics, and the Great War."}} Their conclusions run the spectrum from the " Catherine is the real hero" minions to those who see Hemingway's female characters as "a convenience and a technique to turn a monologue into a dialogue" contingent{{sfn |Tharp |1960 |p=191}}. The latter diagnosis is supportive of my hypothesis that in his creation of Catherine Barkley, Hemingway in addition to turning his monologue into a dialogue, creates an ideal masturbatory fantasy, a technique to allow him to tell himself what he wants to hear; he gets both his say and the opportunity to put satisfactory words into her mouth. Hemingway, as writer, in the assertive role of creation, uses the phallic pen to fulfill his erotic fantasies as his surrogate Frederick lies flat on his back and is ministered to by the "fresh," "young," and "beautiful" Catherine.

Frederick's selfish behavior toward Catherine enhances the connotations of autoeroticism; he is not concerned that she has work to do or may be tired, his satisfaction is all that matters. "Come back to bed" he tells her when she says she has charts to fill, work to do. Although she is on duty the day Doctor Valentini visits him, Frederick implores, "And can you be on night {{pg |290|291}}
duty tonight?" Like the selfish boy that he is, he cajoles, "You don't really love me or you'd come back again"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=102}}. The autoerotic state is one of complete self-absorption and Frederick is nothing if not totally self-centered. The narrator (Frederick after the fact) comments on how popular Catherine is with the other nurses "because she would do night duty indefinitely"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=108}}, and she does it indefinitely because of Frederick's demands.

Hemingway, when he distances himself as author, is aware of Frederick's selfishness and to his credit creates a scene where Ferguson reminds him of it. "You might give her just a little rest," she suggests, although doubtful that he will{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=109}}. She even reminds him that while he is sleeping, Catherine, after having fulfilled his sexual needs, is still working. Still, lest reality intrude too much on this remonstrance, there is an element of boasting involved; the implication is that he is so potent and insatiable that Catherine never gets to rest. Hemingway does end the scene with Miss Gage coming into the room, having a drink with Frederick and assuring him no less than four times in the space of one page, "I'm your friend," thus providing a modicum of absolution{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=110}}. In the end the three nights that Catherine is off duty serve only to add further piquancy to the resumption of their lovemaking and can be read as an Epicurean enhancement to the pure Hedonism of Frederick's self-indulgence. Absence acts to increase the appetite. Holding off is just another way to add potency to the reunion.

Hemingway creates Catherine/Agnes as compliant, docile, and anxious to please. "I'll say just what you wish and I'll do what you wish," says the fantasy woman{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=105}}. It is hard to imagine that the twenty-six year old veteran nurse would speak to the nineteen-year-old "kid," as she called him in such a servile manner.{{efn |Jean Wyrick, exploring Catherine's credibility as a twentieth-century woman, observes: "Few women, if any, live only to serve, their wish to deny their own personalities and to assume those of their lovers"{{sfn |Wyrick |1973 | p=43}}.}} Then, having given him an enema and prepared him for surgery, she is summoned back to his bed: "You see," she said. "I do anything you want." The most telling exchange in this scene is when she says: "I want what you want. There isn't any me any more. Just what you want"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=106}}. And, indeed there isn't any woman there, just what the Hemingway's surrogate figure wants. The reality of a masturbatory fantasy is a lone individual, doing just what he wants. His only limitations are those of his imagination.

To further enhance the argument that, at one level of this novel, Hemingway is engaging in an autoerotic fantasy, there is Catherine's insistence that she does not exist as a separate entity. "There isn't any me. I'm you," she insists. "Don't make up a separate me"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=115}}. The oneness of the two is reinforced by Ferguson, "You're two of the same thing," she proclaims, citing {{pg |291|292}}
in particular that they both have no shame and no honor and are equally sneaky{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=247}}. Of course, like the good little autoerotic fantasy that she is, Catherine often assures Frederick of her lack of any will separate from his: "I'll go any place any time you wish," which of course she will, since as a creation in Frederick's memory and Hemingway's fantasy, she has no autonomy outside of their needs and minds{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=252}}.

In the published photos of Agnes Von Kurowsky during her time in Italy, her hair is very neatly situated under her nurse's cap, so it is difficult to know what it looked like unconfined. In Hemingway's fantasy, however, he makes full use of the erotic resonance of woman's hair in the sexual encounter, hair being a traditional and timeworn symbol of female sexuality. It is not coincidental that Brett Ashley, one of Hemingway's most castrating women, has short hair, hair that her young love Pedro Romero wants her to grow so she will be more womanly.

Catherine's hair is a key component of her attractiveness for him: "She had wonderfully beautiful hair and I would lie sometimes and watch her twisting it up in the light"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=114}}. There is a voyeuristic quality to his description of these scenes: "I watched her brushing her hair, holding her head so the weight of her hair all came on one side"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=258}}. Watching her brush with the light shining on her hair, he remarks that the sight makes him feel faint. In a particularly sensual image, Frederick remembers taking the pins out of her hair so that it cascades down around the two of them, making him feel as if they are either "inside a tent or behind a falls"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=114}}. A number of scholars have written about Hemingway's hair fetishes and I won't rehearse them here; however, the impact of hair on Frederick's sexual responses is evident in a scene where he watches Catherine having her hair done in a beauty salon.{{efn |A key text is Carl Eby's ''Hemingway's Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood.'' Binghamton: SUNY Press, 1999.}} While most men would be annoyed having to wait while a woman gets her hair curled, Frederic finds it "exciting to watch." He finds it so arousing that his "voice was a little thick from being excited"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=292}}. In Hemingway, we must read between the lines and what Hemingway does not make explicit is exactly what the woman who runs the salon sees. But it is obvious that she notices something out of the ordinary and the reader can readily interpret that there must have been evidence of arousal as the salon owner is moved to comment, "Monsieur was very interested. Were you not, monsieur?"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=293}}. This is followed by a smile, further confirmation that the owner saw something that is not made explicit for the reader. If further {{pg |292|293}}

corroboration of the importance of hair as trigger in Hemingway's autoerotic arsenal is needed, this scene is ample proof.

In still another scene, the sexual connotations of hair are coupled with Catherine's desire to merge with Frederick. She suggests that he grow his hair longer and that she cut hers so "we'd be just alike only one of us blonde and one of us dark"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=299}}. Though he tells her he likes her hair as it is and does not want her to cut it, she argues for the change so that they would both be alike. "Oh, darling, I want you so much I want to be you too" is the language Hemingway gives her, to which Frederick, making my argument, responds: "You are. We're the same one"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=299}}. Reading the strong autoerotic nature of this recreation of Hemingway's first serious love affair, it is obvious that they are one and the one is Hemingway, indulging his fantasy. Furthermore, Catherine adds, " I don't live at all when I'm not with you," as the Catherine character has no existence outside of Hemingway's self indulgence{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=300}}.

Hemingway, as a novelist, has great latitude in his creation of characters. he can use real-life models and situations, and as a fiction writer recreate persons and places to fit his plot and interpretation. Judith Wilt, in explaining the romantic appeal of Ayn Rand's writing, theorizes that a particular allure for the romantic writer of creating a fantasy is being allowed to live in it while one is creating it{{sfn|Wilt|1999 |pages=173-74}}. Hemingway's romantic fantasy operates in a similar vein. While ''A Farewell to Arms'' can be lauded for its hard-hitting realism, it is also Romance with a capital R. Hemingway can recreate his love affair with Agnes Von Kurowsky to his liking and live in it while he is creating it. All the elements are there, a love story that prefigures Erich Segal's ''Love Story'' and a war story Hollywood could not resist making and remaking.{{efn |The first film version was in 1932, starring Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes, directed by Frank Borzage. In 1957 Charles Vidor directed Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones. Even a scholarly book on the subject inspired a Hollywood production. Richard Attenborough's ''In Love and War'' was inspired by James Nagel and Henry S. Villard's ''Hemingway in Love and War.''}} Furthermore, Wilt suggests, if a writer creates a fantasy and can live in it while writing, it is Romance, and if the writer can live in it after having created it, it is philosophy, creating the "sublime equipoise"{{sfn|Wilt|1999 |pages=173-74}}. Hemingway has created the "sublime equipoise" in ''A Farewell To Arms''. The strong stoical contents cushion the fantasy, lifted it beyond the realm of pure autoeroticism. At the same time Hemingway has a philosophical rationalization for killing the "one who left him." Catherine cannot live in the theoretical structural design because she must fulfill Frederick's philosophy of the "biological trap." She is the one who is caught off base, the brave one who may have died many times before her death, but she barely mentions it. Hemingway can recreate his war experiences and love affair, but can, at the same {{pg |293|294}}
time, assuage his wounded pride at having been left by Agnes in the creation of a Catherine who is devoted unto death.{{efn |Hemingway's masterful ability to amalgamate his experience, historical data, and fiction are nowhere more in evidence than in the retreat from Caporetto scenes of ''A Farewell to Arms''{{sfn |Reynolds |1976 |pages=105-180}}}}

The reader must construct a mental image of Hemingway's dream girl from narrator's description of a "quite tall," blonde with "tawny skin and grey eyes" who Frederick thinks is "very beautiful"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=18}}. Mailer's fantasy woman poses no such problem, for her image is world-famous and she probably served and may well still do duty as an instrument for millions of men in autoerotic contexts. She is so well known that Mailer needs only her first name for the title of his biography. But, in the event that the reader does not have a strong imagination, Mailer is nothing if not generous in that he supplies the visual as well as the verbal tools to implement the fantasy.{{efn |I am not unmindful of the fact that the book began with Lawrence Schiller's photographs and Mailer's participation grew as he warmed to the subject. However, I would contend that this strengthens my argument.}} Marilyn's life-size face, mouth slightly open, eyes in a sleepily half-open position, stares out from the cover, invitingly. Inside there are numerous photos, pictures taken from the time she was an unknown starlet, throughout her career and from her last photo-shoot. In many of them she is posed naked-Marilyn stretched out on red satin, tangled in white sheets, and climbing out of a swimming pool, one leg swung up so that her genital area is probably spread wide where the mind's eye but not the camera can venture.

Mailer gives permission for a wide latitude of readings by calling his work a novel biography, "a ''species'' of novel ready o play by the rules of biography"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=20}}. Quoting Virginia Woolf to the effect that a biography may capture six or seven of a person's selves, where there may be as many as a thousand in the individual's reality, Mailer rationalizes his portrayal. And in his argument that none of the extant biographies of the time had provided a complete and satisfactory portrayal, it is worth nothing that he references Carlos Baker's biography of Hemingway{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |pages=18-20}}. Mailer underlines his qualification to accomplish this "novel" of Marilyn Monroe by arguing that as a literary man he is best equipped to achieve an imaginative act of appropriation by the exercise of his skill. Appropriation is the telling word here, helping to make my argument about his use of her for his autoerotic fantasy.

That Mailer considers Marilyn an instrument for sexual flights of the imagination is evidenced by the initial images he uses to describe her. In the first paragraph of his book he likens her to a violin, calling her "a very Stradivarius of sex." Continuing the violin metaphor he rhapsodizes, "the sugar of sex came up from her like a resonance of sound in the clearest grain of a violin"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=15}}. Moreover, for those male readers who might shrink from the {{pg |294|295}}
possibility of intercourse with this larger than life icon of sexual appeal, he promises that "even the most mediocre musician would relax his lack of art in the dissolving magic of her violin"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=15}}. "Come," his sub-text reads, "any and all, from the sex maven like me to the pimply faced nerd, all are welcome to use this book for their masturbatory stimulation tool. Marilyn is our instrument." In addition, he saw his writing about her as an instrument for erotic attraction, a kind of aphrodisiac. In his inscription of the book to Barbara Davis (Norris Church Mailer) early in their relationship, he confirms that he "he knew when I wrote this book that someone I had not yet met would read it and be with me"{{sfn |Mailer|2010|p=89}}.

The facts or factoids, as Mailer calls them, about Norma Jean/Marilyn are mostly culled from Fred Lawrence Guiles, with regular citations from Maurice Zolotow; here and there he does quote from Diane Trilling and Norman Rosten. Mailer is acutely conscious of the impossibility of knowing the "truth" and does not pretend that he will arrive at it, only as Rollyson explains, an attempt to create a whole person, "while a the same time conceding that the search for wholeness is elusive and problematical"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=49}}. For my purposes here, the focus will be those instances in the narrative when Mailer is indulgin his sexual fantasies.{{efn |To that end I will avoid discussion of Mailer's interesting takes on her search for a true self, issues of how her personality was molded by the traumas and privations of her childhood, her survival techniques.}} In one such instance he imagines a studio executive questioning Marilyn about the nude calendar pose. The questions are salaciously pointed: "Did you spread your legs?"...Is your asshole showing?...Any animals in it with you?"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=92}}.

If, as many reviewers complain, Mailer's ''Marilyn'' is nothing but a thinly disguised commercial maneuver, I would argue that it is not as Robert D. Callahan opines, "wasting square miles of forest in a Brobdingnagian mercantile enterprise"{{sfn |Callahan |1974 |p=50}}. A cursory reading reveals how much fun and personal satisfaction Mailer is getting as he lives in his fantasy. And why shouldn't a writer be allowed his autoerotic daydreams? On the distaff side are those like the ''Booklist'' reviewer who likens Mailer's appropriation to feeding on dead flesh and is disgusted by his "self-satisfied prose" and the reduction of the woman to a "figment in Mailer's stylishly lurid dreams"{{sfn |Booklist |1973 |p=363}}. Hugh Leonard's view is harsher and lends further support to my thesis that Mailer is using Marilyn for his autoerotic pleasure. Leonard detests the book and calls it "an exercise in necrophilia"{{sfn |Leonard |1974 |p=80}}.

Whereas Hemingway sets time limits to his autoerotic fantasy as he is reinventing a particular time period in his life, Mailer gives his wide scope. His being a biography of the whole life of a woman he never met, he can {{pg |295|296}}
give his imagination full range to satisfy any number of his fantasies by recalling scenes from a wide array of Marilyn's sexual experiences, lovers, husbands, and final days. As early as in his description of the sixteen-year-old bride, Mailer indulges his sexual visualizing: "We close our eyes, and see the movement of her hips"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=46}}. He interrupts the presentation of facts to gratify his libidinous daydream, "Her wedding peels off like a stripper kicking a gown""{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=46}} Writing about her activities and weight training, he cannot resist picturing how "[h]er plumped breasts bounce like manifests of the great here!""{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=49}}ler theorizes that Jim Dougherty, her first husband, was feeling threatened by Marilyn's maturing sexuality, "feeling the natural discomfort of any man when his prize is capable of getting him into murderous fights""{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=50}}.

Throughout the text, Mailer makes little attempt to disguise the autoerotic nature of his enterprise. Acknowledging the nature of his imaginings, he writes: "It is not too great a demand on our ''voyeurism'' (emphasis mine) to see a young husband in bed"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=53}}. Inviting the reader along on this escapade of indulgence, he assures us that "we may as well enjoy one more situation where we can have no certainty""{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=60}}. His sentences may begin with a "why not assume" or, after a rhapsodic stint of theorizing about how a lie becomes a script for an actor and whether or not Marilyn was telling the truth to one of her early lovers, or just acting a script, acknowledges: "Let us return then to the ''little'' (emphasis mine) of which we can be certain""{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=58}}.

In his musings about writing, Mailer acknowledges his understanding of the connection between creation and autoeroticism. In another instance he likens writing to psychic excretion"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |title=The Spooky Art |p=140}}. Paradoxically, he also inveighs against masturbation, because he claims the "ultimate direction of masturbation always has to be insanity" {{sfn |Mailer |1973 |title=The Spooky Art |p=137}}. Nonetheless, it is difficult to take Mailer at his word, for if he rationalizes his stance that masturbation is bad because "everything that's beautiful and good in one goes up the hand"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |title=The Spooky Art |p=137}}, he seems not to mind if it is someone else's hand. Carole Mallory writes of his taking her to a pornographic movie, watching the screen mesmerized and then reaching for her to put in his unzipped pants{{sfn |Mallory |2010 |p=171}}. She comments on her awareness that at that moment she is nothing but an object for his satisfaction.

In one area of the presentation of autoerotic fantasy, at least the published ones, Mailer has considerable advantage over Hemingway. Although he may have fought for the right to use more realistic language, Hemingway wrote {{pg |296|297}}

in an era of strict censorship, coming up with his own clever way of conveying his meaning while still abiding by the strictures of publishing in his day. Since he could not print the obscenity and since much of what his peasant characters in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' say is unprintable, Hemingway devised the cunning stratagem of writing "obscenity" or "unprintable" whenever one of his characters uses a forbidden word. thus his gypsies utter such oddities as "I obscenity in the milk of thy mother" or go "unprint thyself." Only when he has the freedom of writing in Spanish can Hemingway's characters curse openly. Thus Robert Jordan swears at the gypsy, "You ''hijo de la gran puta''!" which can be loosely translated "son of the great whore," equivalent to son of a bitch{{sfn |Hemingway|2003b|p=274}}. When Jordan and Pilar hear the planes attacking El Sordo's enclave, Pilar asks Jordan if she thinks Sordo is ''jodido''{{sfn |Hemingway|2003b|p=298}}. Hemingway could not have used "fucked," an English equivalent. Hemingway developed this two-prolonged method of surmounting he censorship challenge for his Spanish Civil War book, but, maybe because his characters are both English speakers, or maybe because the context is so different, his language in this earlier book remains within the bounds of propriety in most instances. There is the moment when Frederick returns from the hospital in Milan and Rinaldi is teasing him, offering to take out his liver and replace it with a good Italian liver. Frederick responds, "Go something yourself"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=169}}, which while it has the same obvious connotation is not nearly as powerful as "Go obscenity yourself."

In the Caporetto retreat, after they have picked up the two young girls, Hemingway again depends on what is not printed, but suggested by the blank line: _____________. Aymo tries to reassure one, saying "Don't worry...No danger of ____________,"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=196}}. In case the reader should miss the implication of the blank, Frederick tells us that Aymo used the vulgar word.

Mailer began his writing career when such strictures were still in place and following in Hemingway's footsteps, he developed his own strategy for conveying the language of the American fighting man in the ''The Naked and the Dead''. Since he could not use the four-letter word that is the mainstay of a soldier's vocabulary, he invented a three-letter word as a substitute. His fighting men use "fug," phonetically similar, but able to pass the censor's inspection. The civil rights movements of the 60s and early 70s also liberated language and by the time he was writing ''Marilyn'',Mailer had wide latitude not only about what he could write, but also in the language he could use to write about it. Gone was the constriction f having to use fug instead of fuck.{{pg |297|298}}
Thus, in describing the allure of Marilyn's publicity stills, Mailer explains, that for a man looking at the pictures it is as if she is whispering, "You can fuck me if you're lucky"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=91}}. In the crudest language he is free to write derisively about Marilyn's having been reputed to be Schenek's or Hyde's girl first; therefore bedding her was not any "glory" to Darryl Zanuck's "sausage." he explains that Zanuck had the reputation of stamping female actresses by putting "his own meat into a star's meat"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=90}}. Mailer can unreservedly write about blowjobs, anal sex, and use any and all obscenities. Hemingway's sexual iceberg is very much seven-eighths under water. When Rinaldi asks Frederick, if he is in love and married, he expresses sympathy, asking "Is she good to you?" When Frederick's positive response comes too easily, Rinaldi clarifies, using a euphemism, "I mean is she good to you practically speaking?"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=169}}. We know this is a sexual euphemism because Frederick tells Rinaldi to "shut up." Rather than being explicit, Rinaldi asks, “Does she ——?”{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=169}}. Again, Hemingway does not fill in the blank and we can only surmise from Frederick's angry response that he is asking sexually explicit questions. In the exchange that follows, Rinaldi claims not to have any sacred objects, so Frederick asks, "I can say this about your mother and that about your sister?" {{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=170}}. Once more Hemingway avoids the actual language and evades the censors. Mailer, on the other hand, is so liberated from any restraints to his fantasies and/or language that he even creates his own obscenity. In trying to find a way to describe how physically appealing Monroe looked during the time she was married to Joe Dimaggio, Mailer searches for the appropriate metaphor or adjective. First he writes, "She looks fed on sexual candy"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=102}}. However, that does not satisfy him. Therefore he decides to "examine a verb through its adverb" and resorts to creating the word "fucky" to describe the sexual energy she was emitting. No, he proclaims, never again "will she appear so fucky"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=102}}.

In what each man is allowed or allows himself to write of his autoerotic fantasy, their styles could not be more opposite. Hemingway is controlled, using few adjectives; there are no specific descriptions of either the genitalia or the sex act itself. It would not be until ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' that he created the "earth moved" metaphor to describe orgasm{{sfn |Hemingway|2003b|p=174}}.{{efn |It should be noted that the "earth moved" metaphor has maintained a place in the cultural lexicon.}} Mailer, ''au contraire'', indulges in florid flights of linguistic high jinks. Everything is explicit. He repeats an apocryphal story about Marilyn's comment when she finally signed a contract with the studio: "Well, that's the last cock I suck" {{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=78}} He envisions some of her modeling photos as suggesting, "Take me from"
{{pg |298|299}}
behind"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=79}}. He is even detailed about her gynecological history, speculating on painful periods, many abortions, and whether or not she used a diaphragm{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |pages=171-3}}.

It should be noted at this juncture that if both men created desirable and docile fantasy women for their erotic fantasies, their writing is not without their opposites, bitch women, destroyers of male potency, not the women of dreams, but those who inhabit their fictional nightmares. Hemingway's Margot Macomber is a bitch goddess of the first order, turning her husband, the great American boy-man into a whining cuckold before she finally does away with him altogether with the eponymous named Mannlicher rifle.{{efn |I am not unaware of the debate about whether or not Margot killed her husband on purpose or accidentally. For purposes of this study I will take my cue from Hemingway's comment that he saw her as "a bitch for the full course." I developed the characterization more fully in ''The Indestructible Woman in Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck'',{{sfn |Gladstein |1986 |pages=62-64}}.
}} Mailer's consummate bitch is the Jewess of "The Time of Her Time," who if she doesn't turn him into a boy-man, accuses him of being a man who loves boys when she categorizes him as a latent homosexual{{sfn |Mailer |1959 |title=The Time of Her Time |pages=503}}. But that is another article.

A philosopher colleague and I were once discoursing on the differences between men and women in their choices of characteristics for an ideal fantasy partner.{{efn |David Hall and I created and team-taught a course in Sexuality at the University of Texas at El Paso. He is the author of, among other books, ''Eros and Irony''.}} Besides the physical and sexual qualities Hall listed, he added that a major component of the ideal fantasy woman's appeal is annoying because the man has to deal with her once his satisfaction has been achieved; she may demand consideration and attention from him. A fantasy woman is all satisfaction and no responsibility. For Hemingway and Mailer, the ultimate disappearance is achieved. They can creatively enjoy their fantasy women with no possibility of the women becoming demanding, because the women deceased, one done away in fiction, the other dead in real life. Hemingway wrote a number of possible endings for ''A Farewell to Arms''. In one both Catherine and the baby survive. In another Catherine survives, but the baby does not; in another the survives but Catherine doesn't. His choice, artistically and autoerotically gratifying is to free Frederick of all responsibility, leaving him with memories of a compliant, devoted Catherine who is on call for instant replay in his memory. Whatever the aesthetic justifications, Hemingway did choose to tell the story as Frederick's recreation of the past. Catherine is dead when he begins the story, but their lovemaking is resurrected at his choice. Let me add here that Agnes von Kurowsky, Hemingway's Catherine model, was far from dead when he rewrote their history. She lived a long full life and seems never to have regretted his loss. Like Frederick's Catherine who is dead before his narration

{{pg |299|300}}
begins, so Mailer's Marilyn is likewise a memory, having been dead a decade when Mailer's rapturous portrait is published.

Sexologists tell us that most human beings fantasies when they are having sexual relations. At sperm banks male clients are given pornographic materials to help them achieve their goal. Writers have a power that most of us do not. They can not only create their own sexual fantasy to please themselves, but they can also sell it to us. My argument here is that on one level that is exactly what Hemingway and Mailer do.

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

==Citations==
{{reflist}}

==Work Cited==
{{Refbegin |indent=1 |20em}}

*{{cite AV media |people= Allen, Woody (director), Perf. Allen,Woody (actor), Keaton,Diane (actress)|date=1977 |title=Anne Hall|publisher=United Artists |work=film |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |last=Calisher |first= Hortense |date=February 1970 |title= No Important Woman Writer|magazine=''Mademoiselle'' |pp=188+ |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |last=Callahan|first=Robert D. |date=January 1974 |title= Rev. of ''Marilyn'' |magazine=''West Coast Review'' |pages=50-51 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Fetterley |first=Judith |date=1978 |title=The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction |location=Bloomington|publisher=U of Indiana P |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Gladstein |first= Mimi Reisel |date=1986 |title= The Indestructible Woman in Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck |location=Ann Arbor|publisher= UMI Research Press |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003a |title=A Farewell to Arms |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=2003b |title=For Whom the Bell Tolls|location=New York |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|editor-last1 =Vigia
|editor-first1=Finca |date=2003c |title=The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber |script-title=The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=5-28 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|editor-last1 =Vigia
|editor-first1=Finca |date=2003d |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro |script-title=The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=39-56 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |last=Leonard |first=Hugh |date=1974 |title=At the Flicks Again |script-title=Rev. of Marilyn by Norman Mailer |magazine=Books and Bookmen |series=19.7 |pages=80-82 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |last=MacCannell |first=Dean |date=1987 |title=Marilyn Monroe Was Not a Man |script-title= Rev. of ''Marilyn'', by Norman Mailer, ''MarilynNorma Jeane'', by Gloria Steinem, ''Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe'', by Anthony Summers, and ''Marilyn in Art'', by Roger G. Taylor |magazine=Diacritics |series=17.2 |pages=114-127|ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1973 |title=Marilyn |location=New York |publisher=Grossett & Dunlap |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman|author-mask=1|date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart and Company, Inc. |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |last2=Hemingway |first2=Gregory |date=1976 |title=Papa: A Personal Memoir |location=Boston |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |pages=xi-xiii |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=2003 |title=The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |script-title=The Time of Her Time |location=New York |publisher=G.P. Putnam's Sons |pages=478-503 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norris Church |date=2010 |title=A Ticket to the Circus |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mallory |first=Carole |date=2010 |title=Loving Mailer |location=Beverly Hills |publisher=Phoenix Books |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Meyers |first=Jeffrey |date=1999 |title=Hemingway: A Biography |location=Cambridge |publisher=Da Capo Press |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Millett |first=Kate |date=1969 |title=Sexual Politics |location=Urbana |publisher=U of Illinois P |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |last=Newman |first=Judith |date= April 2010 |title=A Norman Life |via=Rev. of A Ticket to the Circus by Norris Church Mailer |magazine=O, The Oprah Magazine |p=128 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |title=Rev. of ''Marilyn'', by Norman Mailer |date=1973 |magazine=Booklist |series=70.7|p=363 |ref={{harvid|Booklist|1973}}}}

*{{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1976 |title=Hemingway's First War |location=Princeton |publisher= Princeton UP |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1976 |title=Hemingway's First War |location=Princeton|publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Rollyson, Jr. |first=Carl E. |date=1991 |title=The Lives of Norman Mailer |location=New York|publisher=Paragon House |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |last=Rollyson, Jr. |first=Carl E.|author-mask=1 |date=1978 |title=Marilyn: Mailer's Novel Biography|magazine=Biography |series=1.4 |pages=49-67 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite journal |last=Spanier |first=Sandra Whipple |date=1990 |title=Hemingway's Unknown Soldier: Catherine Barkley, the Critics, and the Great War|pages=75-108 |editor-last1=Donladson |editor-first1=Scott |publisher=Cambridge: Cambridge UP |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Schwenger |first=Peter |date=1984 |title=Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth Century Literature |url=https://www.routledge.com/Phallic-Critiques-Routledge-Revivals-Masculinity-and-Twentieth-Century-Literature/Schwenger/p/book/9781138830196 |location=London|publisher=Routledge and Kegan Paul |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Tharp |first=Willard |date=1960 |title=American Writing in the Twentieth Century |location=Cambridge|publisher=Harvard UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite journal |last=Wilt |first= Judith |title= "The Romances of Ayn Rand." |url=https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-01830-5.html |journal=Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand |date=1999 |pages=173-198 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite journal |last=Wyrick |first=Jean |title=Fantasy as Symbol: Another Look at Hemingway's Catherine |journal=Massachusetts Studies in English |series=4.2 |date=1973 |pages=42-47 |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman

2025-04-09T02:42:03Z

JKilchenmann: changes to 2003 multiple Hemingway

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}{{Byline|last=Gladstein|first=Mimi Reisel|abstract=Hemingway and Mailer had many similarities. In the cases of Catherine Barkley for Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe for Mailer, both writers allowed themselves for imaginative privileges that they did not have in life. Both characterizations are a certain kind of dream fantasy woman, a projection of autoerotic impulses. Whereas life may not have afforded either Hemingway or Mailer the realization of some of their fantasies, as authors, they can,to borrow a phrase from Seinfeld,be “masters of their own domain.”|url=...}}
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{{dc|dc=C|HARACTERIZATIONS OF THE HEMINGWAY/MAILER CONNECTION ARE MANY.}} Hortense Calisher once quipped that Norman mailer was one of those writers who too early got caught up in Hemingway's jockstrap.{{sfn|Wilt|1999 |p=188}}{{efn|This was in the context of a review of the lack of women writers in the cannon.}} For Peter Schwenger, Hemingway and Mailer are catalogued as writers of the School of Virility{{sfn |Schwenger |1984}}{{efn|Swenger's focus is their fascination with the bullfight.}}. Jeffrey Meyers names Mailer as Hemingway's "most important disciple" in what he identifies as the "hardboiled" school of writers{{sfn |Meyers |1999}}{{efn|Myers writes that"Mailer was obsessed with Hemingway, fastened onto the son after he had failed to meet the father"{{sfn |Meyers |1999 |p=570}}}}. Indeed, a linking of the two is almost a cliche by this time, the younger Mailer referencing Hemingway often, not only in interviews, but also in his writing. One of mailer's biographers, Carl Rollyson, contends that mailer saw Hemingway as a role model in that he "had shown how a writer could become his own man"{{sfn |Rollyson, Jr. |1991}}. When Gregory Hemingway wrote his remembrance of his father, ''Papa: A Personal Memoir'', mailer wrote the Preface. The connections are numerous and varied. In another sense the relationship could be characterized as an ongoing ''mano a mano'', almost Oedipal contest, as the younger writer attempted to emulate and outdo the master in myriad manners; the creation f a larger-than life celebrity persona, drinking, brawling, and challenging peers to boxing matches both literal and figuratve. Both had war experiences when young and both used those experiences to feed their fiction. Hemingway wrote the quintessential World War I novel, ''A Farewell to Arms''; Mailer's ''The Naked and the Dead'' occupies a similar status as the definitive war novel of World War II. Both married multiple times, Mailer beating Hemingway by two wives. Both became favorite whipping boys for feminist critics, condemned for their misogynistic portrayals of {{pg |288|289}}
women and chauvinistic notions about relationships between the sexes. Kate Millett's ''Sexual Politics'' devotes a chapter to Mailer, whom she characterizes as "a prisoner of the virility cult"{{sfn |Millett | 1969}}, one who sees sex as war and war as sexual. Judith Fetterley's ''The Resisting Reader: a Feminist Approach to American Fiction'' includes chapters on both Hemingway and Mailer. And while I do not disagree with much of the criticism, in my appreciation for the major talents of these two writers I must invoke Norris Church Mailer, who comments on the tensions of living with Mailer: {{cquote|"Part of him was this wonderful, sweet, intelligent, terrific, funny guy that I was in love with. And another part, I just couldn't stand."{{sfn |Newman | 2010}}}} It is a tension applicable to my situation as a professor of literature, one who recognizes and teaches the brilliance of these men as writers, while never loath to point out some of the less than savory aspects of their personalities and artistic creations.
In keeping with that perspective of appreciating the talents while acknowledging alternative readings, this essay identifies another similarity in the writings of Hemingway and Mailer, one that perhaps springs from an analogous impulse of these two self-absorbed and often ego-maniacal writers-their creation of a certain kind of dream fantasy woman, a projection of autoerotic impulses, by which they allow themselves, imaginatively, privileges that they did not have in life. In their fiction, they create a fulfillment that privileges male satisfaction; man is the subject, woman an object, a means to that end. Whereas life may not have afforded them realization of certain of their fantasies, they can, to borrow a phrase from Seinfeld, be "masters of their own domain" in writing or following from the egocentric nature of the two, they can accomplish in their writings a fantasy fulfillment, for as Woody Allen quips in ''Annie Hall'': "Don't knock masturbation: it's sex with someone I love"{{efn |Thanks to my colleague Ezra Cappell for reminding of this scene.}} my hypothesis is validated in ''The Spooky Art'' where Mailer makes the connection explicit, noting that "[t]he act of writing is so close to the psychic character of masturbation that if we are going to discuss the world of the writer, then we ought to deal with this as well"{{sfn |Mailer |2003}}.

The cases in point for this study are Catherine Barkley for Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe for Mailer.{{efn |A longer study could survey a number of their texts interpolating the auto-erotic construction of others of these writers' fantasy women, but for this shorter study, the primary focus will be on one character for each.}} These choices may strike some as an odd pairing, perhaps inappropriate. After all, one is a fictional character and the other was a real woman. Not withstanding that demurrer, in terms of the authors' autoerotic uses of these women, the comparison is justified. Hemingway took the real Agnes Von Kurowsky, the woman who, in the words of Harry, his alter-ego writer of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," was "the first one,{{pg |289|290}}
the one who left him" and formed a fictional daydream who could never get away{{sfn |Hemingway |2003d | 48}}. Various members of Hemingway's family and biographers have written of the traumatic effect on him of Kurowsky's "Dear Ernest" letter. But, while the actual woman may have gotten away in his life, the author captures her forever on the pages of his daydream projection in ''A Farewell to Arms'' On the other hand, Marilyn Monroe was a real woman, but one who recreated herself as a fictional character, a characterization Mailer validates: "Marilyn had been polishing her fables for years"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=18}}. Just as Agnes Von Jurowsky is the one who left Hemingway, who metaphorically got away, Marilyn is one who got away from Mailer, as he was never invited to meet her when she and Arthur Miller were his neighbors in Connecticut. In his review of the Marilyn biography, Dean MacCannell theorizes that "Mailer is burned up about this, fantasizing that Miller did not have him over out of fear that he would steal Marilyn"{{sfn |MacCannell |1987}}. It is a view supported by Mailer, who acknowledges in his introductory chapter that " in all his vanity he thought on one was so well suited to ring out the best in her as himself, a conceit which fifty million other men may also have held"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |pages=19-20}}. However, as a skilled writer the older Mailer can rectify the missed opportunity. What did not happen in real life can be played over and over in the reel life of his fictional fantasy.{{efn |As a side note, Norris Church Mailer makes an observation about the fantasy connection between Hemingway and Marilyn for Norman Mailer. when they visit the finca in Cuba, she writes: "I was a little sad, seeing Norman poking about in Hemingway's house, wondering what they might have said to each other if they had indeed ever met. Kind of like the phantom affair he might have had with Marilyn Monroe, if they had ever met, which they didn't"{{sfn |Mailer |2010 |p=305}}}}

Generations of critics have analyzed and dissected the character of Catherine Barkley.{{efn |Sandra Whipple Spanier catalogs
them in "Hemingway's Unknown Soldier: Catherine Barkley, the Critics, and the Great War."}} Their conclusions run the spectrum from the " Catherine is the real hero" minions to those who see Hemingway's female characters as "a convenience and a technique to turn a monologue into a dialogue" contingent{{sfn |Tharp |1960 |p=191}}. The latter diagnosis is supportive of my hypothesis that in his creation of Catherine Barkley, Hemingway in addition to turning his monologue into a dialogue, creates an ideal masturbatory fantasy, a technique to allow him to tell himself what he wants to hear; he gets both his say and the opportunity to put satisfactory words into her mouth. Hemingway, as writer, in the assertive role of creation, uses the phallic pen to fulfill his erotic fantasies as his surrogate Frederick lies flat on his back and is ministered to by the "fresh," "young," and "beautiful" Catherine.

Frederick's selfish behavior toward Catherine enhances the connotations of autoeroticism; he is not concerned that she has work to do or may be tired, his satisfaction is all that matters. "Come back to bed" he tells her when she says she has charts to fill, work to do. Although she is on duty the day Doctor Valentini visits him, Frederick implores, "And can you be on night {{pg |290|291}}
duty tonight?" Like the selfish boy that he is, he cajoles, "You don't really love me or you'd come back again"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=102}}. The autoerotic state is one of complete self-absorption and Frederick is nothing if not totally self-centered. The narrator (Frederick after the fact) comments on how popular Catherine is with the other nurses "because she would do night duty indefinitely"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=108}}, and she does it indefinitely because of Frederick's demands.

Hemingway, when he distances himself as author, is aware of Frederick's selfishness and to his credit creates a scene where Ferguson reminds him of it. "You might give her just a little rest," she suggests, although doubtful that he will{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=109}}. She even reminds him that while he is sleeping, Catherine, after having fulfilled his sexual needs, is still working. Still, lest reality intrude too much on this remonstrance, there is an element of boasting involved; the implication is that he is so potent and insatiable that Catherine never gets to rest. Hemingway does end the scene with Miss Gage coming into the room, having a drink with Frederick and assuring him no less than four times in the space of one page, "I'm your friend," thus providing a modicum of absolution{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=110}}. In the end the three nights that Catherine is off duty serve only to add further piquancy to the resumption of their lovemaking and can be read as an Epicurean enhancement to the pure Hedonism of Frederick's self-indulgence. Absence acts to increase the appetite. Holding off is just another way to add potency to the reunion.

Hemingway creates Catherine/Agnes as compliant, docile, and anxious to please. "I'll say just what you wish and I'll do what you wish," says the fantasy woman{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=105}}. It is hard to imagine that the twenty-six year old veteran nurse would speak to the nineteen-year-old "kid," as she called him in such a servile manner.{{efn |Jean Wyrick, exploring Catherine's credibility as a twentieth-century woman, observes: "Few women, if any, live only to serve, their wish to deny their own personalities and to assume those of their lovers"{{sfn |Wyrick |1973 | p=43}}.}} Then, having given him an enema and prepared him for surgery, she is summoned back to his bed: "You see," she said. "I do anything you want." The most telling exchange in this scene is when she says: "I want what you want. There isn't any me any more. Just what you want"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=106}}. And, indeed there isn't any woman there, just what the Hemingway's surrogate figure wants. The reality of a masturbatory fantasy is a lone individual, doing just what he wants. His only limitations are those of his imagination.

To further enhance the argument that, at one level of this novel, Hemingway is engaging in an autoerotic fantasy, there is Catherine's insistence that she does not exist as a separate entity. "There isn't any me. I'm you," she insists. "Don't make up a separate me"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=115}}. The oneness of the two is reinforced by Ferguson, "You're two of the same thing," she proclaims, citing {{pg |291|292}}
in particular that they both have no shame and no honor and are equally sneaky{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=247}}. Of course, like the good little autoerotic fantasy that she is, Catherine often assures Frederick of her lack of any will separate from his: "I'll go any place any time you wish," which of course she will, since as a creation in Frederick's memory and Hemingway's fantasy, she has no autonomy outside of their needs and minds{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=252}}.

In the published photos of Agnes Von Kurowsky during her time in Italy, her hair is very neatly situated under her nurse's cap, so it is difficult to know what it looked like unconfined. In Hemingway's fantasy, however, he makes full use of the erotic resonance of woman's hair in the sexual encounter, hair being a traditional and timeworn symbol of female sexuality. It is not coincidental that Brett Ashley, one of Hemingway's most castrating women, has short hair, hair that her young love Pedro Romero wants her to grow so she will be more womanly.

Catherine's hair is a key component of her attractiveness for him: "She had wonderfully beautiful hair and I would lie sometimes and watch her twisting it up in the light"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=114}}. There is a voyeuristic quality to his description of these scenes: "I watched her brushing her hair, holding her head so the weight of her hair all came on one side"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=258}}. Watching her brush with the light shining on her hair, he remarks that the sight makes him feel faint. In a particularly sensual image, Frederick remembers taking the pins out of her hair so that it cascades down around the two of them, making him feel as if they are either "inside a tent or behind a falls"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=114}}. A number of scholars have written about Hemingway's hair fetishes and I won't rehearse them here; however, the impact of hair on Frederick's sexual responses is evident in a scene where he watches Catherine having her hair done in a beauty salon.{{efn |A key text is Carl Eby's ''Hemingway's Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood.'' Binghamton: SUNY Press, 1999.}} While most men would be annoyed having to wait while a woman gets her hair curled, Frederic finds it "exciting to watch." He finds it so arousing that his "voice was a little thick from being excited"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=292}}. In Hemingway, we must read between the lines and what Hemingway does not make explicit is exactly what the woman who runs the salon sees. But it is obvious that she notices something out of the ordinary and the reader can readily interpret that there must have been evidence of arousal as the salon owner is moved to comment, "Monsieur was very interested. Were you not, monsieur?"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=293}}. This is followed by a smile, further confirmation that the owner saw something that is not made explicit for the reader. If further {{pg |292|293}}

corroboration of the importance of hair as trigger in Hemingway's autoerotic arsenal is needed, this scene is ample proof.

In still another scene, the sexual connotations of hair are coupled with Catherine's desire to merge with Frederick. She suggests that he grow his hair longer and that she cut hers so "we'd be just alike only one of us blonde and one of us dark"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=299}}. Though he tells her he likes her hair as it is and does not want her to cut it, she argues for the change so that they would both be alike. "Oh, darling, I want you so much I want to be you too" is the language Hemingway gives her, to which Frederick, making my argument, responds: "You are. We're the same one"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=299}}. Reading the strong autoerotic nature of this recreation of Hemingway's first serious love affair, it is obvious that they are one and the one is Hemingway, indulging his fantasy. Furthermore, Catherine adds, " I don't live at all when I'm not with you," as the Catherine character has no existence outside of Hemingway's self indulgence{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=300}}.

Hemingway, as a novelist, has great latitude in his creation of characters. he can use real-life models and situations, and as a fiction writer recreate persons and places to fit his plot and interpretation. Judith Wilt, in explaining the romantic appeal of Ayn Rand's writing, theorizes that a particular allure for the romantic writer of creating a fantasy is being allowed to live in it while one is creating it{{sfn|Wilt|1999 |pages=173-74}}. Hemingway's romantic fantasy operates in a similar vein. While ''A Farewell to Arms'' can be lauded for its hard-hitting realism, it is also Romance with a capital R. Hemingway can recreate his love affair with Agnes Von Kurowsky to his liking and live in it while he is creating it. All the elements are there, a love story that prefigures Erich Segal's ''Love Story'' and a war story Hollywood could not resist making and remaking.{{efn |The first film version was in 1932, starring Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes, directed by Frank Borzage. In 1957 Charles Vidor directed Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones. Even a scholarly book on the subject inspired a Hollywood production. Richard Attenborough's ''In Love and War'' was inspired by James Nagel and Henry S. Villard's ''Hemingway in Love and War.''}} Furthermore, Wilt suggests, if a writer creates a fantasy and can live in it while writing, it is Romance, and if the writer can live in it after having created it, it is philosophy, creating the "sublime equipoise"{{sfn|Wilt|1999 |pages=173-74}}. Hemingway has created the "sublime equipoise" in ''A Farewell To Arms''. The strong stoical contents cushion the fantasy, lifted it beyond the realm of pure autoeroticism. At the same time Hemingway has a philosophical rationalization for killing the "one who left him." Catherine cannot live in the theoretical structural design because she must fulfill Frederick's philosophy of the "biological trap." She is the one who is caught off base, the brave one who may have died many times before her death, but she barely mentions it. Hemingway can recreate his war experiences and love affair, but can, at the same {{pg |293|294}}
time, assuage his wounded pride at having been left by Agnes in the creation of a Catherine who is devoted unto death.{{efn |Hemingway's masterful ability to amalgamate his experience, historical data, and fiction are nowhere more in evidence than in the retreat from Caporetto scenes of ''A Farewell to Arms''{{sfn |Reynolds |1976 |pages=105-180}}}}

The reader must construct a mental image of Hemingway's dream girl from narrator's description of a "quite tall," blonde with "tawny skin and grey eyes" who Frederick thinks is "very beautiful"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=18}}. Mailer's fantasy woman poses no such problem, for her image is world-famous and she probably served and may well still do duty as an instrument for millions of men in autoerotic contexts. She is so well known that Mailer needs only her first name for the title of his biography. But, in the event that the reader does not have a strong imagination, Mailer is nothing if not generous in that he supplies the visual as well as the verbal tools to implement the fantasy.{{efn |I am not unmindful of the fact that the book began with Lawrence Schiller's photographs and Mailer's participation grew as he warmed to the subject. However, I would contend that this strengthens my argument.}} Marilyn's life-size face, mouth slightly open, eyes in a sleepily half-open position, stares out from the cover, invitingly. Inside there are numerous photos, pictures taken from the time she was an unknown starlet, throughout her career and from her last photo-shoot. In many of them she is posed naked-Marilyn stretched out on red satin, tangled in white sheets, and climbing out of a swimming pool, one leg swung up so that her genital area is probably spread wide where the mind's eye but not the camera can venture.

Mailer gives permission for a wide latitude of readings by calling his work a novel biography, "a ''species'' of novel ready o play by the rules of biography"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=20}}. Quoting Virginia Woolf to the effect that a biography may capture six or seven of a person's selves, where there may be as many as a thousand in the individual's reality, Mailer rationalizes his portrayal. And in his argument that none of the extant biographies of the time had provided a complete and satisfactory portrayal, it is worth nothing that he references Carlos Baker's biography of Hemingway{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |pages=18-20}}. Mailer underlines his qualification to accomplish this "novel" of Marilyn Monroe by arguing that as a literary man he is best equipped to achieve an imaginative act of appropriation by the exercise of his skill. Appropriation is the telling word here, helping to make my argument about his use of her for his autoerotic fantasy.

That Mailer considers Marilyn an instrument for sexual flights of the imagination is evidenced by the initial images he uses to describe her. In the first paragraph of his book he likens her to a violin, calling her "a very Stradivarius of sex." Continuing the violin metaphor he rhapsodizes, "the sugar of sex came up from her like a resonance of sound in the clearest grain of a violin"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=15}}. Moreover, for those male readers who might shrink from the {{pg |294|295}}
possibility of intercourse with this larger than life icon of sexual appeal, he promises that "even the most mediocre musician would relax his lack of art in the dissolving magic of her violin"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=15}}. "Come," his sub-text reads, "any and all, from the sex maven like me to the pimply faced nerd, all are welcome to use this book for their masturbatory stimulation tool. Marilyn is our instrument." In addition, he saw his writing about her as an instrument for erotic attraction, a kind of aphrodisiac. In his inscription of the book to Barbara Davis (Norris Church Mailer) early in their relationship, he confirms that he "he knew when I wrote this book that someone I had not yet met would read it and be with me"{{sfn |Mailer |Norris |2010 |p=89}}.

The facts or factoids, as Mailer calls them, about Norma Jean/Marilyn are mostly culled from Fred Lawrence Guiles, with regular citations from Maurice Zolotow; here and there he does quote from Diane Trilling and Norman Rosten. Mailer is acutely conscious of the impossibility of knowing the "truth" and does not pretend that he will arrive at it, only as Rollyson explains, an attempt to create a whole person, "while a the same time conceding that the search for wholeness is elusive and problematical"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=49}}. For my purposes here, the focus will be those instances in the narrative when Mailer is indulgin his sexual fantasies.{{efn |To that end I will avoid discussion of Mailer's interesting takes on her search for a true self, issues of how her personality was molded by the traumas and privations of her childhood, her survival techniques.}} In one such instance he imagines a studio executive questioning Marilyn about the nude calendar pose. The questions are salaciously pointed: "Did you spread your legs?"...Is your asshole showing?...Any animals in it with you?"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=92}}.

If, as many reviewers complain, Mailer's ''Marilyn'' is nothing but a thinly disguised commercial maneuver, I would argue that it is not as Robert D. Callahan opines, "wasting square miles of forest in a Brobdingnagian mercantile enterprise"{{sfn |Callahan |1974 |p=50}}. A cursory reading reveals how much fun and personal satisfaction Mailer is getting as he lives in his fantasy. And why shouldn't a writer be allowed his autoerotic daydreams? On the distaff side are those like the ''Booklist'' reviewer who likens Mailer's appropriation to feeding on dead flesh and is disgusted by his "self-satisfied prose" and the reduction of the woman to a "figment in Mailer's stylishly lurid dreams"{{sfn |Booklist |1973 |p=363}}. Hugh Leonard's view is harsher and lends further support to my thesis that Mailer is using Marilyn for his autoerotic pleasure. Leonard detests the book and calls it "an exercise in necrophilia"{{sfn |Leonard |1974 |p=80}}.

Whereas Hemingway sets time limits to his autoerotic fantasy as he is reinventing a particular time period in his life, Mailer gives his wide scope. His being a biography of the whole life of a woman he never met, he can {{pg |295|296}}
give his imagination full range to satisfy any number of his fantasies by recalling scenes from a wide array of Marilyn's sexual experiences, lovers, husbands, and final days. As early as in his description of the sixteen-year-old bride, Mailer indulges his sexual visualizing: "We close our eyes, and see the movement of her hips"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=46}}. He interrupts the presentation of facts to gratify his libidinous daydream, "Her wedding peels off like a stripper kicking a gown""{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=46}} Writing about her activities and weight training, he cannot resist picturing how "[h]er plumped breasts bounce like manifests of the great here!""{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=49}}ler theorizes that Jim Dougherty, her first husband, was feeling threatened by Marilyn's maturing sexuality, "feeling the natural discomfort of any man when his prize is capable of getting him into murderous fights""{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=50}}.

Throughout the text, Mailer makes little attempt to disguise the autoerotic nature of his enterprise. Acknowledging the nature of his imaginings, he writes: "It is not too great a demand on our ''voyeurism'' (emphasis mine) to see a young husband in bed"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=53}}. Inviting the reader along on this escapade of indulgence, he assures us that "we may as well enjoy one more situation where we can have no certainty""{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=60}}. His sentences may begin with a "why not assume" or, after a rhapsodic stint of theorizing about how a lie becomes a script for an actor and whether or not Marilyn was telling the truth to one of her early lovers, or just acting a script, acknowledges: "Let us return then to the ''little'' (emphasis mine) of which we can be certain""{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=58}}.

In his musings about writing, Mailer acknowledges his understanding of the connection between creation and autoeroticism. In another instance he likens writing to psychic excretion"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |title=The Spooky Art |p=140}}. Paradoxically, he also inveighs against masturbation, because he claims the "ultimate direction of masturbation always has to be insanity" {{sfn |Mailer |1973 |title=The Spooky Art |p=137}}. Nonetheless, it is difficult to take Mailer at his word, for if he rationalizes his stance that masturbation is bad because "everything that's beautiful and good in one goes up the hand"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |title=The Spooky Art |p=137}}, he seems not to mind if it is someone else's hand. Carole Mallory writes of his taking her to a pornographic movie, watching the screen mesmerized and then reaching for her to put in his unzipped pants{{sfn |Mallory |2010 |p=171}}. She comments on her awareness that at that moment she is nothing but an object for his satisfaction.

In one area of the presentation of autoerotic fantasy, at least the published ones, Mailer has considerable advantage over Hemingway. Although he may have fought for the right to use more realistic language, Hemingway wrote {{pg |296|297}}

in an era of strict censorship, coming up with his own clever way of conveying his meaning while still abiding by the strictures of publishing in his day. Since he could not print the obscenity and since much of what his peasant characters in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' say is unprintable, Hemingway devised the cunning stratagem of writing "obscenity" or "unprintable" whenever one of his characters uses a forbidden word. thus his gypsies utter such oddities as "I obscenity in the milk of thy mother" or go "unprint thyself." Only when he has the freedom of writing in Spanish can Hemingway's characters curse openly. Thus Robert Jordan swears at the gypsy, "You ''hijo de la gran puta''!" which can be loosely translated "son of the great whore," equivalent to son of a bitch{{sfn |Hemingway|2003b|p=274}}. When Jordan and Pilar hear the planes attacking El Sordo's enclave, Pilar asks Jordan if she thinks Sordo is ''jodido''{{sfn |Hemingway|2003b|p=298}}. Hemingway could not have used "fucked," an English equivalent. Hemingway developed this two-prolonged method of surmounting he censorship challenge for his Spanish Civil War book, but, maybe because his characters are both English speakers, or maybe because the context is so different, his language in this earlier book remains within the bounds of propriety in most instances. There is the moment when Frederick returns from the hospital in Milan and Rinaldi is teasing him, offering to take out his liver and replace it with a good Italian liver. Frederick responds, "Go something yourself"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=169}}, which while it has the same obvious connotation is not nearly as powerful as "Go obscenity yourself."

In the Caporetto retreat, after they have picked up the two young girls, Hemingway again depends on what is not printed, but suggested by the blank line: _____________. Aymo tries to reassure one, saying "Don't worry...No danger of ____________,"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=196}}. In case the reader should miss the implication of the blank, Frederick tells us that Aymo used the vulgar word.

Mailer began his writing career when such strictures were still in place and following in Hemingway's footsteps, he developed his own strategy for conveying the language of the American fighting man in the ''The Naked and the Dead''. Since he could not use the four-letter word that is the mainstay of a soldier's vocabulary, he invented a three-letter word as a substitute. His fighting men use "fug," phonetically similar, but able to pass the censor's inspection. The civil rights movements of the 60s and early 70s also liberated language and by the time he was writing ''Marilyn'',Mailer had wide latitude not only about what he could write, but also in the language he could use to write about it. Gone was the constriction f having to use fug instead of fuck.{{pg |297|298}}
Thus, in describing the allure of Marilyn's publicity stills, Mailer explains, that for a man looking at the pictures it is as if she is whispering, "You can fuck me if you're lucky"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=91}}. In the crudest language he is free to write derisively about Marilyn's having been reputed to be Schenek's or Hyde's girl first; therefore bedding her was not any "glory" to Darryl Zanuck's "sausage." he explains that Zanuck had the reputation of stamping female actresses by putting "his own meat into a star's meat"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=90}}. Mailer can unreservedly write about blowjobs, anal sex, and use any and all obscenities. Hemingway's sexual iceberg is very much seven-eighths under water. When Rinaldi asks Frederick, if he is in love and married, he expresses sympathy, asking "Is she good to you?" When Frederick's positive response comes too easily, Rinaldi clarifies, using a euphemism, "I mean is she good to you practically speaking?"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=169}}. We know this is a sexual euphemism because Frederick tells Rinaldi to "shut up." Rather than being explicit, Rinaldi asks, “Does she ——?”{{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=169}}. Again, Hemingway does not fill in the blank and we can only surmise from Frederick's angry response that he is asking sexually explicit questions. In the exchange that follows, Rinaldi claims not to have any sacred objects, so Frederick asks, "I can say this about your mother and that about your sister?" {{sfn |Hemingway |2003a |p=170}}. Once more Hemingway avoids the actual language and evades the censors. Mailer, on the other hand, is so liberated from any restraints to his fantasies and/or language that he even creates his own obscenity. In trying to find a way to describe how physically appealing Monroe looked during the time she was married to Joe Dimaggio, Mailer searches for the appropriate metaphor or adjective. First he writes, "She looks fed on sexual candy"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=102}}. However, that does not satisfy him. Therefore he decides to "examine a verb through its adverb" and resorts to creating the word "fucky" to describe the sexual energy she was emitting. No, he proclaims, never again "will she appear so fucky"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=102}}.

In what each man is allowed or allows himself to write of his autoerotic fantasy, their styles could not be more opposite. Hemingway is controlled, using few adjectives; there are no specific descriptions of either the genitalia or the sex act itself. It would not be until ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' that he created the "earth moved" metaphor to describe orgasm{{sfn |Hemingway|2003b|p=174}}.{{efn |It should be noted that the "earth moved" metaphor has maintained a place in the cultural lexicon.}} Mailer, ''au contraire'', indulges in florid flights of linguistic high jinks. Everything is explicit. He repeats an apocryphal story about Marilyn's comment when she finally signed a contract with the studio: "Well, that's the last cock I suck" {{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=78}} He envisions some of her modeling photos as suggesting, "Take me from"
{{pg |298|299}}
behind"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=79}}. He is even detailed about her gynecological history, speculating on painful periods, many abortions, and whether or not she used a diaphragm{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |pages=171-3}}.

It should be noted at this juncture that if both men created desirable and docile fantasy women for their erotic fantasies, their writing is not without their opposites, bitch women, destroyers of male potency, not the women of dreams, but those who inhabit their fictional nightmares. Hemingway's Margot Macomber is a bitch goddess of the first order, turning her husband, the great American boy-man into a whining cuckold before she finally does away with him altogether with the eponymous named Mannlicher rifle.{{efn |I am not unaware of the debate about whether or not Margot killed her husband on purpose or accidentally. For purposes of this study I will take my cue from Hemingway's comment that he saw her as "a bitch for the full course." I developed the characterization more fully in ''The Indestructible Woman in Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck'',{{sfn |Gladstein |1986 |pages=62-64}}.
}} Mailer's consummate bitch is the Jewess of "The Time of Her Time," who if she doesn't turn him into a boy-man, accuses him of being a man who loves boys when she categorizes him as a latent homosexual{{sfn |Mailer |1959 |title=The Time of Her Time |pages=503}}. But that is another article.

A philosopher colleague and I were once discoursing on the differences between men and women in their choices of characteristics for an ideal fantasy partner.{{efn |David Hall and I created and team-taught a course in Sexuality at the University of Texas at El Paso. He is the author of, among other books, ''Eros and Irony''.}} Besides the physical and sexual qualities Hall listed, he added that a major component of the ideal fantasy woman's appeal is annoying because the man has to deal with her once his satisfaction has been achieved; she may demand consideration and attention from him. A fantasy woman is all satisfaction and no responsibility. For Hemingway and Mailer, the ultimate disappearance is achieved. They can creatively enjoy their fantasy women with no possibility of the women becoming demanding, because the women deceased, one done away in fiction, the other dead in real life. Hemingway wrote a number of possible endings for ''A Farewell to Arms''. In one both Catherine and the baby survive. In another Catherine survives, but the baby does not; in another the survives but Catherine doesn't. His choice, artistically and autoerotically gratifying is to free Frederick of all responsibility, leaving him with memories of a compliant, devoted Catherine who is on call for instant replay in his memory. Whatever the aesthetic justifications, Hemingway did choose to tell the story as Frederick's recreation of the past. Catherine is dead when he begins the story, but their lovemaking is resurrected at his choice. Let me add here that Agnes von Kurowsky, Hemingway's Catherine model, was far from dead when he rewrote their history. She lived a long full life and seems never to have regretted his loss. Like Frederick's Catherine who is dead before his narration

{{pg |299|300}}
begins, so Mailer's Marilyn is likewise a memory, having been dead a decade when Mailer's rapturous portrait is published.

Sexologists tell us that most human beings fantasies when they are having sexual relations. At sperm banks male clients are given pornographic materials to help them achieve their goal. Writers have a power that most of us do not. They can not only create their own sexual fantasy to please themselves, but they can also sell it to us. My argument here is that on one level that is exactly what Hemingway and Mailer do.

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

==Citations==
{{reflist}}

==Work Cited==
{{Refbegin |indent=1 |20em}}

*{{cite AV media |people= Allen, Woody (director), Perf. Allen,Woody (actor), Keaton,Diane (actress)|date=1977 |title=Anne Hall|publisher=United Artists |work=film |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |last=Calisher |first= Hortense |date=February 1970 |title= No Important Woman Writer|magazine=''Mademoiselle'' |pp=188+ |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |last=Callahan|first=Robert D. |date=January 1974 |title= Rev. of ''Marilyn'' |magazine=''West Coast Review'' |pages=50-51 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Fetterley |first=Judith |date=1978 |title=The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction |location=Bloomington|publisher=U of Indiana P |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Gladstein |first= Mimi Reisel |date=1986 |title= The Indestructible Woman in Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck |location=Ann Arbor|publisher= UMI Research Press |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003a |title=A Farewell to Arms |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=2003b |title=For Whom the Bell Tolls|location=New York |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|editor-last1 =Vigia
|editor-first1=Finca |date=2003c |title=The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber |script-title=The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=5-28 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|editor-last1 =Vigia
|editor-first1=Finca |date=2003d |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro |script-title=The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=39-56 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |last=Leonard |first=Hugh |date=1974 |title=At the Flicks Again |script-title=Rev. of Marilyn by Norman Mailer |magazine=Books and Bookmen |series=19.7 |pages=80-82 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |last=MacCannell |first=Dean |date=1987 |title=Marilyn Monroe Was Not a Man |script-title= Rev. of ''Marilyn'', by Norman Mailer, ''MarilynNorma Jeane'', by Gloria Steinem, ''Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe'', by Anthony Summers, and ''Marilyn in Art'', by Roger G. Taylor |magazine=Diacritics |series=17.2 |pages=114-127|ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1973 |title=Marilyn |location=New York |publisher=Grossett & Dunlap |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman|author-mask=1|date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart and Company, Inc. |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |last2=Hemingway |first2=Gregory |date=1976 |title=Papa: A Personal Memoir |location=Boston |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |pages=xi-xiii |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=2003 |title=The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |script-title=The Time of Her Time |location=New York |publisher=G.P. Putnam's Sons |pages=478-503 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norris Church |date=2010 |title=A Ticket to the Circus |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mallory |first=Carole |date=2010 |title=Loving Mailer |location=Beverly Hills |publisher=Phoenix Books |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Meyers |first=Jeffrey |date=1999 |title=Hemingway: A Biography |location=Cambridge |publisher=Da Capo Press |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Millett |first=Kate |date=1969 |title=Sexual Politics |location=Urbana |publisher=U of Illinois P |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |last=Newman |first=Judith |date= April 2010 |title=A Norman Life |via=Rev. of A Ticket to the Circus by Norris Church Mailer |magazine=O, The Oprah Magazine |p=128 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |title=Rev. of ''Marilyn'', by Norman Mailer |date=1973 |magazine=Booklist |series=70.7|p=363 |ref={{harvid|Booklist|1973}}}}

*{{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1976 |title=Hemingway's First War |location=Princeton |publisher= Princeton UP |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1976 |title=Hemingway's First War |location=Princeton|publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Rollyson, Jr. |first=Carl E. |date=1991 |title=The Lives of Norman Mailer |location=New York|publisher=Paragon House |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |last=Rollyson, Jr. |first=Carl E.|author-mask=1 |date=1978 |title=Marilyn: Mailer's Novel Biography|magazine=Biography |series=1.4 |pages=49-67 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite journal |last=Spanier |first=Sandra Whipple |date=1990 |title=Hemingway's Unknown Soldier: Catherine Barkley, the Critics, and the Great War|pages=75-108 |editor-last1=Donladson |editor-first1=Scott |publisher=Cambridge: Cambridge UP |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Schwenger |first=Peter |date=1984 |title=Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth Century Literature |url=https://www.routledge.com/Phallic-Critiques-Routledge-Revivals-Masculinity-and-Twentieth-Century-Literature/Schwenger/p/book/9781138830196 |location=London|publisher=Routledge and Kegan Paul |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Tharp |first=Willard |date=1960 |title=American Writing in the Twentieth Century |location=Cambridge|publisher=Harvard UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite journal |last=Wilt |first= Judith |title= "The Romances of Ayn Rand." |url=https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-01830-5.html |journal=Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand |date=1999 |pages=173-198 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite journal |last=Wyrick |first=Jean |title=Fantasy as Symbol: Another Look at Hemingway's Catherine |journal=Massachusetts Studies in English |series=4.2 |date=1973 |pages=42-47 |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman

2025-04-09T02:28:26Z

JKilchenmann: initial fixes

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}{{Byline|last=Gladstein|first=Mimi Reisel|abstract=Hemingway and Mailer had many similarities. In the cases of Catherine Barkley for Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe for Mailer, both writers allowed themselves for imaginative privileges that they did not have in life. Both characterizations are a certain kind of dream fantasy woman, a projection of autoerotic impulses. Whereas life may not have afforded either Hemingway or Mailer the realization of some of their fantasies, as authors, they can,to borrow a phrase from Seinfeld,be “masters of their own domain.”|url=...}}
{{Working}} 
{{dc|dc=C|HARACTERIZATIONS OF THE HEMINGWAY/MAILER CONNECTION ARE MANY.}} Hortense Calisher once quipped that Norman mailer was one of those writers who too early got caught up in Hemingway's jockstrap.{{sfn|Wilt|1999 |p=188}}{{efn|This was in the context of a review of the lack of women writers in the cannon.}} For Peter Schwenger, Hemingway and Mailer are catalogued as writers of the School of Virility{{sfn |Schwenger |1984}}{{efn|Swenger's focus is their fascination with the bullfight.}}. Jeffrey Meyers names Mailer as Hemingway's "most important disciple" in what he identifies as the "hardboiled" school of writers{{sfn |Meyers |1999}}{{efn|Myers writes that"Mailer was obsessed with Hemingway, fastened onto the son after he had failed to meet the father"{{sfn |Meyers |1999 |p=570}}}}. Indeed, a linking of the two is almost a cliche by this time, the younger Mailer referencing Hemingway often, not only in interviews, but also in his writing. One of mailer's biographers, Carl Rollyson, contends that mailer saw Hemingway as a role model in that he "had shown how a writer could become his own man"{{sfn |Rollyson, Jr. |1991}}. When Gregory Hemingway wrote his remembrance of his father, ''Papa: A Personal Memoir'', mailer wrote the Preface. The connections are numerous and varied. In another sense the relationship could be characterized as an ongoing ''mano a mano'', almost Oedipal contest, as the younger writer attempted to emulate and outdo the master in myriad manners; the creation f a larger-than life celebrity persona, drinking, brawling, and challenging peers to boxing matches both literal and figuratve. Both had war experiences when young and both used those experiences to feed their fiction. Hemingway wrote the quintessential World War I novel, ''A Farewell to Arms''; Mailer's ''The Naked and the Dead'' occupies a similar status as the definitive war novel of World War II. Both married multiple times, Mailer beating Hemingway by two wives. Both became favorite whipping boys for feminist critics, condemned for their misogynistic portrayals of {{pg |288|289}}
women and chauvinistic notions about relationships between the sexes. Kate Millett's ''Sexual Politics'' devotes a chapter to Mailer, whom she characterizes as "a prisoner of the virility cult"{{sfn |Millett | 1969}}, one who sees sex as war and war as sexual. Judith Fetterley's ''The Resisting Reader: a Feminist Approach to American Fiction'' includes chapters on both Hemingway and Mailer. And while I do not disagree with much of the criticism, in my appreciation for the major talents of these two writers I must invoke Norris Church Mailer, who comments on the tensions of living with Mailer: {{cquote|"Part of him was this wonderful, sweet, intelligent, terrific, funny guy that I was in love with. And another part, I just couldn't stand."{{sfn |Newman | 2010}}}} It is a tension applicable to my situation as a professor of literature, one who recognizes and teaches the brilliance of these men as writers, while never loath to point out some of the less than savory aspects of their personalities and artistic creations.
In keeping with that perspective of appreciating the talents while acknowledging alternative readings, this essay identifies another similarity in the writings of Hemingway and Mailer, one that perhaps springs from an analogous impulse of these two self-absorbed and often ego-maniacal writers-their creation of a certain kind of dream fantasy woman, a projection of autoerotic impulses, by which they allow themselves, imaginatively, privileges that they did not have in life. In their fiction, they create a fulfillment that privileges male satisfaction; man is the subject, woman an object, a means to that end. Whereas life may not have afforded them realization of certain of their fantasies, they can, to borrow a phrase from Seinfeld, be "masters of their own domain" in writing or following from the egocentric nature of the two, they can accomplish in their writings a fantasy fulfillment, for as Woody Allen quips in ''Annie Hall'': "Don't knock masturbation: it's sex with someone I love"{{efn |Thanks to my colleague Ezra Cappell for reminding of this scene.}} my hypothesis is validated in ''The Spooky Art'' where Mailer makes the connection explicit, noting that "[t]he act of writing is so close to the psychic character of masturbation that if we are going to discuss the world of the writer, then we ought to deal with this as well"{{sfn |Mailer |2003}}.

The cases in point for this study are Catherine Barkley for Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe for Mailer.{{efn |A longer study could survey a number of their texts interpolating the auto-erotic construction of others of these writers' fantasy women, but for this shorter study, the primary focus will be on one character for each.}} These choices may strike some as an odd pairing, perhaps inappropriate. After all, one is a fictional character and the other was a real woman. Not withstanding that demurrer, in terms of the authors' autoerotic uses of these women, the comparison is justified. Hemingway took the real Agnes Von Kurowsky, the woman who, in the words of Harry, his alter-ego writer of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," was "the first one,{{pg |289|290}}
the one who left him" and formed a fictional daydream who could never get away{{sfn |Hemingway |2003}}. Various members of Hemingway's family and biographers have written of the traumatic effect on him of Kurowsky's "Dear Ernest" letter. But, while the actual woman may have gotten away in his life, the author captures her forever on the pages of his daydream projection in ''A Farewell to Arms'' On the other hand, Marilyn Monroe was a real woman, but one who recreated herself as a fictional character, a characterization Mailer validates: "Marilyn had been polishing her fables for years"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=18}}. Just as Agnes Von Jurowsky is the one who left Hemingway, who metaphorically got away, Marilyn is one who got away from Mailer, as he was never invited to meet her when she and Arthur Miller were his neighbors in Connecticut. In his review of the Marilyn biography, Dean MacCannell theorizes that "Mailer is burned up about this, fantasizing that Miller did not have him over out of fear that he would steal Marilyn"{{sfn |MacCannell |1987}}. It is a view supported by Mailer, who acknowledges in his introductory chapter that " in all his vanity he thought on one was so well suited to ring out the best in her as himself, a conceit which fifty million other men may also have held"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |pages=19-20}}. However, as a skilled writer the older Mailer can rectify the missed opportunity. What did not happen in real life can be played over and over in the reel life of his fictional fantasy.{{efn |As a side note, Norris Church Mailer makes an observation about the fantasy connection between Hemingway and Marilyn for Norman Mailer. when they visit the finca in Cuba, she writes: "I was a little sad, seeing Norman poking about in Hemingway's house, wondering what they might have said to each other if they had indeed ever met. Kind of like the phantom affair he might have had with Marilyn Monroe, if they had ever met, which they didn't"{{sfn |Mailer |2010 |p=305}}}}

Generations of critics have analyzed and dissected the character of Catherine Barkley.{{efn |Sandra Whipple Spanier catalogs
them in "Hemingway's Unknown Soldier: Catherine Barkley, the Critics, and the Great War."}} Their conclusions run the spectrum from the " Catherine is the real hero" minions to those who see Hemingway's female characters as "a convenience and a technique to turn a monologue into a dialogue" contingent{{sfn |Tharp |1960 |p=191}}. The latter diagnosis is supportive of my hypothesis that in his creation of Catherine Barkley, Hemingway in addition to turning his monologue into a dialogue, creates an ideal masturbatory fantasy, a technique to allow him to tell himself what he wants to hear; he gets both his say and the opportunity to put satisfactory words into her mouth. Hemingway, as writer, in the assertive role of creation, uses the phallic pen to fulfill his erotic fantasies as his surrogate Frederick lies flat on his back and is ministered to by the "fresh," "young," and "beautiful" Catherine.

Frederick's selfish behavior toward Catherine enhances the connotations of autoeroticism; he is not concerned that she has work to do or may be tired, his satisfaction is all that matters. "Come back to bed" he tells her when she says she has charts to fill, work to do. Although she is on duty the day Doctor Valentini visits him, Frederick implores, "And can you be on night {{pg |290|291}}
duty tonight?" Like the selfish boy that he is, he cajoles, "Yo don't really love me or you'd come back again"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003 |p=102 |title=A Farewell to Arms}}. The autoerotic state is one of complete self-absorption and Frederick is nothing if not totally self-centered. The narrator (Frederick after the fact) comments on how popular Catherine is with the other nurses "because she would do night duty indefinitely"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003 |p=108 |title=A Farewell to Arms}}, and she does it indefinitely because of Frederick's demands.

Hemingway, when he distances himself as author, is aware of Frederick's selfishness and to his credit creates a scene where Ferguson reminds him of it. "You might give her just a little rest," she suggests, although doubtful that he will{{sfn |Hemingway |2003 |p=109 |title=A Farewell to Arms}}. She even reminds him that while he is sleeping, Catherine, after having fulfilled his sexual needs, is still working. Still, lest reality intrude too much on this remonstrance, there is an element of boasting involved; the implication is that he is so potent and insatiable that Catherine never gets to rest. Hemingway does end the scene with Miss Gage coming into the room, having a drink with Frederick and assuring him no less than four times in the space of one page, "I'm your friend," thus providing a modicum of absolution{{sfn |Hemingway |2003 |p=110 |title=A Farewell to Arms}}. In the end the three nights that Catherine is off duty serve only to add further piquancy to the resumption of their lovemaking and can be read as an Epicurean enhancement to the pure Hedonism of Frederick's self-indulgence. Absence acts to increase the appetite. Holding off is just another way to add potency to the reunion.

Hemingway creates Catherine/Agnes as compliant, docile, and anxious to please. "I'll say just what you wish and I'll do what you wish," says the fantasy woman{{sfn |Hemingway |2003 |p=105 |title=A Farewell to Arms}}. It is hard to imagine that the twenty-six year old veteran nurse would speak to the nineteen-year-old "kid," as she called him in such a servile manner.{{efn |Jean Wyrick, exploring Catherine's credibility as a twentieth-century woman, observes: "Few women, if any, live only to serve, their wish to deny their own personalities and to assume those of their lovers"{{sfn |Wyrick |1973 | p=43}}.}} Then, having given him an enema and prepared him for surgery, she is summoned back to his bed: "You see," she said. "I do anything you want." The most telling exchange in this scene is when she says: "I want what you want. There isn't any me any more. Just what you want"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003 |p=106 |title=A Farewell to Arms}}. And, indeed there isn't any woman there, just what the Hemingway's surrogate figure wants. The reality of a masturbatory fantasy is a lone individual, doing just what he wants. His only limitations are those of his imagination.

To further enhance the argument that, at one level of this novel, Hemingway is engaging in an autoerotic fantasy, there is Catherine's insistence that she does not exist as a separate entity. "There isn't any me. I'm you," she insists. "Don't make up a separate me"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003 |p=115 |title=A Farewell to Arms}}. The oneness of the two is reinforced by Ferguson, "You're two of the same thing," she proclaims, citing {{pg |291|292}}
in particular that they both have no shame and no honor and are equally sneaky{{sfn |Hemingway |2003 |p=247|title=A Farewell to Arms}}. Of course, like the good little autoerotic fantasy that she is, Catherine often assures Frederick of her lack of any will separate from his: "I'll go any place any time you wish," which of course she will, since as a creation in Frederick's memory and Hemingway's fantasy, she has no autonomy outside of their needs and minds{{sfn |Hemingway |2003 |p=252 |title=A Farewell to Arms}}.

In the published photos of Agnes Von Kurowsky during her time in Italy, her hair is very neatly situated under her nurse's cap, so it is difficult to know what it looked like unconfined. In Hemingway's fantasy, however, he makes full use of the erotic resonance of woman's hair in the sexual encounter, hair being a traditional and timeworn symbol of female sexuality. It is not coincidental that Brett Ashley, one of Hemingway's most castrating women, has short hair, hair that her young love Pedro Romero wants her to grow so she will be more womanly.

Catherine's hair is a key component of her attractiveness for him: "She had wonderfully beautiful hair and I would lie sometimes and watch her twisting it up in the light"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003 |p=114 |title=A Farewell to Arms}}. There is a voyeuristic quality to his description of these scenes: "I watched her brushing her hair, holding her head so the weight of her hair all came on one side"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003 |p=258 |title=A Farewell to Arms}}. Watching her brush with the light shining on her hair, he remarks that the sight makes him feel faint. In a particularly sensual image, Frederick remembers taking the pins out of her hair so that it cascades down around the two of them, making him feel as if they are either "inside a tent or behind a falls"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003 |p=114 |title=A Farewell to Arms}}. A number of scholars have written about Hemingway's hair fetishes and I won't rehearse them here; however, the impact of hair on Frederick's sexual responses is evident in a scene where he watches Catherine having her hair done in a beauty salon.{{efn |A key text is Carl Eby's ''Hemingway's Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood.'' Binghamton: SUNY Press, 1999.}} While most men would be annoyed having to wait while a woman gets her hair curled, Frederic finds it "exciting to watch." He finds it so arousing that his "voice was a little thick from being excited"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003 |p=292 |title=A Farewell to Arms}}. In Hemingway, we must read between the lines and what Hemingway does not make explicit is exactly what the woman who runs the salon sees. But it is obvious that she notices something out of the ordinary and the reader can readily interpret that there must have been evidence of arousal as the salon owner is moved to comment, "Monsieur was very interested. Were you not, monsieur?"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003 |p=293 |title=A Farewell to Arms}}. This is followed by a smile, further confirmation that the owner saw something that is not made explicit for the reader. If further {{pg |292|293}}

corroboration of the importance of hair as trigger in Hemingway's autoerotic arsenal is needed, this scene is ample proof.

In still another scene, the sexual connotations of hair are coupled with Catherine's desire to merge with Frederick. She suggests that he grow his hair longer and that she cut hers so "we'd be just alike only one of us blonde and one of us dark"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003 |p=299 |title=A Farewell to Arms}}. Though he tells her he likes her hair as it is and does not want her to cut it, she argues for the change so that they would both be alike. "Oh, darling, I want you so much I want to be you too" is the language Hemingway gives her, to which Frederick, making my argument, responds: "You are. We're the same one"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003 |p=299 |title=A Farewell to Arms}}. Reading the strong autoerotic nature of this recreation of Hemingway's first serious love affair, it is obvious that they are one and the one is Hemingway, indulging his fantasy. Furthermore, Catherine adds, " I don't live at all when I'm not with you," as the Catherine character has no existence outside of Hemingway's self indulgence{{sfn |Hemingway |2003 |p=300 |title=A Farewell to Arms}}.

Hemingway, as a novelist, has great latitude in his creation of characters. he can use real-life models and situations, and as a fiction writer recreate persons and places to fit his plot and interpretation. Judith Wilt, in explaining the romantic appeal of Ayn Rand's writing, theorizes that a particular allure for the romantic writer of creating a fantasy is being allowed to live in it while one is creating it{{sfn|Wilt|1999 |pages=173-74}}. Hemingway's romantic fantasy operates in a similar vein. While ''A Farewell to Arms'' can be lauded for its hard-hitting realism, it is also Romance with a capital R. Hemingway can recreate his love affair with Agnes Von Kurowsky to his liking and live in it while he is creating it. All the elements are there, a love story that prefigures Erich Segal's ''Love Story'' and a war story Hollywood could not resist making and remaking.{{efn |The first film version was in 1932, starring Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes, directed by Frank Borzage. In 1957 Charles Vidor directed Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones. Even a scholarly book on the subject inspired a Hollywood production. Richard Attenborough's ''In Love and War'' was inspired by James Nagel and Henry S. Villard's ''Hemingway in Love and War.''}} Furthermore, Wilt suggests, if a writer creates a fantasy and can live in it while writing, it is Romance, and if the writer can live in it after having created it, it is philosophy, creating the "sublime equipoise"{{sfn|Wilt|1999 |pages=173-74}}. Hemingway has created the "sublime equipoise" in ''A Farewell To Arms''. The strong stoical contents cushion the fantasy, lifted it beyond the realm of pure autoeroticism. At the same time Hemingway has a philosophical rationalization for killing the "one who left him." Catherine cannot live in the theoretical structural design because she must fulfill Frederick's philosophy of the "biological trap." She is the one who is caught off base, the brave one who may have died many times before her death, but she barely mentions it. Hemingway can recreate his war experiences and love affair, but can, at the same {{pg |293|294}}
time, assuage his wounded pride at having been left by Agnes in the creation of a Catherine who is devoted unto death.{{efn |Hemingway's masterful ability to amalgamate his experience, historical data, and fiction are nowhere more in evidence than in the retreat from Caporetto scenes of ''A Farewell to Arms''{{sfn |Reynolds |1976 |pages=105-180}}}}

The reader must construct a mental image of Hemingway's dream girl from narrator's description of a "quite tall," blonde with "tawny skin and grey eyes" who Frederick thinks is "very beautiful"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003 |p=18 |title=A Farewell to Arms}}. Mailer's fantasy woman poses no such problem, for her image is world-famous and she probably served and may well still do duty as an instrument for millions of men in autoerotic contexts. She is so well known that Mailer needs only her first name for the title of his biography. But, in the event that the reader does not have a strong imagination, Mailer is nothing if not generous in that he supplies the visual as well as the verbal tools to implement the fantasy.{{efn |I am not unmindful of the fact that the book began with Lawrence Schiller's photographs and Mailer's participation grew as he warmed to the subject. However, I would contend that this strengthens my argument.}} Marilyn's life-size face, mouth slightly open, eyes in a sleepily half-open position, stares out from the cover, invitingly. Inside there are numerous photos, pictures taken from the time she was an unknown starlet, throughout her career and from her last photo-shoot. In many of them she is posed naked-Marilyn stretched out on red satin, tangled in white sheets, and climbing out of a swimming pool, one leg swung up so that her genital area is probably spread wide where the mind's eye but not the camera can venture.

Mailer gives permission for a wide latitude of readings by calling his work a novel biography, "a ''species'' of novel ready o play by the rules of biography"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=20}}. Quoting Virginia Woolf to the effect that a biography may capture six or seven of a person's selves, where there may be as many as a thousand in the individual's reality, Mailer rationalizes his portrayal. And in his argument that none of the extant biographies of the time had provided a complete and satisfactory portrayal, it is worth nothing that he references Carlos Baker's biography of Hemingway{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |pages=18-20}}. Mailer underlines his qualification to accomplish this "novel" of Marilyn Monroe by arguing that as a literary man he is best equipped to achieve an imaginative act of appropriation by the exercise of his skill. Appropriation is the telling word here, helping to make my argument about his use of her for his autoerotic fantasy.

That Mailer considers Marilyn an instrument for sexual flights of the imagination is evidenced by the initial images he uses to describe her. In the first paragraph of his book he likens her to a violin, calling her "a very Stradivarius of sex." Continuing the violin metaphor he rhapsodizes, "the sugar of sex came up from her like a resonance of sound in the clearest grain of a violin"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=15}}. Moreover, for those male readers who might shrink from the {{pg |294|295}}
possibility of intercourse with this larger than life icon of sexual appeal, he promises that "even the most mediocre musician would relax his lack of art in the dissolving magic of her violin"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=15}}. "Come," his sub-text reads, "any and all, from the sex maven like me to the pimply faced nerd, all are welcome to use this book for their masturbatory stimulation tool. Marilyn is our instrument." In addition, he saw his writing about her as an instrument for erotic attraction, a kind of aphrodisiac. In his inscription of the book to Barbara Davis (Norris Church Mailer) early in their relationship, he confirms that he "he knew when I wrote this book that someone I had not yet met would read it and be with me"{{sfn |Mailer |Norris |2010 |p=89}}.

The facts or factoids, as Mailer calls them, about Norma Jean/Marilyn are mostly culled from Fred Lawrence Guiles, with regular citations from Maurice Zolotow; here and there he does quote from Diane Trilling and Norman Rosten. Mailer is acutely conscious of the impossibility of knowing the "truth" and does not pretend that he will arrive at it, only as Rollyson explains, an attempt to create a whole person, "while a the same time conceding that the search for wholeness is elusive and problematical"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=49}}. For my purposes here, the focus will be those instances in the narrative when Mailer is indulgin his sexual fantasies.{{efn |To that end I will avoid discussion of Mailer's interesting takes on her search for a true self, issues of how her personality was molded by the traumas and privations of her childhood, her survival techniques.}} In one such instance he imagines a studio executive questioning Marilyn about the nude calendar pose. The questions are salaciously pointed: "Did you spread your legs?"...Is your asshole showing?...Any animals in it with you?"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=92}}.

If, as many reviewers complain, Mailer's ''Marilyn'' is nothing but a thinly disguised commercial maneuver, I would argue that it is not as Robert D. Callahan opines, "wasting square miles of forest in a Brobdingnagian mercantile enterprise"{{sfn |Callahan |1974 |p=50}}. A cursory reading reveals how much fun and personal satisfaction Mailer is getting as he lives in his fantasy. And why shouldn't a writer be allowed his autoerotic daydreams? On the distaff side are those like the ''Booklist'' reviewer who likens Mailer's appropriation to feeding on dead flesh and is disgusted by his "self-satisfied prose" and the reduction of the woman to a "figment in Mailer's stylishly lurid dreams"{{sfn |Booklist |1973 |p=363}}. Hugh Leonard's view is harsher and lends further support to my thesis that Mailer is using Marilyn for his autoerotic pleasure. Leonard detests the book and calls it "an exercise in necrophilia"{{sfn |Leonard |1974 |p=80}}.

Whereas Hemingway sets time limits to his autoerotic fantasy as he is reinventing a particular time period in his life, Mailer gives his wide scope. His being a biography of the whole life of a woman he never met, he can {{pg |295|296}}
give his imagination full range to satisfy any number of his fantasies by recalling scenes from a wide array of Marilyn's sexual experiences, lovers, husbands, and final days. As early as in his description of the sixteen-year-old bride, Mailer indulges his sexual visualizing: "We close our eyes, and see the movement of her hips"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=46}}. He interrupts the presentation of facts to gratify his libidinous daydream, "Her wedding peels off like a stripper kicking a gown""{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=46}} Writing about her activities and weight training, he cannot resist picturing how "[h]er plumped breasts bounce like manifests of the great here!""{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=49}}ler theorizes that Jim Dougherty, her first husband, was feeling threatened by Marilyn's maturing sexuality, "feeling the natural discomfort of any man when his prize is capable of getting him into murderous fights""{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=50}}.

Throughout the text, Mailer makes little attempt to disguise the autoerotic nature of his enterprise. Acknowledging the nature of his imaginings, he writes: "It is not too great a demand on our ''voyeurism'' (emphasis mine) to see a young husband in bed"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=53}}. Inviting the reader along on this escapade of indulgence, he assures us that "we may as well enjoy one more situation where we can have no certainty""{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=60}}. His sentences may begin with a "why not assume" or, after a rhapsodic stint of theorizing about how a lie becomes a script for an actor and whether or not Marilyn was telling the truth to one of her early lovers, or just acting a script, acknowledges: "Let us return then to the ''little'' (emphasis mine) of which we can be certain""{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=58}}.

In his musings about writing, Mailer acknowledges his understanding of the connection between creation and autoeroticism. In another instance he likens writing to psychic excretion"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |title=The Spooky Art |p=140}}. Paradoxically, he also inveighs against masturbation, because he claims the "ultimate direction of masturbation always has to be insanity" {{sfn |Mailer |1973 |title=The Spooky Art |p=137}}. Nonetheless, it is difficult to take Mailer at his word, for if he rationalizes his stance that masturbation is bad because "everything that's beautiful and good in one goes up the hand"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |title=The Spooky Art |p=137}}, he seems not to mind if it is someone else's hand. Carole Mallory writes of his taking her to a pornographic movie, watching the screen mesmerized and then reaching for her to put in his unzipped pants{{sfn |Mallory |2010 |p=171}}. She comments on her awareness that at that moment she is nothing but an object for his satisfaction.

In one area of the presentation of autoerotic fantasy, at least the published ones, Mailer has considerable advantage over Hemingway. Although he may have fought for the right to use more realistic language, Hemingway wrote {{pg |296|297}}

in an era of strict censorship, coming up with his own clever way of conveying his meaning while still abiding by the strictures of publishing in his day. Since he could not print the obscenity and since much of what his peasant characters in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' say is unprintable, Hemingway devised the cunning stratagem of writing "obscenity" or "unprintable" whenever one of his characters uses a forbidden word. thus his gypsies utter such oddities as "I obscenity in the milk of thy mother" or go "unprint thyself." Only when he has the freedom of writing in Spanish can Hemingway's characters curse openly. Thus Robert Jordan swears at the gypsy, "You ''hijo de la gran puta''!" which can be loosely translated "son of the great whore," equivalent to son of a bitch{{sfn |Hemingway|2003 |title=For Whom the Bell Tolls|p=274}}. When Jordan and Pilar hear the planes attacking El Sordo's enclave, Pilar asks Jordan if she thinks Sordo is ''jodido''{{sfn |Hemingway|2003 |title=For Whom the Bell Tolls|p=298}}. Hemingway could not have used "fucked," an English equivalent. Hemingway developed this two-prolonged method of surmounting he censorship challenge for his Spanish Civil War book, but, maybe because his characters are both English speakers, or maybe because the context is so different, his language in this earlier book remains within the bounds of propriety in most instances. There is the moment when Frederick returns from the hospital in Milan and Rinaldi is teasing him, offering to take out his liver and replace it with a good Italian liver. Frederick responds, "Go something yourself"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003 |p=169 |title=A Farewell to Arms}}, which while it has the same obvious connotation is not nearly as powerful as "Go obscenity yourself."

In the Caporetto retreat, after they have picked up the two young girls, Hemingway again depends on what is not printed, but suggested by the blank line: _____________. Aymo tries to reassure one, saying "Don't worry...No danger of ____________,"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003 |p=196 |title=A Farewell to Arms}}. In case the reader should miss the implication of the blank, Frederick tells us that Aymo used the vulgar word.

Mailer began his writing career when such strictures were still in place and following in Hemingway's footsteps, he developed his own strategy for conveying the language of the American fighting man in the ''The Naked and the Dead''. Since he could not use the four-letter word that is the mainstay of a soldier's vocabulary, he invented a three-letter word as a substitute. His fighting men use "fug," phonetically similar, but able to pass the censor's inspection. The civil rights movements of the 60s and early 70s also liberated language and by the time he was writing ''Marilyn'',Mailer had wide latitude not only about what he could write, but also in the language he could use to write about it. Gone was the constriction f having to use fug instead of fuck.{{pg |297|298}}
Thus, in describing the allure of Marilyn's publicity stills, Mailer explains, that for a man looking at the pictures it is as if she is whispering, "You can fuck me if you're lucky"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=91}}. In the crudest language he is free to write derisively about Marilyn's having been reputed to be Schenek's or Hyde's girl first; therefore bedding her was not any "glory" to Darryl Zanuck's "sausage." he explains that Zanuck had the reputation of stamping female actresses by putting "his own meat into a star's meat"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=90}}. Mailer can unreservedly write about blowjobs, anal sex, and use any and all obscenities. Hemingway's sexual iceberg is very much seven-eighths under water. When Rinaldi asks Frederick, if he is in love and married, he expresses sympathy, asking "Is she good to you?" When Frederick's positive response comes too easily, Rinaldi clarifies, using a euphemism, "I mean is she good to you practically speaking?"{{sfn |Hemingway |2003 |p=169 |title=A Farewell to Arms}}. We know this is a sexual euphemism because Frederick tells Rinaldi to "shut up." Rather than being explicit, Rinaldi asks, “Does she ——?”{{sfn |Hemingway |2003 |p=169 |title=A Farewell to Arms}}. Again, Hemingway does not fill in the blank and we can only surmise from Frederick's angry response that he is asking sexually explicit questions. In the exchange that follows, Rinaldi claims not to have any sacred objects, so Frederick asks, "I can say this about your mother and that about your sister?" {{sfn |Hemingway |2003 |p=170 |title=A Farewell to Arms}}. Once more Hemingway avoids the actual language and evades the censors. Mailer, on the other hand, is so liberated from any restraints to his fantasies and/or language that he even creates his own obscenity. In trying to find a way to describe how physically appealing Monroe looked during the time she was married to Joe Dimaggio, Mailer searches for the appropriate metaphor or adjective. First he writes, "She looks fed on sexual candy"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=102}}. However, that does not satisfy him. Therefore he decides to "examine a verb through its adverb" and resorts to creating the word "fucky" to describe the sexual energy she was emitting. No, he proclaims, never again "will she appear so fucky"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=102}}.

In what each man is allowed or allows himself to write of his autoerotic fantasy, their styles could not be more opposite. Hemingway is controlled, using few adjectives; there are no specific descriptions of either the genitalia or the sex act itself. It would not be until ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' that he created the "earth moved" metaphor to describe orgasm{{sfn |Hemingway|2003 |title=For Whom the Bell Tolls|p=174}}.{{efn |It should be noted that the "earth moved" metaphor has maintained a place in the cultural lexicon.}} Mailer, ''au contraire'', indulges in florid flights of linguistic high jinks. Everything is explicit. He repeats an apocryphal story about Marilyn's comment when she finally signed a contract with the studio: "Well, that's the last cock I suck" {{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=78}} He envisions some of her modeling photos as suggesting, "Take me from"
{{pg |298|299}}
behind"{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |p=79}}. He is even detailed about her gynecological history, speculating on painful periods, many abortions, and whether or not she used a diaphragm{{sfn |Mailer |1973 |pages=171-3}}.

It should be noted at this juncture that if both men created desirable and docile fantasy women for their erotic fantasies, their writing is not without their opposites, bitch women, destroyers of male potency, not the women of dreams, but those who inhabit their fictional nightmares. Hemingway's Margot Macomber is a bitch goddess of the first order, turning her husband, the great American boy-man into a whining cuckold before she finally does away with him altogether with the eponymous named Mannlicher rifle.{{efn |I am not unaware of the debate about whether or not Margot killed her husband on purpose or accidentally. For purposes of this study I will take my cue from Hemingway's comment that he saw her as "a bitch for the full course." I developed the characterization more fully in ''The Indestructible Woman in Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck'',{{sfn |Gladstein |1986 |pages=62-64}}.
}} Mailer's consummate bitch is the Jewess of "The Time of Her Time," who if she doesn't turn him into a boy-man, accuses him of being a man who loves boys when she categorizes him as a latent homosexual{{sfn |Mailer |1959 |title=The Time of Her Time |pages=503}}. But that is another article.

A philosopher colleague and I were once discoursing on the differences between men and women in their choices of characteristics for an ideal fantasy partner.{{efn |David Hall and I created and team-taught a course in Sexuality at the University of Texas at El Paso. He is the author of, among other books, ''Eros and Irony''.}} Besides the physical and sexual qualities Hall listed, he added that a major component of the ideal fantasy woman's appeal is annoying because the man has to deal with her once his satisfaction has been achieved; she may demand consideration and attention from him. A fantasy woman is all satisfaction and no responsibility. For Hemingway and Mailer, the ultimate disappearance is achieved. They can creatively enjoy their fantasy women with no possibility of the women becoming demanding, because the women deceased, one done away in fiction, the other dead in real life. Hemingway wrote a number of possible endings for ''A Farewell to Arms''. In one both Catherine and the baby survive. In another Catherine survives, but the baby does not; in another the survives but Catherine doesn't. His choice, artistically and autoerotically gratifying is to free Frederick of all responsibility, leaving him with memories of a compliant, devoted Catherine who is on call for instant replay in his memory. Whatever the aesthetic justifications, Hemingway did choose to tell the story as Frederick's recreation of the past. Catherine is dead when he begins the story, but their lovemaking is resurrected at his choice. Let me add here that Agnes von Kurowsky, Hemingway's Catherine model, was far from dead when he rewrote their history. She lived a long full life and seems never to have regretted his loss. Like Frederick's Catherine who is dead before his narration

{{pg |299|300}}
begins, so Mailer's Marilyn is likewise a memory, having been dead a decade when Mailer's rapturous portrait is published.

Sexologists tell us that most human beings fantasies when they are having sexual relations. At sperm banks male clients are given pornographic materials to help them achieve their goal. Writers have a power that most of us do not. They can not only create their own sexual fantasy to please themselves, but they can also sell it to us. My argument here is that on one level that is exactly what Hemingway and Mailer do.

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

==Citations==
{{reflist}}

==Work Cited==
{{Refbegin |indent=1 |20em}}

*{{cite AV media |people= Allen, Woody (director), Perf. Allen,Woody (actor), Keaton,Diane (actress)|date=1977 |title=Anne Hall|publisher=United Artists |work=film |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |last=Calisher |first= Hortense |date=February 1970 |title= No Important Woman Writer|magazine=''Mademoiselle'' |pp=188+ |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |last=Callahan|first=Robert D. |date=January 1974 |title= Rev. of ''Marilyn'' |magazine=''West Coast Review'' |pages=50-51 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Fetterley |first=Judith |date=1978 |title=The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction |location=Bloomington|publisher=U of Indiana P |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Gladstein |first= Mimi Reisel |date=1986 |title= The Indestructible Woman in Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck |location=Ann Arbor|publisher= UMI Research Press |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=A Farewell to Arms |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=2003 |title=For Whom the Bell Tolls|location=New York |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|editor-last1 =Vigia
|editor-first1=Finca |date=2003 |title=The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber |script-title=The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=5-28 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|editor-last1 =Vigia
|editor-first1=Finca |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro |script-title=The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=39-56 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |last=Leonard |first=Hugh |date=1974 |title=At the Flicks Again |script-title=Rev. of Marilyn by Norman Mailer |magazine=Books and Bookmen |series=19.7 |pages=80-82 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |last=MacCannell |first=Dean |date=1987 |title=Marilyn Monroe Was Not a Man |script-title= Rev. of ''Marilyn'', by Norman Mailer, ''MarilynNorma Jeane'', by Gloria Steinem, ''Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe'', by Anthony Summers, and ''Marilyn in Art'', by Roger G. Taylor |magazine=Diacritics |series=17.2 |pages=114-127|ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1973 |title=Marilyn |location=New York |publisher=Grossett & Dunlap |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman|author-mask=1|date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart and Company, Inc. |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |last2=Hemingway |first2=Gregory |date=1976 |title=Papa: A Personal Memoir |location=Boston |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |pages=xi-xiii |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=2003 |title=The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |script-title=The Time of Her Time |location=New York |publisher=G.P. Putnam's Sons |pages=478-503 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norris Church |date=2010 |title=A Ticket to the Circus |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mallory |first=Carole |date=2010 |title=Loving Mailer |location=Beverly Hills |publisher=Phoenix Books |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Meyers |first=Jeffrey |date=1999 |title=Hemingway: A Biography |location=Cambridge |publisher=Da Capo Press |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Millett |first=Kate |date=1969 |title=Sexual Politics |location=Urbana |publisher=U of Illinois P |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |last=Newman |first=Judith |date= April 2010 |title=A Norman Life |via=Rev. of A Ticket to the Circus by Norris Church Mailer |magazine=O, The Oprah Magazine |p=128 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |title=Rev. of ''Marilyn'', by Norman Mailer |date=1973 |magazine=Booklist |series=70.7|p=363 |ref={{harvid|Booklist|1973}}}}

*{{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1976 |title=Hemingway's First War |location=Princeton |publisher= Princeton UP |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1976 |title=Hemingway's First War |location=Princeton|publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Rollyson, Jr. |first=Carl E. |date=1991 |title=The Lives of Norman Mailer |location=New York|publisher=Paragon House |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |last=Rollyson, Jr. |first=Carl E.|author-mask=1 |date=1978 |title=Marilyn: Mailer's Novel Biography|magazine=Biography |series=1.4 |pages=49-67 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite journal |last=Spanier |first=Sandra Whipple |date=1990 |title=Hemingway's Unknown Soldier: Catherine Barkley, the Critics, and the Great War|pages=75-108 |editor-last1=Donladson |editor-first1=Scott |publisher=Cambridge: Cambridge UP |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Schwenger |first=Peter |date=1984 |title=Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth Century Literature |url=https://www.routledge.com/Phallic-Critiques-Routledge-Revivals-Masculinity-and-Twentieth-Century-Literature/Schwenger/p/book/9781138830196 |location=London|publisher=Routledge and Kegan Paul |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Tharp |first=Willard |date=1960 |title=American Writing in the Twentieth Century |location=Cambridge|publisher=Harvard UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite journal |last=Wilt |first= Judith |title= "The Romances of Ayn Rand." |url=https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-01830-5.html |journal=Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand |date=1999 |pages=173-198 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite journal |last=Wyrick |first=Jean |title=Fantasy as Symbol: Another Look at Hemingway's Catherine |journal=Massachusetts Studies in English |series=4.2 |date=1973 |pages=42-47 |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer

2025-04-09T02:07:27Z

JKilchenmann: fix multiple 1936

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}}

{{Byline |last=Leeds |first=Barry H. |abstract=An enumeration and analysis of firearms in the works of Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer. Guns are virtually ubiquitous, sometimes mere everyday equipment, more often objects of profound symbolic and thematic significance. But always, as in life, they loom as instruments that amplify the individual’s influence on the world around him. Whether used to hunt game, commit murder, or fight for a political ideal, every gun is a tool that extends the power of the existential human will in a world that would attempt to render it impotent. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04lee}}
{{dc|dc=B|Y NOW IT IS MOUTHING A TRUISM TO POINT OUT THAT FIREARMS—}} have played
an iconic role in American history. Starting with this axiomatic assumption, one finds that guns are virtually ubiquitous in the works of those two peculiarly American authors, Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer. Sometimes mere accoutrements or plot devices, they are more often significant thematically and symbolically.

Occasionally, serendipitous connections between the two authors present themselves. The best example of these may be the case of the 6.5 mm. Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. At the outset of ''A Farewell to Arms,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|}} Hemingway describes how

<blockquote>
the troops were muddy and wet in their capes; their rifles were wet and under their capes the two leather cartridge-boxes on the front of the belts, gray leather boxes heavy with the packs of clips of thin, long 6.5 mm. cartridges, bulged forward under the capes so that the men, passing on the road, marched as though they were six months gone with child.{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|pg=4}}
</blockquote>

This crucial passage foreshadows the thematic connection of rain, pregnancy, war and death in the novel, notably that of Catherine Barkley, which
makes ''Farewell'' so clearly a naturalistic work.

The 6.5 mm. Mannlicher-Carcano, standard issue for the Italian army throughout the first half of the twentieth century, was subsequently sold cheaply in large numbers through mail-order houses worldwide. One of these rifles, equipped with a 4-power scope, was ordered by Lee Harvey Oswald in{{pg|157|158}}1963, forty-five years after the 1918 setting of Hemingway’s ''Farewell'', and used to assassinate John F. Kennedy, as elaborated upon in Mailer’s ''Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery.''{{sfn|Mailer|1995}} This death of monumental, tragic proportions was brought about by the use of a $10 gun. Also in ''A Farewell to Arms,'' Frederick Henry feels faintly ridiculous in obeying the regulation that a uniformed officer be armed with a pistol even when out of combat{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|pg=148}}.Yet after his
convalescence in Milan he uses his pistol (of unspecified caliber, but described
as “regulation”) during the next campaign to shoot one of two sergeants for disobedience and desertion{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|pg=204}}. The point of the passage, one of many emphasizing the anti-heroic message of the novel, is that Henry and the enlisted man Bonello (who administers the ''coup de grâce'') are so inured to death in war that they are entirely dispassionate about it.

Most clearly parallel to this scene is the opening of ''An American Dream''{{sfn|Mailer|1965|}} in which Stephen Richards Rojack kills four German machine-gunners with his .30 caliber M1 carbine. Portentously set under a full moon, the episode illustrates Rojack’s capacity for lethal violence and his perception
that murder has a sexual aspect to it.{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=3-6}} Yet, in a later
passage in the New England woods with his wife Deborah, he is shamed by her superior ability to hunt small animals with a .22 rifle, another of the
scenes that illuminates the constant competition in their intense love/hate relationship: “And in fact she was an exceptional hunter. She had gone on safari with her first husband and killed a wounded lion charging ten feet from her throat, she dropped an Alaskan bear with two shots to the heart (30/06
Winchester)”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=35}}

Moving to the beginning of Mailer’s career, it is obvious that every character in ''The Naked and the Dead''{{sfn|Mailer|1948|}} is issued regulation small arms: the officers with caliber .45 ACP Model 1911A1 pistols, the enlisted men with 30-06 M1 Garand rifles (as distinguished from Rojack’s smaller M1 carbine) or .45 Thompson submachine guns. Perhaps the most crucial episode in which one of these weapons figures is late in the book, during the abortive attempt by I & R platoon to climb Mt. Anaka, when Red Valsen rebels against Staff Sgt. Croft’s leadership and is forced to obey at gunpoint: “Croft . . . unslung his rifle, cocked the bolt leisurely. . . . It was worthless to temporize. Croft wanted to shoot him” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|pg=695-6}}.When Red capitulates, it signals the end of all resistance to Croft, which is emblematic of the allegorical conclusion by Mailer that reactionaries would dominate post-war America and which emphasizes the novel’s pessimistic message, its naturalistic bias.{{pg|158|159}}If war is the most obvious arena in which guns figure, it is not hard to find the others: hunting and, in urban civilian life, criminal pursuits. The
most striking of the latter occurs in Hemingway’s great story, ''The Killers,'' and Mailer’s 1984 murder mystery, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance''. In the former,
the two hit men, almost robotic in their mindless, inexorable commitment to a job that must be done, pursue their prey, ex-boxer Ole Anderson, with
a chilling, leisurely assurance and sawed-off 12 gauge shotguns. In the first cinematic version of the story,{{sfn|Siodmak|Lancaster|1946|}} a classic ''film noir'' with Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner in their first starring roles, the killers (one of whom is William Conrad, later of TV“Cannon” fame) use more pedestrian Smith &
Wesson Model 10 .38 Special revolvers. As in Hemingway’s story, Ole Anderson, in true naturalistic fashion, passively awaits his death.

In ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'', several of the seven violent deaths are carried out by the three matching .22 automatic pistols bought by Meeks Wardley
Hilby III, including his own suicide and that of his doppelgänger Lonnie Pangborn. These parallels in death echo the sexual parallels in the lives of
these characters and the novel presents a sexual nexus in which virtually every character is attached carnally to several others.

In a more significant book, ''The Executioner’s Song''{{sfn|Mailer|1979|}}, the career criminal Gary Gilmore traffics in guns and murders with one. He is inept with the .32 automatic he uses in his two cold-blooded assassinations, for he shoots
himself in the hand after the second murder, and the bleeding wound casts immediate suspicion upon him and leads to his quick capture by the police.
This episode is in line with Gary’s failures throughout the book and his entire life.

In ''Why Are We in Vietnam?,''{{sfn|Mailer|1967|}} the metaphorical juxtaposition of over-armed Texans hunting in Alaska, and the parallel depredations of the U.S. Army upon the population of Vietnam is best expressed in the passage where DJ lists at length the battery of guns brought on the hunt, especially by his father, Rusty:

<blockquote>
Which brings up Rusty, who travels like a big-ass hunter. . . . yeah, he got for instance a .404 Jeffrey on a Mauser Magnum action with a Circassian walnut stock, one love of a custom job by Biesen with Zeiss Zielklein 2 on Griffin & Howe side mount for Gun #1. Gun #2 is Model 70 Winchester rechambered to .300 Weatherly Magnum, Stith Bear Cub scope, birds’-eye maple
</blockquote>{{pg|159|160}}<blockquote>
stock, etcetera. . . . Gun #3 is Winslow Regimental Grade 7 mm. Remington Magnum with FN Supreme 400 action and Premium Grade Douglas barrel, ivory and ebony inlays in the stock, basket weave carving on both sides of the forearm and pistol grip, Redfield Jr. mounts, Redfield 2X-7X {{sfn|Mailer|1967|pg=79-80}}
</blockquote>

Despite this impressive array of weaponry, Rusty selfishly fails his son by his lack of a sportsmanlike hunter’s ethics. Later in the novel, it is only by divesting themselves of all weapons and other equipment that DJ and his best friend Tex Hyde are able to experience a transcendent oneness with nature.

In a similar situation but without the devastating irony, Hemingway equips the title character in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” with a 30-06 rifle and 220 grain solid slugs for lion and Cape buffalo. The professional hunter, Robert Wilson, based on the famous Philip Percival with whom Hemingway had hunted in Africa, carries a “shockingly big-bored".505 Gibbs “with a muzzle velocity of two tons”{{sfn|Hemingway|1936c|pg=138}}. Here, Hemingway makes an error in nomenclature and physics, since muzzle ''velocity'' is measured in feet per second, and muzzle ''energy'' in foot pounds.Yet the .505 Gibbs, a highly specialized big game hunting rifle of which only eighty were ever manufactured, presents a very impressive picture in the mind’s eye. Finally, in one of the greatest examples of controlled ambiguity in literature, Macomber’s wife Margot, “shot at the buffalo with the 6.5 Mannlicher”{{sfn|Hemingway|1936c|pg=153}}, killing her husband. This 6.5 mm Mannlicher (a fine sporting arm quite different from the rough, mass produced Mannlicher Carcano of ''Farewell'' and ''Oswald’s Tale'') is the instrument of a death which lives forever in the shadowy ambiguity of Margot Macomber’s true intent, and which brings to a close the short, happy, existential life of the protagonist.

Part One of Hemingway’s ''To Have and Have Not'' {{sfn|Hemingway|1937|}} opens with an action sequence in which two politically opposed groups of Cubans kill each other with, among other guns, a 9 mm. Luger, a 12 gauge shotgun, and a .45 Thompson submachine gun. Later in the same section of the book, the protagonist Harry Morgan, a modern pirate like his namesake Henry Morgan (1635?–1688: a Welsh buccaneer in the Caribbean, later acting governor of Jamaica, 1680-82) carries out the dangerous mission of transporting (and double-crossing) illegal Chinese immigrants with the aid of a fairly standard but versatile battery consisting of a Winchester 30-30 lever action carbine, a{{pg|160|161}}12 gauge pump shotgun, and“the Smith and Wesson thirty-eight special I had when I was on the police force up in Miami{{sfn|Hemingway|1937|p=44}}

In Part Two, Harry is badly wounded in his right arm, which he subsequently loses, by the gunfire of law enforcement agents while smuggling liquor from Cuba. But in Part Three, the longest and most intense section of the book, he (literally) single-handedly kills, with his Thompson submachine gun, four Cuban revolutionaries escaping from a bank robbery. And yet, a true existential character trapped in a naturalistic world, he mutters with his dying breath this credo: “No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance”{{sfn|Hemingway|1937|pg=225}}.

Many guns figure prominently in the 1940 novel ''For Whom the Bell Tolls,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|}} perhaps most significantly the Smith and Wesson .32 revolver handed down by Robert Jordan’s grandfather, a veteran of the American Civil War:

<blockquote>
It was a single action officer’s model .32 caliber and there was no trigger. It had the softest, sweetest trigger pull you had ever felt and it was always well oiled and the bore was clean although the finish was all worn off and the brown metal of the barrel and the cylinder was worn smooth from the leather of the holster {{sfn|Hemingway|1940|pg=336}}
</blockquote>

After Robert’s father commits suicide with this gun (like the author’s own father), although the revolver is lovingly described, Robert Jordan disposes of it in a memorable flashback by dropping it into an eight hundred feet deep lake {{sfn|Hemingway|1940|pg=337}}. In the main action of the novel, Jordan is armed with an automatic pistol and a submachine gun, both unspecified as to caliber or manufacture. But other guns are more clearly defined: the Lewis gun of which the guerrilla band is so proud but whose obsolescence disappoints Jordan, and the 9mm Star pistol with which El Sordo carries out his “suicide” ruse on the fascists surrounding him in his last stand. Finally, Robert Jordan, waiting to make ''his'' last stand at the novel’s conclusion, grasps his submachine gun and thinks, “I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|pg=467}}. Here, as with Harry Morgan, the firearm is an extension of the individual’s capacity to resist evil forces and fight with existential heroism for the good.{{pg|161|162}}Firearms play minor roles in other Hemingway novels and stories: the shotguns Col. Cantwell uses in the opening duck-hunting sequence of ''Across the River and into the Trees;''{{sfn|Hemingway|1950|}} the .357 Magnum carried by Thomas Hudson in ''Islands in the Stream''{{sfn|Hemingway|1970|}} and the Thompson gun used to shoot sharks in that novel; the shotgun used by the father in “A Day’s Wait” to dispense death to quail while his beloved son is lying in bed at home mistakenly expecting his own death. Finally, the last gun for Hemingway was the “double-barreled Boss shotgun with a tight choke” with which he took his own life.{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=563}}

What, finally, can we say about the role of guns in the works of Hemingway and Mailer? They are virtually ubiquitous, sometimes mere everyday equipment, more often objects of profound symbolic and thematic significance. But always, as in life, they loom as instruments that amplify the individual’s influence on the world around him. Whether used to hunt game, commit murder, or fight for a political ideal, every gun is a tool that extends the power of the existential human will in a world that would attempt to render it impotent.

===Citations===
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
*{{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1969 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1950 |title=Across the River and into the Trees |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1936a |chapter=A Day's Wait |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and other Stories |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=34-36 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest|author-mask=1 |date=1929 |title=A Farewell to Arms |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest|author-mask=1 |date=1940 |title=For Whom the Bell Tolls |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest|author-mask=1 |date=1970 |title=Islands in the Stream |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest|author-mask=1 |date=1936b |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and other Stories |chapter=The Killers |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=71-81 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest|author-mask=1 |date=1936c |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and other Stories |chapter=The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=121-154 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest|author-mask=1 |date=1937 |title=To Have and Have Not |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite AV media |last= Siodmak |first=Robert(Dir.) |last2=Lancaster |first2=Burt |title=The Killers |medium=Film |publisher=Universal Pictures |location= |date=1946 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1965 |title=An American Dream |location=New York |publisher=Dial Press |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman|author-mask=1 |date=1979 |title=The Executioner’s Song |location=Boston |publisher=Litte, Brown and Co. |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman|author-mask=1 |date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart and Co. |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman|author-mask=1 |date=1995 |title=Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown and Co. |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman|author-mask=1 |date=1984 |title=Tough Guys Don’t Dance |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman|author-mask=1 |date=1967 |title=Why Are We in Vietnam? |location=New York |publisher=G.P. Putnam’s Sons |pages= |ref=harv}}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway

2025-04-07T02:57:03Z

JKilchenmann: add defaultsort

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''Harlot's Ghost'', ''Bildungsroman'', Masculinity and Hemingway}}
{{MR04}}
{{Byline |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |abstract=''Harlot’s Ghost'' is the ''Bildungsroman'' of the education of Harry Hubbard. It is a novel of protagonist Harry Hubbard’s psychological, moral and social shaping in the course of his journey from youth—adolescence in Harry’s case—to a degree of consolidation of adulthood. ''Harlot'' also is a picaresque of that same education. Harry’s development as a man is marked mainly by his armoring himself ''against'' dangers, not by Harry initiating or escalating aggression. To draw on Hemingway, Harry’s “manly development” brings more of the grace under pressure of early Hemingway characters like Nick Adams and Jack Barnes than of the occasional public belligerence of the late Papa, or of the middle-aged Mailer. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04hic}}

{{dc|dc=H|''arlot’s Ghost'' is the ''Bildungsroman'' of the education}} of Harry Hubbard. In calling ''Harlot’s Ghost'' a ''Bildungsroman'', I mean a novel of protagonist Harry Hubbard’s psychological, moral and social shaping in the course of his journey from youth—adolescence in Harry’s case—to a degree of consolidation of adulthood.{{efn|See {{harvtxt|Moretti|1987}}.}} ''Harlot'' also is a picaresque of that same education.{{efn|By calling it a picaresque I mean a novel of its protagonists’ exploration of various sectors of the social world, like some cliques and stations of the CIA. For further information.}}

Despite a lack of conventional closure, ''Harlot’s'' Harry moves through enough phases of an education toward full manhood for ''Harlot'' to constitute a contribution to the literature of the ''Bildungsroman''. Although the ''Bildungsroman'' typically moves toward a final resolution marked by one or another sort of consolidation of adulthood, whether happily triumphant as in
''David Copperfield'', or adaptive to a substantial degree of misfortune as in
''L’education Sentimental'' or ''Invisible Man'', or disastrous as in ''Illusions Perdue'', such final resolution is not all.{{efn|The relevance of the picaresque is merely touched on here, as the topic, once treated seriously, draws us into the copious details of ''Harlot'' as social document and history (but see notes 5 and 30). On the varieties of English and French ''Bildungsroman'', see {{harvtxt|Moretti|1987}}.}} Lessons that yield impacts on character development occur throughout the temporal course of ''Harlot'', as I will illustrate. Thus, the ''prima facie'' case for ''Harlot'' as ''Bildungsroman'' is not negated by the book’s ending with Harry still substantially unformed and the book’s Omega tale unresolved.

In short, our actually existing, truncated ''Harlot'' offers some of the more episodic developmental satisfactions of the ''Bildungsroman'' (as well as the
picaresque). It is more than the incomplete narrative decried by adversarial
critics like John Simon. And not only does ''Harlot'' offer the cornucopia of
vibrant characters and tales suggested by such celebrants as Wilfred Sheed {{pg|462|463}} and William H Pritchard.{{efn|See John Simon, Wilfrid Sheed, and William F. {{harvtxt|Pritchard|1992}}.}} Its tales enthrall in good part because they cohere around phases of Harry’s education and because they gain force as Harry’s development cumulates, even if it does not conclude.{{efn|It also involves, entertains and instructs the reader in some social history as picaresque, a matter to which I’ll briefly return.}}

Space is not available here for an exhaustive accounting of the developmental episodes in the 1300-page ''Harlot'', but discussion of a few examples of such sequences for some of the work’s key developmental threads can substantiate
my argument. I will focus particularly on episodes in the development of Harry Hubbard’s masculine identity—first, his physical courage, second his sexual maturation and, finally, his manliness among men. These are key to the book and to Harry’s development as something like the “tough guy” aspect of writings by and about Mailer.

Harry’s education in physical courage begins with demands from father Cal Hubbard, during a skiing trip, for a manly Harry. When Harry falls on
a ski slope and does not quickly rise, Cal asks, “Will you rise to your feet,
you quitter?” When Harry indicates that he has broken something, Cal relents,
exclaiming “Your father, Carl Hubbard, is a fathead” and “you’re not
the worst kid.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|pp=123-124}} Harry’s struggle to attain the high
standard of physical courage set by Father Cal is begun.

A second physical challenge of note confronts Harry while rock climbing
“the precipices” with Hugh Tremont “Harlot” Montague. When Hugh leads Harry to a place where “a quick glimpse down . . . proved no easier than standing on the edge of a roof seven stories high that had no railing,”
Harry’s impulse is “to ask Mr. Montague if this was, for certain, the right
place.” Hugh responds, “This climb will test you” and adds that mastering
the test is “[j]ust a matter of learning a new vocabulary”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|pp=147-150}} and a portion, perhaps, of the larger “language of men.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=122}}
Harry meets the test of the precipices, climbing with increased composure
and confidence toward effective mastery of the new manly “vocabulary.” After the precipices, Harry seldom confronts physical dangers that emanate so much from nature as opposed to other people, but the dangers confronted do often include death. A key encounter with the risk of death involves
Harry’s participation alongside Dix Butler and Cuban anti-Castro forces in the landing on Playa Girón. In Harry’s words, “Adrenaline kept prayer at bay” and “[d]eath was a great temple” before which he “stood at the gate.” Yet Harry plays his role well. Indeed he reports, “I remember letting loose a prodigious whoop”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1139}}. Harry has become a happy warrior. {{pg|463|464}} Harry’s sexual development starts late and proceeds slowly and haltingly. There is no talk of High School coitus, no College news of more than some “petting.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=228}} During Company training, the bisexual Rosen and Dix Butler tint the atmosphere around Harry’s sexual development; and early during his Berlin mission Harry has an ambiguous encounter with Dix. He rebuffs an aggressive sexual advance from Dix but images of “Butler’s “knotted buttocks”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=330}} come to him as he approaches climax during his first intercourse, this with a German co-worker named Ingrid. Still, the sex is satisfying: Harry can write that afterwards he “was feeling a good bit better.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=330}} His sex life begins on an essentially heterosexual footing, if not the firmest. Harry’s return from Berlin brings a flowering of romantic and friendly feelings toward Kittredge Gardiner. This blooms most fully in
Harry’s letters to Kittredge from Montevideo station. On a more emphatically
sexual note, the Montevideo mission brings an adultery with Sally Porringer, trysts with many of the ladies of Montevideo’s brothels and fellatio from the Libertad la Lingual, a brothel hermaphrodite distinguished by strong feminine allure and, as it turns out to Harry’s consternation, male genitals.{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=669}} The Miami mission brings Harry intense, well-integrated romantic and sexual experience in the person of Modene Murthy, mistress also
to JFK and mob leader Sam Giancano. Enraptured by Modene’s “sexual lavishness,”
{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=796}} Harry comes, he writes, “into the place I had been expecting to enter all my life.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=818}} Beyond the compass of Modene’s thrall, Harry’s
epistolary romance with Kittredge continues. Although sexual fulfillment
with her lies beyond the extant Alpha, it can be read back from the pages of
the extant Omega on Harry and Kittredge—or Harry and Kittredge and mistress Chloe, a waitress who “could enjoy a lonely customer” and who could laugh at her own sexual escapades “with enough good humor to have been watching her own pornographic romp.{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=18-19}} With Kittredge, <blockquote>after all our years together, we still flew at each other. Kittredge, indeed, was as fierce as one of those wood-animals with claws and sharp teeth and fine fur that you can never quite tame. At its worst, there were times when I felt like a tomcat in with a raccoon. . . . I’d see God when the lightning flashed and we jolted our souls into one another. Afterward, was tenderness, and the sweetest domestic knowledge of how curious and wonderful we were for one another.{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=19}}</blockquote> {{pg|464|465}} In regard to Harry’s education in “manliness among men,” his education in physical courage is relevant, for the latter typically involves meeting challenges in the company of mentors like Cal and Hugh. However, I stress aspects
of Harry’s learning of his trade that entail dealing in a competent and
dignified manner with his male co-workers at the Company. Here one key challenge appears to be attaining a degree of respect and support from mentors Cal Hubbard and Hugh Montague. Another appears to be averting both the self-destructive sexual passivity of Reed Arnold Rosen and the psychopathic
sexual extroversion of Dix Butler.

The trajectory of social learning and personal development that takes up the most of Mailer’s labor and Harry’s years in ''Harlot’s'' Alpha section involves Harry’s
work relations with William King “Wild Bill” Harvey. Early in Alpha, Harvey is Harry’s Station chief for Berlin Station Mission, and he is the focus of Harry’s activities during the Roman phase of Alpha’s final completed section, its “Afterword.” These work relations with “Wild Bill” provide virtual dramatic bookends to the Alpha’s account of Harry’s Company history, such as Mailer completed it. In the Berlin section of Alpha, Harry’s
drama and development largely consist of battles of wits and will with Harvey
over the secret identity of the insubordinate KU/CLOAKROOM who has made light of a request by Harvey and turns out to be none other than Harry himself.{{sfn|Mailer|1991|pp=271-278}} The drama is intensified because Harry is assigned
to uncover KU/CLOAKROOM for Harvey, because the cloak room uncovering is tied to the uncovering of the potentially dangerous Soviet agent KU/WILDBOAR and because Harry’s mentors Cal Hubbard and High Montague are antagonists of Harvey, both for their resented class pedigrees and
their opposition to Harvey in Company battles over the question of Kim
Philby—who proves to be the traitor Harvey had intimated.{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=276}} In their give and take with Harvey, Harry and his mentors emerge unscathed, but the contest between Harry and Harvey is rejoined a decade later in Rome.

In the Roman episode, Harry is charged by Company head Dick Helms with cleaning up the “mess” that Helms states that “Harvey is making of Station in Rome.” Harry must enact Helms’ decision to send Harvey “out to pasture.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|pp=1268-1269}} When Harry confronts Harvey in Rome, where he has been sent to notify him of the termination of his Roman service, he is threatened by a drunk Harvey who says, pointing a gun “thoughtfully” at Harry,
that his seeming dangerousness is not “an act.” To the contrary, he has been
feeling “a real inclination which goes right down into the most honest part {{pg|465|466}} of me to pull that trigger and blow somebody’s name right out of their body.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1273}} True, Harvey next tells Harry “you are relatively safe.” However, he also notes that “[i]f Hugh Montague were present, he “would be a deadman.” Moreover, he plants doubt in Harry’s head about Harlot’s loyalty to the
Company and bids Harry good bye with a head butt that, to use Harry’s words, provides him with a “last gift, a headache to take home with the hangover.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1277}} By Rome, Harry has the toughness to take such “tough guy” behavior in stride.

Although Harlot as ''Bildungsroman'' is principally comprised of the events of Harry’s Alpha manuscript, some parts of Omega are instructively projected back into the year unreached by Alpha. For example, as we have seen, Omega’s references to marital relations between Harry and Kittredge speak rather directly to his “sexual development,” and Rosen’s death and possible suicide may bear a little on the relevance of Rosen’s meaning for Harry. Indeed, Omega suggests to us expectations about how Harry’s tale may have ended, about how the Harry engendered by Mailer in our imaginations might have come to fare in his years beyond those denoted by the extant Omega, about indeed the pattern into which the accounted events of Harry might ideally fit. At the end of the extant Omega, Harry at his clandestine Moscow halfway house gathers his resolve to unveil and address whatever project Montague might pursue. Montague’s project bears on Harry’s relation to himself, for Harry’s chosen vocation, nurtured both by father Cal and mentor Montague, is one of patriot and Company man; and Omega intimates that Montague’s purpose may involve work for and against country or Company, or both. Where circumstance and resolve may lead Harry not
only stimulates our imagination about where our imaginatively projected Harry is headed but about what to make of the Harry we already know. Indeed, both the Harry of the extant ''Harlot’s Ghost'' and the Harry of anymore extended saga we might have imagined, is one whose identity centers around issues of masculine identity—physical, sexual, and social. This is a Harry whose identity conflicts a future encounter with Harlot—after all, a father figure who has been husband to the Mrs. Kittredge Hubbard’s of the final pages of ''Ghost''—would very likely bring to a head. And so Omega highlights main themes in the ''Bildungsroman'' of Harry Hubbard’s education, indeed two ''Bildungsromans''—one on the page and one for our expectation for Harry.

Although I have geared my examples of developmental episodes in ''Harlot'' {{pg|466|467}} as ''Bildungsroman'' to Harry’s “manly” development, I stress that Harry hardly becomes a stereotypical Mailerian “tough guy.” Any theme of “toughness” in Mailer’s depiction of Harry’s development is more one of Harry’s mastery of behaviors befitting his dignified adaptation to the rough and tumble world of the U.S. intelligence establishment than it is one of a domineering tough guy. Harry’s development as a man is marked mainly by his armoring himself ''against'' dangers, not by Harry initiating or escalating aggression. To draw on Hemingway, Harry’s “manly development” brings more of the grace under pressure of early Hemingway characters like Nick Adams and Jake
Barnes than of the occasional public belligerence of the late Papa, or of the
middle-aged Mailer. Although Mailer seems to have shifted into an undue sympathy for personal violence in his depictions of certain fictional characters—most notably Croft and Rojack—his portrait of Harry Hubbard is mainly one of a youth’s adaption to a sometimes dangerous world with equanimity. This is so, even though this adaption does draw on the traditional
“manly” virtues. Harry more resembles Nick Adams rising from innocence to a degree of bravery as when in “The Killers,” despite the warning of “the cook,” Nick warns Ole Andreson that two men are coming to execute him,{{efn|The “cook” cautions Nick, when his employer George suggests warning Andreson, “I don’t like it . . . I don’t like any of it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938|p=286}}}} than he does the coldblooded killers themselves or the resolutely long suffering Jack Brennan of “Fifty Grand.”{{efn|Jack suffers his way through a defeat that can hand him “Fifty Grand” for retirement from bets on his opponent but feels “all busted inside.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938|p=326}}}} Eventually the warrior, as with Dix at
Playa Girón, he is never as heedless of his own mortality as Manuel in “The Undefeated,”{{efn|In an attempt to compensate for awkwardly tripping over a cushion thrown honorifically from the stands, Manuel indulges in a last aggravation of his dying kill, hoping it will revive his threat and the crowd’s appreciation. “He stepped close and jammed the sharp peak of the ''muletta'' into
the bull’s damp muzzle.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938|p=263}}}} nor as coldly self-possessed as the white hunter of “The Short
Happy Life.”{{efn|Hemingway, “The Short Happy Life.” Neither is Hubbard as misogynistic as the hunter Wilson
of “The Short Happy Life” or as the writer-hunter of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” However, he does seem to share something with Wilson and Macomber, who reports just before his demise when he confides in Wilson about that “feeling of happiness before action is going to come.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938|p=33}}}}

In relation to both Hemingway and the ''Bildungsroman'' at once, ''Harlot'' has an interesting precedent in another novel that concerns manliness in the public service amidst a prolonged geopolitical conflict. I refer to Frederick Marryat’s ''Mr. Midshipman Easy'', with its protagonist’s service in the British navy and the Napoleonic wars. This is not ostensibly as distinguished a precedent as ''Great Expectations'' or ''Lost Illusions''.{{efn|Then again, Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf figure with Hemingway among the celebrants of ''Mr. Midshipman Easy''.}} However ''Mr. Midshipman Easy'' is a fine example of the explicit integration of “manly development” into the ''Bildungsroman''. Indeed, it is also a fine example of the integrations
of such development into the picaresque; that is, something of a chronicle
of naval and Iberian theaters of the early Napoleonic Wars.{{sfn|Fulford|2001|pp=ix-xi}}{{efn|Despite ''Harlot’s'' rather abrupt end to Harry’s social odyssey, the novel explores sufficient social worlds for ''Harlot'' to offer many of the satisfactions of the picaresque as well, indeed the satisfaction of an exploration of many agency missions and of a chronicle of the CIA over more than a history-packed dozen-plus years. On the relevance of ''Mr. Midshipman Easy'', this is the work of one of Hemingway’s favorite authors, one right up there with Turgenev.}}
Thus, attention to ''Easy'' may merit our attention as students of Mailer’s relation
to Hemingway as well as to Mailer as author of ''Harlot'' and portrayer of “tough guys.”{{pg|467|468}} The retrospective and anticipatory framing of the central, ''Bildungsromanische'' Alpha portion of Harlot in terms does not much resemble anything in Hemingway. It better resembles the framing of Ralph Ellison’s ''Invisible Man''. Ellison’s protagonist is also in hiding and also frames his own biographical narrative. Indeed, he is doing so “in covert preparation for a more overt action.”{{sfn|Ellison|1952|p=13}} Although this has no focus as sharp as Hugh “Harlot” Montague, Ellison’s unnamed protagonist is like Harry at the close of ''Harlot'', one who is in clandestine residence at Moscow’s Hotel Metropole, gathering his resolve to head off, as Harry puts it, “on a mission whose purpose
I could not name but for the inner knowledge that I knew it.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1279}}

Still, Harry, toward the close of the actually existing ''Harlot'', resembles Hemingway protagonists at the ends of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' in looking forward toward momentous resolutions.
However, in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', these resolutions come in the form of those protagonists’ own imminent deaths.
Harry’s final posture in Harlot is more extroverted, as well as more hopeful. Harry looks to a future that may draw the strings of his life together by acting
to affect a mentor of his youth and the success of his vocation in ways
that will affect public as well as personal fates. Harry’s resolve is more clearly
focused than the abstract resolve of Ellison’s invisible man, who has no precise
agenda for action. It differs from the resolve of Hemingway’s Robert
Jordan at the conclusion of ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' because Jordon’s dying
resolution is confined to a final courageous encounter with death, detached
from any larger public purpose than the possible elimination of another Nationalist
or two in Jordon’s final battle fascist forces. It is, with its relative extroversion and public as well as private purpose, at least as “manly.”{{efn|It is also clearer and more public in intent than the resolves that end many an otherwise unresolved Mailerian narrative: O’Shaughnessy on his way to Yucatan at the end of ''The Deer Park'', Rojack off to Vegas at the end of ''An American Dream'', Menenhetet and little Meni off across the centuries at the conclusion of ''Ancient Evenings''. Perhaps it is not clearer or more public minded than Gilmore’s embrace of execution as a move toward prisoner autonomy in the face of legal obstacles to a public contrition via public execution. However, it is more outwardly oriented, more extroverted. Of course, Harry Hubbard, as a perennially youthful and refreshed American Adam can never be more than a momentary victim of his past or circumstance and must look ever hopefully forward.}}

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

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

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Dickens |first=Charles |date=1850 |title=David Copperfield |location=Philadelphia |publisher=T. B. Peterson |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickens |first=Charles |authormask=1 |date=1863 |title=Great Expectations|location=Mobile |publisher=S.H. Goetzel & Co |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Ellison |first=Ralph |date=1952 |title=Invisible Man |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fulford |first=Tim |date=2001|chapter=Introduction|title=Mr. Midshipman Easy |location=By Captain Frederick Marryat. 1836. New York |publisher=Signet Books|pages=v-xiii|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1940 |title=For Whom the Bell Tolls |location=New York |publisher=Scribner’s |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |authormask=1 |date=1938 |title=The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=New York |publisher=Scribner’s |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |title=The Mailerian Narrative: Structural Dynamics in a Poetics of Mailer’s Fiction |url= |journal=The Mailer Review ||issue= 3.1|date=2009 |pages=397-413 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |location=New York |publisher=G. P. Putnam’s Sons.|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1991 |title=Harlot’s Ghost. |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last1=Mailer |first1=Norman |last2=Lennon |first2=J. Michael |date=2007 |title=On God: An Uncommon Conversation|location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Marryat |first=Captain Frederick |date=2001 |title=Mr.Midshipman Easy |location=New York |publisher=Signet Books|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Moretti |first=Franco |date=1987 |title=The Way of the World: the Bildungsroman in European Culture |location=London |publisher=Verso |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Pritchard |first=William H. |title=Mailer’s Main Event |url= |journal=The Hudson Review |issue=45.1 |date=1992 |pages=149-57 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Simon |first=John |date=September 29, 1991|title=The Company They Keep.” Rev. of ''Harlot’s Ghost'', by Norman Mailer|work=New York Times Book Review |location=late ed., sec 7:1 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Whalen-Bridge |first=John |title=The Myth of the American Adam in Late Mailer |journal=Connotations |issue=5.2-3 |date=1995–1996 |pages=304-21 |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Ernest and Norman (Exit Music)

2025-04-07T02:48:22Z

JKilchenmann: fix error messages

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{{Byline|last=Kaufmann|first=Donald L.}}

NORMAN AND ERNEST

(EXIT MUSIC)

'''DONALD L. KAUFMANN'''

 Author’s Note: Nearly four decades ago I wrote an essay, “The Long Happy Life of Norman Mailer,” an ironic echo of Hemingway’s Francis Macomber’s split-second demise (Modern Fiction Studies, 1971). Norman Mailer’s passing in 2007 inspired this revision of my premature “last words.” 

HEMINGWAY’S SUICIDAL SHADOWS REINFORCED THE LITERARY TRUISM that Mailer was Papa’s heir apparent for the postwar generation. In 1948 Hemingway was revisited in the guise of ''The Naked and the Dead''. John Aldridge and other critics gave their blessings. At Hemingway’s death, Mailer’s eternal debt still echoed: “I shared with Papa the notion, arrived at slowly in my case, that even if one dulled one’s talent in the punishment of becoming a man, it was more important to be a man than a very good writer” (''Advertisements'' 265 ).{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=265}} Even without such “advertisements,” few readers, then or now, could ignore the surface similarities, so massive as to make a kind of Siamese twins out of Hemingway and Mailer.

Both men were exponents of lifestyles that almost push their writing off stage. Both took to notoriety that keeps time to gyrations of Byron in the raw. Mailer’s summer action at Provincetown was a rerun of Hemingway’s action at Key West and Cuba. Papa’s conformation with the outdoors—bulls, fish, game—had its counterpart in Mailer’s gestures at prize fighting, glider flying, hand wrestling. Both abided by the neo-primitive, a distrust of civilization and complication, a demand that man shift to the natural and simple and go back to the tough-guy earth. Females, usually, ended up as second class in fictive worlds that rocked with masculinity.
{{pg|243|244}}
With current American sexuality in flux, mostly spouts of neo-feminism, the Mailer-Hemingway flair for the art and life of the he-man makes for instant hate/love from the literary world. Legends-still-in-the-making cannot not wait for smug cultural certitudes. Future scholars will discover ultimate Mailer-Hemingway clarity. Much will depend on the vagaries of overall “Canon Esteem” and “Legacy Quotients.” A more likely future scenario, both American and global, is, ZIP—near-zero books and readers, a literary dystopia. Already the times may be too much out of joint to include Hemingway and Mailer in the same slice of literary history after all their shadowboxing with posterity ends.

But no such utopias or dystopias are yet here; but still lumping Norman and Ernest in a time capsule makes a generation gap look like a cultural chasm.

Such ongoing cultural and literary fireworks have already pushed Hemingway and Mailer into separate spheres of no-man’s land. In the Hemingway canon, a thin slice of experience repeats itself. Heroes look and sound alike. A code emerges with an inner order. Various settings, moods, and actions almost blur, as if popping from the same narrow but deep bag of ideas and themes. And there is that prose style, unique, that brooks no imitation. Despite all the ado about his writing of hyperaction, violence, madness, and confrontation with the void, Hemingway’s work survives as giving off a sense of unity, coherence and simplicity. Ultimately, there exists a rapport with the natural and the individual .All such trademarks of Hemingway end with Mailer, whose writing features a series of non-heroes without a code. Instead of Hemingway’s mannered serenity, a fictive world “clean and well-lighted” as a foil to the outside void, Mailer lets the outside chaos shape his fictive world. As a chameleon of American letters, Mailer seldom repeats himself. It is either change for the sake of change or, more likely, an attempt to mark time with the headlong rush of American history. Unlike Hemingway, whose culture was ripe for “a separate peace,” Mailer’s culture seems ripe for a separate war.

Language takes to different styles depending on whether the writer’s strategy is peace or war. Hemingway sees language as a way of disengaging from an institutionalism that brings to the individual the effects of a constant condition of war. Silence becomes an index to inner peace, the kind “that passes all understanding,” the best to be had during an age given over to Nada. The answer to complication is simplification—to corruption, purification. This is {{pg|244|245}} how Hemingway’s language works—as a tactic of survival for those at one with the code. His hero’s rapport with relative silence—tight-lipped, coolgestured—reveals one key to how experience can be made more simple and pure. Much of the hero’s pullout from the “messy” establishment rides on verbal omission.Words have become noisy lies, products of the cerebral and the institutional taboos of the Hemingway world. The magic in Papa’s language rests on the ability to keep sensation a one-man show. Hemingway’s ear for cutting experience to the bone gives him a one-man authorial voice and explains why he so mastered the short story, an accomplishment not repeated in the Mailer canon with its fewer and lesser Dreiser jumbo-sized stories. But for Mailer, for decades on a kaleidoscopic search for authorial voices, language poses an altogether different challenge. Words must echo history. Instead of the Hemingway sound of disengagement, Mailer’s language leads to a confrontation with the stuff of American culture, past and present. Since culture continues to undergo shock, language as communication is pushed to its limit. This results in language complicated and experimental. Unlike Hemingway with his one-man style, Mailer has turned into an everyman. Versatility sounds throughout his canon: to read Mailer’s novels—from the neo-naturalism of ''The Naked and the Dead'' to the mixture of bland essay and flip allegory in ''Barbary Shore'' to the aesthetics of magic and mood in ''An American Dream'' to the pop dynamics of ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' and to the “simple declaratives” Hemingway echoes of ''The Executioner’s Song'', and to ''Ancient Evenings'', a time capsule with Melville operatics; and to elevated Le Carré and Clancy genre diction of ''Harlot’s Ghost''; and later “near novels”—''Oswald’s Tale'' or neo-classic “Creative Nonfiction”; and ''The Gospel According to the Sun'' with its show-stopping “Divine First Person Narrator,” and the Mailer literary finale, ''The Time of Our Time'', a six-decade creative tome, is the antithesis of Hemingway’s clean well-lighted pocket dictionary. As a bonus, the stuff of Mailer’s prose is a kind of rhetoric that rocks with grace and wit. It befits a mod Jeremiah who aims to win over readers to the word, an image that has made Mailer a modern master of the essay. His is the language of involvement, the opposite of Hemingway’s voice at the fringe of American experience, almost underground. No other American writer but Hemingway has made it so big with so small a vocabulary while Mailer, in his attempt to interpret what makes his culture tick, uses a vocabulary that pumps without beginning to end.
{{pg|245|246}}
This dissimilarity between Hemingway and Mailer holds when the focus shifts from language to hero, from voice to face. The Hemingway hero enters as a fixture. His face fits the contour of a generation more letdown than lost. His is masculinity plus with a next-door name. He sports a big wound (scarring body and soul) but puts down any self-pity. With heavyweight thought in hock, he leads with his body, seeks out a life of sensation with much coolness and courage until hedonism turns into his religion. If Nada still bothers, the hero counters with an ironic lip and enough cosmic stoicism to insure belief in selfhood. Such a lifestyle clings to the Hemingway hero with little variation—Nick Adams, Jake Barnes, Frederick Henry, Robert Jordan, and others all resembling the same Papa with the same message. The code to be emulated enables an individual to erect a no-man’s land between himself and the establishment. At least there is survival with dignity as Hemingway’s heroism passes on a vital advertisement that even if God is dead, man, alone, is very much alive.

Any such hope fades with what passes for heroism in the Mailer canon. Here a hero is defined as someone to be emulated in terms of cultural survival. But America is cancerous, too sick a culture to justify automatic survival and thus more ripe for villainy than heroism. As a result, Mailer takes to a diverse and tentative approach to heroism that had turned out non-heroes, antiheroes and, at best, heroes-in-training. The wartime culture of ''The Naked and the Dead'' offers five soldiers—Ridges, Goldstein, Valsen, Hearn, and Croft—whose heroics are halfhearted and part-time. In ''Barbary Shore'', the theme of mankind drifting toward barbarism squelches any vital heroism. As for ''The Deer Park'', Sergius O’Shaugnessy (the cool one) and Marion Faye (the cold one) are experts in styles of sensibility that mark them as villains in a sickly sentimental land. Stephen Rojack, in the shadow of hipsters and “White Negroes,” acts as a “philosophical psychopath” who exposes the nerve of cancer in ''An American Dream'' and ends more the murderer than savior of his culture: a happening in language serves as makeshift heroism in ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''

An omniscient “D.J.” (disc jockey) in a way-out version of the “Voice of America” spews out a one-way dialogue at the heart of cultural abyss. Any reader, bothered by books without overt classic heroes, can tune in or turn off the Word as hero. In his socio political work—''The Armies of the Night'' and ''Miami and the Siege of Chicago'' and ''Some Honorable Men''—Mailer playacts as hero-narrator, camouflaged with all the tonal acrobatics of self as third person {{pg|246|247}}(shades of Joyce’s ''Stephen Hero'' and ''Portrait''). And there is Gary Gilmore, the Maileresque philosophical soulful All-American Murderer, and, ultra pop celebs, Ali and Marilyn, and super-stud artists or writers, Picasso and Henry Miller; and the “historic” Lee Harvey Oswald, the eternal “suspect” J.F.K. killer, subtitled, “An American Mystery.” But there is no mystery hero in Mailer’s idiosyncratic tome, ''Time of Our Time''. Just open it and out will rush a one-man’s “The American Language” in all its “Baroque Glory.” Yet, there remains a Manichean-based “hero” mystery—Mailer’s final project and protagonist. During his last days, Mailer envisioned a trilogy centered on Adolf Hitler, his generation’s consummate human evil. No human heroism here, just villainy, with a Nazi-SS point of view, and no counter American in sight. Finally the Mailer hero has stopped wrestling with tangible American culture. All in all, there is little chance (so sayeth posterity) that Mailer will duplicate Hemingway’s feat of making a mode of heroism and his name inseparable.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s split over the hero carries over to their authorial tone. Unlike Mailer, whose rhetoric of self sends out an array of attitudes throughout his work, Hemingway usually lets his authorial voice play it straight.Whether fiction or nonfiction, Hemingway relies on an expertise of total experience to cut down on tonal ambiguity. When it does occur— playful or serious or in between—such ambiguity clings to the work or to the reader and rarely refers to Hemingway himself. One authorial mask that Papa rejects is that which undercuts the authority of self, especially any tone that smacks of self-parody. Papa, at bottom, is serious. As Carlos Baker and others have pointed out, Hemingway as man often takes to the gross lie, a way to make his life as jazzy as his art. But once the claims of art intrude, he subscribes to a law of authenticity, fact or pseudo-fact done up in a style that tells it the way it is. Autobiography passes into fiction. As for nonfiction, fact becomes the final word. No matter how well he could hunt, fish, fight bulls or men, Hemingway’s greatest and most lasting gift is with words whose main power derives from an authority of self.

But America’s current increasingly reader-free, flashy-iffy pop culture for decades ran counter to any one-man expertise as a serious writer. But the expatriate Hemingway’s fame occurred in the early 1920s,with America on the brink of worldwide literary acclaim. Mailer’s overnight Byronic literary debut with his “Big War Novel” happened with America on the brink of “culture shock” that erupted in the 1960s. Quickly the Hemingway-Mailer time {{pg|247|248}} frames differed. As Norman weated over a disappointing Barbary Shore, Ernest was surfing to literary heights with ''The Old Man and the Sea''. Clearly, literary times were out of joint. Mailer’s new radicalized America superseded any possible tonal uniformity with Papa. See ''Advertisements for Myself'', the Mailer opus with underlined homage to the new “Cultural Papa,” mass media. Granted, Hemingway knew how to create notoriety (becoming an instant celebrity in his own time) by doing “tricks,” his way, cool and sly, with the voracious media. But by Mailer’s time, mega-media (no less) demanded excess, derring-do, and out-and-out egomania. Mailer complied with inflated prose and personality. In Hemingway’s day, a writer’s life could be (should be) derring-do, but a writer’s craft (his art) should be highly disciplined and aesthetically grounded. But by Mailer’s time, derring-do had to be both on and off the page.

''Advertisements'' introduces the necessary hard sell. Mailer’s tonal grotesqueries range from self-exalting arrogance to self-pitying confessions. What also shapes such a personality plus is a style of existentialism that leads Mailer into “those areas of experience where no expert is competent” (qtd. in Kaufmann 111). More at home with the radical, the tabooed and the mysterious, Mailer veers from the Hemingway rapport with a clean well-lighted slice of experience. Unlike Papa’s assimilation of autobiography, Mailer makes do with bits and pieces of his life revised to fit his fiction. This makes for writing spiced with sound effects of a pseudo-self. During the media craze for privacy, Mailer finds that aping Papa and restricting the big lie to real life is superfluous. Notoriety is automatic once an American writer makes it big. That is the iron law of mass media.As a result, the authorial voice in Mailer’s nonfiction runs on an overload of tone—arrogant, perceptive, naughty, defiant, confessional, scatological, humble, profane, candid, and so on. Such a barrage of attitudes blurs the images of Mailer as man and Mailer as writer. At times, readers cannot distinguish between the authentic and the phony and between the sincere and the put-on, as if Mailer is a kind of writer on a tightrope straddled between wisdom and nonsense. Irony, Hemingway’s key tactic for insulating the me from the not-me, can become in Mailer’s hands a radical extension of self, from the heights of adulation to the depths of parody. Such is the price—seer or clown?—that Mailer pays for his refusal to settle on expertise not heavyweight enough to confront the ills of his culture.

The fact that Mailer is more the heavyweight thinker than Hemingway points to how the American milieu has grown evermore a mix of the high-tech {{pg|248|249}} and lowbrow: the result, the current obsession with the “touchy-feely,” and the chic media creation, the celebrity writer, billed as the “Popular Culture Philosopher.” Hemingway’s earlier aversion toward “Big Thinking” stems from his believing the roots of American experience to be (at that late date) still tied to the frontier. Thus he sees the urban and industrial side of the American Twenties as transplanted Europe, foreign to what really makes Americans tick—nature as the ultimate test for man, alone. Papa’s resultant flair for the neo-primitive and raw sensations does away with the intellectual style of art. Ideology weighs down fiction. Thought, even in nonfiction, should be cut to the bone. The intensity of self, tuned to the body, not the mind, becomes Hemingway’s touchstone for art.

But Mailer takes art far outside the heart of self into the glare of history, American style. Neo-primitivism, in the Mailer style, also enshrines the role of sensations but only as an adjunct to a more vital mission of the artist— “making a revolution in the consciousness of our time” (''Advertisements'' 17).{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=17}} Art, as a style of revolution, feeds on ideas, especially those that expose the underside of American experience, the roots of orgy, orgasm, psychopathy, violence, suicide, and the rest of the cultural abyss. Hemingway’s frontier— as an index to American experience—is art that is dead-end. In its place, and saturating the entire Mailer canon, stands the image of America as worldwide number one, a modern Rome, the undisputed shaper of current history, the key to why Mailer’s writing remains a “peculiarly American statement.” It also makes Mailer (despite his protestations to the contrary) one of America’s arch-intellectual writers of all time. Hemingway’s standard of art has gone into reverse.

Even those themes—sex, violence, death—which look to be Hemingway hand-me-downs are worked over by Mailer with a scope and depth never attempted by Papa. Hemingway’s mode of sex, he-man’s “pleasures on the run,” strikes a Mailer reader as a throwback to the pristine sex of yore. Of course, the Hemingway hero does not make love to unpolluted maids on horsehair sofas. Nick Adams meets his quota of perverts, and Jake Barnes does the can-can with occasional whores as expatriate homosexuals cruise Left Bank bars. But nowhere in the Hemingway canon is there anything that matches Mailer’s souped-up probe into the guts of current American sexuality on a 3-D online “XXX” rated romp. In his earlier fiction, Mailer takes apart autoeroticism, onanism, and narcissism, a prelude to the analism, orgy, incest, “apocalyptic orgasm,” and other erotic cousins of violence and {{pg|249|250}} murder in ''An American Dream'' and ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' In the latter, Mailer takes Hemingway’s dictum that the real obscene words are institutional abstractions (such as “honor” or “patriotism”) to a linguistic point of no return. “Vietnam” sports so-called obscenities by the hundreds before it is finally mentioned twice on the last page. “Vietnam,” for Mailer, is the only dirty word in the book. The sexual and cultural revolution in American letters has put Mailer’s style of sex almost outside Hemingway’s shadow.

The same holds for the theme of violence. Hemingway, as expected, snubs cerebral comment and sticks to dramatic action. His hero finds violence the key unit of sense experience, the most natural way of discovering the sources of one’s own feeling. When he confronts violence, all concerns about the not-me (all those institutionalized obscenities) fade; in their place, there is only a lust for survival, a passion for life, self-contained, unique. Philip Young and others have traced Hemingway’s obsession with violence to “traumatic neurosis” or a permanent shock after a wartime Big Wound, which makes for suicidal urges that must be diverted and purged through the destruction of other things. This may well be true, but Hemingway stays silent and lets his critics supply a rationale to his style of violence.

Again, Mailer does the expected, doing Papa one better. Not content with just dramatizing a mode of violence, Mailer adds his own ideology. In “The White Negro,” he projects from hipsterism the “philosophical psychopath” or “the antithetical psychopath who extrapolates from his own condition, from the inner certainty that his rebellion is just, a radical vision of the universe which thus separates him from the general ignorance, reactionary prejudice, and self-doubt of the more conventional psychopath”(''Advertisements'' 343).{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=343}} Once this psychopathy is set up as a revolutionary force against the establishment, Mailer focuses on how philosophic psychopaths create “a new nervous system for themselves” (345).{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=345}} This sounds like a see-all composite of Rojack, Gilmore, Oswald, and other hip derring-do “tough guys.” Hemingway’s noted—“killing is not a feeling that you share”—passes into the complexity of Mailer’s “authentic violence,” an existential way of seeing the roots of emotions during a violent act. The ancient intimacy of violence of “''et tu, Brute?''” is updated to explain the zest for love and the reign of violence in a modern Rome. In America, killing (contrary to Papa) has become a last ditch way to share a feeling that love will conquer all.

Those changing times have also revised the concept of death, long a thematic trademark of Hemingway and Mailer. Death as terminal experience {{pg|250|251}} is what the Hemingway code is all about. Existence before or after death, no such nonsense! Courage spiced with stoicism is all the hero can muster against his ultimate encounter with nothingness. ''Carpe diem'' will, in the meantime, keep Nada at bay. But Hemingway’s cosmic blackout does not hold for Mailer, who rejects old-time God-is-dead and seeks a mode of eschatology that fits modern times. In Mailer’s existential theology, God is much alive but “not all-powerful; He exists as a warring element in a divided universe” (380). Old-time Manichaeism takes on a modern look as Mailer sees drama flare up at the hub of the universe: “If God and the Devil are locked in an implacable war, it might not be excessive to assume their powers are separate, God the lord of inspiration, the Devil a monumental bureaucrat of repetition” (''Time'' 1233). {{sfn|Mailer|1998|p=1233}} The 2007 Mailer/Lennon’s “An Uncommon Conversation,” entitled On God, offers final Mailer words on his “iffy” theology. Of course, such an existential vision makes death a mere workable mystery. Unlike Hemingway’s pinpointing death as a one-way ultimate experience, Mailer runs variations on the concept of death—from the “naked knowledge of wartime to the sophisticated techniques of the concentration camps, death “unknown, unhonored and unremarked” (''Advertisements'' 338).{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=338}} He most resembles Hemingway when he approaches death from an existential standpoint—death as the most exact way of defining the self. But in his later work, Mailer passes beyond Papa’s orbit into the mysticism of death“as sea change, voyages, metamorphoses” (''Cannibals'' 328).{{sfn|Mailer|1966|p=328}} Rojack’s “private kaleidoscope of death” is as much his as his culture’s(''American Dream'' 7).{{sfn|Mailer|1965}} Hemingway’s use of death as the ultimate definer of a man still appeals to Mailer, but not as much as death as a crucial definer of a culture.

The one area that creates a sophistication gap is political thought. Next to Mailer, Hemingway comes out naïve. His journalism has its quota of surface accounts of revolutions gone astray. The action spills outside America onto the world scene as Communists and Fascists vie with each other. Hemingway’s emphasis stays pragmatic; his is the politics of action, immediate and tangible, with issues clear-cut. As for speculation and theory, Papa declares “a separate peace” from all that political claptrap. But Mailer’s salvos on the ills of America shift into total war. What stays fixed as a target is America’s political horror—totalitarianism. The writer as political warrior now employs new literary weaponry, heightened nomenclature, “The Novel as History,” known earlier as “Art Journalism,” and more recently, “Creative Nonfiction.” But in 1968, the award-winning ''The Armies of the Night'', Mailer’s {{pg|251|252}} “hybrid novel” still remains a literary revelation. Writers, on the cultural or political beat, now can do it many ways—as fact or fancy, in either first or third person, or other multiple tones and moods. (Hemingway, if still around, would have either smirked or shuddered.) But not media-crazed 1968 America. Mailer (also Vidal and Capote) achieves media stardom. The new Mailer calendar now features big-time television appearances as sage and seer; and, in print media, numerous essays, articles, interviews, and other “talking points” literary ephemera. And, of course, multi-books on politics (''Some Honorable Men'') or pop culture happenings, the Marilyn books and the Ali fights. And don’t forget Mailer’s “live” campaign for the New York City mayoralty. Politics and culture literature, at such protean times, entirely blur.(The literary world once thought that History itself cannot be invented.) Hemingway’s world is dead. But not for Mailer. A few years before his death, he interrupts his massive Hitler biography, to publish a slim soft-cover, entitled ''Why Are We at War?'' (2003). (No Vietnam—this time, Iraq.) Until the end, Mailer remains a literary warrior and, perhaps a history-maker.

Gone are Papa’s days when fiction—in the hands of a master—seems stranger than truth and, not surprisingly, with Mailer’s canon in an orbit unknown to Hemingway’s, this is also true of aesthetics. Critics agree that aesthetic thought is not one of Hemingway’s strong points. Besides the oftresurrected “principle of the iceberg” of ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway usually limits aesthetics to his own problems as writer and gray-bearded advice to young writers. Papa’s dicta include the high premium on honesty and imagination in fiction,with an accent on the sensuous and concrete, a muscled version of Henry James’ “felt life.” The abstract and other cerebral fallout he relegated to the essay. For the writer, action is rooted in his inner life; its highest quality turns into the stuff of fiction. To do any more with aesthetics would be superfluous to Hemingway, who learned early how to key up and measure out his life for his art, a tactic that later times denied to Mailer.

If Papa (like Byron) woke up in the twenties to find himself famous, Mailer wakes up in a postwar milieu intent on converting overnight fame into instant notoriety. ''Advertisements for Myself'' brims with personality jitters as Mailer confronts a media-minded America given over to pushing writers into the limelight, Horatio Algers as entertainers. Show business and cutthroat competition are a writer’s touchstones for survival in an electric {{pg|252|253}} age and Mailer reacts with an electric personality. Unable to do smooth autobiographical fiction in the Hemingway manner, Mailer begins living, rather than writing novels. This results in aesthetic stance and thought that hover between the sublime and banal. The overload of egocentricity, courage, and honesty that Mailer expends on his public image puts his aesthetics outside past norms of separating a man from his work, an artist from his mission. For Hemingway’s “iceberg,” he substitutes a metaphor of writers as “pole vaulters”—“a being who ventured into the jungle of his unconscious to bring back a sense of order or a sense of chaos. . . . If a writer is really good enough and bold enough he will, by the logic of society, write himself out onto the end of a limb which the world will saw off. He does not go necessarily to his death, but he must dare it” (''Cannibals'' 108).{{sfn|Mailer|1966|p=108}} As a mode of literary survival and self-preservation, Mailer projects on the national scene a panorama of aesthetic possibilities—self images of the writer as prize fighter, as army general, as a cultural spokesman, soulful revolutionary, and so on—a razzle-dazzle public image whose strategy aims to “influence the history of my time a little bit” (''Advertisements'' 269).{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=269}} Such a grandiose goal seems within reach, thanks to the literary establishment’s belated taking up with Mailer. But if some critics still insist that Mailer’s image as a writer ends up more clown than sage, Mailer would blast back with the ironic fact that his inner life is already a matter of public record in ''Time or Life'' or Talk Radio or ''Vanity Fair'' or blogs or Google, and that Hemingway’s “principle of the iceberg” sounds quaint during a time given over to disappearing books and “brain modification” and ubiquitous computers and “identity theft.”Mailer also eclipses and excels Papa in the realm, usually reserved for academe and prestigious publications—serious literary criticism. The Mailer canon sports many tidbits on the craft and tribulations of “The Writing Life.” Typically, Mailer, as literary critic, is candid and blustery, usually softened by surplus charm and wit and, an unusual gift, serendipity, and, at bottom, some genuine literary heft and depth. Thus far, this phase of Mailer has been either ignored or underrated. His “Some Thoughts about Writing” has been collected and published in 2003, aptly entitled ''The Spooky Art''. By contrast, Hemingway’s life seems the more “spooky.”

As for present and future biographers of Hemingway and Mailer, they can only note a growing incompatibility in lifestyles. Mailer’s career, especially its later stages, points up the absurdity of any conscious imitation of classic Hemingway. Even the two World Wars, supposedly Hemingway’s and {{pg|253|254}} Mailer’s twin springboards, make for little harmony. In the South Pacific, Private Mailer with his cool rifle and hot dream of being first with the big postwar novel looks bush league next to the legendary adventures of a warrior-Papa who (as an over-aged World War II war correspondent) still takes a lion’s share of frontline action around Paris and elsewhere. Hemingway’s “big” wounds—237 mortar fragments from World War I plus countless late injuries—look like high romance when set against the black eyes and bruised fists and other more prosaic variations of Mailer’s peace “in our time.” Mailer’s world—Dachau, Hiroshima, Watts, man on the moon, 9/11, and Iraq—is tone-deaf to the Byronic rumblings of a writer whose shadow loomed over bullrings, safaris, and big and little wars. This disparity in lifestyles comes out in their fiction. “Big Two-Hearted River,” which features Nick Adams—a chunk of composite Hemingway—the wounded outdoor man who embodies the American loner’s last rapport with nature, passes into the Mailer canon as the surrealistic autobiography of ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' where an American eclectic voice chimes in and beeps out an overkill world of Heinrich Himmler. A second go-round with Papa’s classic life was off the American literary map, and this Mailer well knew.

But Mailer and the rest of the literary world had to ride out Hemingway’s grotesque finale, a suicide that made his life in retrospect read like terminal writer’s block. Prior to the end, the Hemingway style as a viable force in American letters had already been eclipsed, even Papa’s twilight triumph in ''The Old Man and the Sea'', despite its fine prose, still reeked with the lastditch happenings of hero, code, and the rest of Hemingway’s message, tied neatly with upbeat humanism. An old Cuban fisherman’s stoic victory over a big fish sounded hollow to Mailer’s generation, more in tune with the earlier Hemingway whose fictive world was rooted in an encounter with Nada without any fishy ''deus ex machina''. A big fish or any ready made index to identity was a metaphysical luxury out of sight for Mailer’s generation. Papa was human after all. Like most men, Hemingway has lacked the ultimate “grace under pressure,” that of growing old. The Hemingway message in the sixties had a last-minute relevancy for the middle-aged. Or, as Mailer said— in regard to ''An American Dream'' and how he cast Rojack (age 44) in the Hemingway mold—a reader “really enjoys Hemingway” when middle-aged, when ripe for “that attack on masculinity that comes about the time when life is chipped away” (qtd. in Kaufmann 124–125).{{sfn|Kaufmann|1969|pp=124-125}} Mailer was speaking, three years after a death that had shocked both him and America:
{{pg|254|255}}
<blockquote> I think Ernest hates us by the end. He deprived us of his head. It does not matter so much whether it was suicide or an accident— one does not put a gun barrel in one’s mouth, tickle the edge of an accident and fail to see that people will say it’s suicide. Ernest, so proud of his reputation. So fierce about it. His death was awful. Say it. It was the most difficult death in America since Roosevelt. One has still not recovered from Hemingway’s death. One may never. (''Presidential'' 103){{sfn|Mailer|1963|p=103}} </blockquote>

Then, Mailer tried to clean up a “messy” suicide by substituting an existential ritual that made Papa’s “deed . . . more like a reconnaissance from which he did not come back.” Mailer’s imagination saw Hemingway each morning “go downstairs secretly in the dawn, set the base of his loaded shotgun on the floor, put the muzzle to his mouth, and press his thumb into the trigger. There is a no-man’s-land in each trigger.” To enter here became Hemingway’s (a skilled hunter’s) final expertise, to press as far as possible, to recover “the touch of health” by daring to “come close to death without dying.” Mailer ended by suggesting that this may not be suicide: “When we do not wish to live, we execute ourselves. If we are ill and yet want to go on, we must put up the ante. If we lose, it does not mean we wished to die” (104–105). Mailer’s version of Hemingway’s death (not meant for official biographies) was his way of “recovering” from a literary fact—that Papa’s suicide (even by any other name) had instantly converted all his life into an American tragedy, a total experience that any other American writer would find suicidal (no joke intended) to follow.

Norman Mailer didn’t. He must have concluded that Hemingway’s death reflected how void of grace American old age still is. Mailer died on November 10, 2007, and his dying provided some telling final words on the Mailer-Hemingway connection. (I should add that during Mailer’s final three years, I was periodically privy to Mailer and to his inner circle. I have either seen or heard firsthand some of this Mailer epilogue.)

At the 2005 Norman Mailer Society conference, in Provincetown, members were offered souvenir tokens, key holders attached to a miniature pair of finger-sized red and white boxing gloves, with the caption, “Norman {{pg|255|256}} Mailer Takes on America.”At that time, Mailer, in his early eighties, was already visibly aging. He might have amended that caption to read, “Norman Mailer Takes on Norman Mailer.” His opponent was his body. His mind, probably from enriched family DNA, thus far, had decided to “sit this bout out.” His body, subject to decades of excess, was finally saying “enough.” It also more and more whispered such dire sounds as “bedridden” and “house arrest.” This also meant no more moneyed celebrity outings for the octogenarian writer, still the reputed “Super Papa,” and also the blue chip “Good Family Man” who (unlike Hemingway) befriended ex-wives and supported the offspring. Still, “not enough,” said his stubborn body, after decades of supporting a literary celebrity too often “off the page” and “out” on the edge—what some might call “crypto-suicidal.”

Was this an existential Mailer-Hemingway combo attempt to “fix” the bout? Would Norman do an Ernest encore?

Some of the early signs said “either way.” The Mailer mind was on the march. Alzheimer’s was not welcomed here. Each day he religiously assaulted the New York Times “toughie” crossword puzzles, usually to his advantage. Much of his time was still devoted to various writing projects—that steady grind along with other mental feats. The Mailer mind, like those deathless counterparts in ''Ancient Evenings'', seemed steely hip and immune to termination.

Other signs played more overt Papa music. What resounded from Mailer’s refusal to become housebound was his battle with the dreaded wheelchair (echoes of Hemingway’s “Old Man” and “Big Fish”). Reports out of his Provincetown home told of his herculean attempts to stay robust and mobile. Such were his indoor military manners, but what about the more showy outdoors and the public image of Mailer-being-Mailer? What result was battleground vanity? Using a “walker” was a no-show, most unbecoming for the (another Papa echo) “undefeated.” Instead of the old folk’s “walker,” the Mailer choice—the “telling” tough guy sleek twin dark walking canes and yes, more Hemingway grace notes: Papa’s matador with his code-blessed minimal artsy cape. Lastly, the public Mailer’s outer countenance: massive stress and pain, notwithstanding, the sustained and composed image of a laconic stoic, a muted reminder of Hemingway’s “grace under pressure.”

The end-result: a surprising engaging, elderly avuncular Mailer, once again stage center. I witnessed in a South Florida auditorium, its audience hushed, on seeing the featured speaker’s laborious Mailer reading Mailer, spiced with meaty but cozy cultural nuggets, the focus on his current favorite, the mystery of creative writing, or ''The Spooky Art''. There was an {{pg|256|257}} encore (surprise), for those fortunate admirers able to get up close and personal and seeing, almost touching, healthy gray hair, and, still a muscled toned face, and that prime-time Irish glint and smile. Had those giddy 1960s made a comeback? But this was still February 2007, and those up close soon realized that today’s feature performer had but one imperfect ear, and that his body was locked in last ditch combat.

Yet, there was some leftover Mailer celebrity magic, especially, when the Mailer Society met in Provincetowntown, where the Mailers (Norman and wife, Norris Church) held an open house. These parties were an instant follow-up of Mailer’s live dramatics at the nearby, legendary Provincetown Playhouse. Now our host was ready for closet drama. Such stage hopping rejuvenated and morphed octogenarian Norman into a vintage host. He stationed himself room-center, seated, with his twin parked canes. He was the hub, the party’s only main artery. About one hundred guests took turns, passed by and pressed flesh, hearts, and minds. All later agreed that the Mailer mind remained indomitable. At mid-party, guests could believe in miracles—endless Mailer parties, what with Norman, intermittently, swigging whiskey, flirting with young, sexy, guests, still dispensing loads of rapturous charm and wit, but (below the party’s radar) the party-room’s one indomitable brain knew that a “war” was going on.

What those partygoers did not see was the hands-off sign on Mailer, what the insiders, supposedly respected, a warning temporarily deactivated, for this time, under this roof. On these open house occasions, guests, including some of his own family, and, of course, neighbors and friends and Society members, in short, this onetime extended family could be hands-on. Hence, those wishful images of the host as an ephemeral “Life of the Party,” reinforced by the reputed Norman Mailer, the good Family Man (no Hemingway overtones here). But those partygoers, oblivious to “hands off,” did not see what the usually mannerly Mailer did when I tried to help him up a steep building ramp. His twin canes miscued. He lost his balance and I, instinctively, grabbed and held him and he glared and pushed me off, saying, “Never do that again.” I nodded and obeyed. His strategy for survival was his and nobody else’s. Few, if any, knew the totality of Mailer’s wrestling with death.

In his final weeks, amid media whispers of overnight Boston hospital “check-ups,” Mailer was “failing.” Dire Provincetown reports told of morning and midnight tussles with newspaper crosswords and other mindboosters, and sweat over the ongoing Hitler book. There were in-house {{pg|257|258}} endurance feats, such as prolonged torturous twin-caned inching, alone, to use the bathroom. All indoor and outdoor activity had become an obstacle course. The last battle alert read: his body, situation hopeless.

Hemingway did his own mop-up. Suicide, no less. And where was his beloved code? His end was not clean and well lighted. His last act, instead, was darkly done and downright messy. Mailer’s version of Papa’s final act was creative, revealing much more about Mailer and the extremities of the “Spooky Art.”Hemingway’s suicide remains more mystery than fact.Instead of a lengthy tell-all letter, a shotgun in the mouth was his final word. America’s famed literary Papa, at the end, seemingly sought a separate peace.

Mailer, instead, remained Mailer.

One of the most eloquent maxims on confronting one’s own death remains: “Do not go gentle into that good night”—so said Dylan Thomas with his battle cry: and Norman Mailer, seemingly, was “going” in the midst of a one-man war (Thomas 791). No separate peace here. Mailer ended, an existential warrior more and more resembling an aging and defiant Nick Adams but certainly not this hero’s creator. On November 10, 2007, in a Boston Hospital, Mailer closed his eyes for the final time, and no Hemingway in sight.

===Citations===
{{Reflist}}

===WORKS CITED===

*{{cite book|last=Kaufmann|first=Donald L.|title= Norman Mailer: The Countdown (The First Twenty Years).|publisher=Carbondale:Southern Illinois UP|date=1969|ref=harv}}

*{{cite book|last=Mailer|first=Norman|title= Advertisements for Myself. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons|date=1959|ref=harv}}

*{{cite book|last=Mailer|first=Norman|author-mask=1|title= .An American Dream. New York:|publisher=Dial Press, |date=1965|ref=harv}}

*{{cite book|last=Mailer|first=Norman|author-mask=1|title= Cannibals and Christians.|location=New York: |publisher=Dial Press,|date=1966|ref=harv}}

*{{cite book|last=Mailer|first=Norman|author-mask=1|title=The Presidential Papers.|location=New York:|publisher=G.P. Putnam’s Sons,|date=1963|ref=harv}}

*{{cite book|last=Mailer|first=Norman|author-mask=1|title=The Time of Our Time.|location=New York:|publisher=Random House,|date=1998|ref=harv}}

*{{cite book|last=Thomas|first=Dylan|title=“Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.”|series=The Norton Introduction to Literature.|editor= Ed.Alison Booth,J. Paul Hunter and Kelly J. Mays.|edition=Shorter 9th |location=New York: |publisher=W.W. Norton,|date=2005|ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ernest and Norman Exit Music}}

[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer

2025-04-07T02:33:35Z

JKilchenmann: fix Whalen-Bridge two authors

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{{byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|abstract=In both Ernest Hemingway and [[Norman_Mailer|Norman Mailer]], their rhetoric announces a new beginning, a new Genesis. But, unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of God, providence, a rational universe. But how does the residual God-language in Hemingway and Mailer actually work? Is grace—a crucial Judeo-Christian reality—to be replaced by ''nada'', signaled in Hemingway's "A Clean Well-Lighted Place"? Or, in an absurd post-human world, does narrative "make sense of life?" Is God-language part of the rhetoric of modernity—or its antithesis? Paradoxically, both may be true.|url=https://projectmailer.net/pm/Raymond_M._Vince}}

{{cquote|This book is fiction. But there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.|author=Ernest Hemingway|source=''A Moveable Feast''{{sfn|Hemingway|2009|p=230}}}}

{{cquote|[I]t is the author’s contention that good fiction—if the writer can achieve it—is more real, that is, more nourishing to our sense of reality, than non-fiction. . . . novelists have a unique opportunity—they can create superior histories out of an enhancement of the real, the unverified, and the wholly fictional.|author=Norman Mailer|source=''Harlot's Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1287-8}}}}

{{dc|dc=W|hat is the rhetoric of modernism?}} Is the Modern novel “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God?”{{sfn|Lukács|1971|p=88}} If so, why do religious themes still appear? Are they the Cheshire Cat’s grin, nostalgic echoes of a vanished age, cosmic footprints left in the wasteland of Modernity? Or are they rumors of grace? How does God-language function in the work of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and Norman Mailer (1923–2007)?

This issue could be a problem in narrative theory, constructing modernity, contemporary religion, or all three. In any case, why does religion persist? Why is some God-language compatible with Modernity—and some not? I shall first discuss the rhetoric of Modernism, then Modernity and disenchantment, before moving on to my selection of God-language of Hemingway and Mailer. I briefly emphasize the sacred, indeterminacy, and grace.{{pg|331|332}}
=== The Rhetoric of Modernism ===

The epigraphs speak of the role of fiction in our lives. For Mailer, paradoxically, good fiction nourishes “our sense of reality.” For Hemingway, fiction “may throw some light” on the facts. The strange relationship between fiction and fact seems linked with Modernism—and the problematic nature of “reality.” I call this the ''rhetoric'' of Modernism. But is that rhetoric—seen in the Modern novel—necessarily linked with secularization? Pericles Lewis suggests that it may be the following:

<blockquote>If the novel is indeed the art form of secularization, “the representative art-form of our age” in Lukács’s words, and if modernity is indeed a secular age, then we could expect the modern novel to be doubly secular. {{sfn|Lukács|1971|p=93}} Many major novels of the early twentieth century do in fact seem to represent a “world that has been abandoned by God,” inasmuch as virtually none of their characters expresses any concrete religious faith and no gods intervene in the course of the action.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}}{{efn|“Novels of the period that do address theological themes more directly seem to be excluded from the modernist canon precisely because of their express interest in religion . . .”{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=690}}}} </blockquote>

But does the novel represents a world “abandoned by God”—or is this statement more hyperbole than argument? Either way, how do we explain these vestiges of God-language? Is this merely etymology—like using ''Wednesday'' without necessarily invoking the god ''Woden?'' I suggest that God-language has more significance than that. But what is the rhetoric of Modernism? Here are two samples.

We start with Hemingway and ''In Our Time.''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} At the end of chapter two’s vignette, we read three sentences: “There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} The impact of war, fragmenting of form, juxtaposing of birth and death, distancing of trauma, the phrase ''scared sick looking'' stripped of its subject, the absence of any clear antecedent to the pronoun ''it,'' the naturalistic symbol of rain—combine in Hemingway’s language. Shaped by modern warfare, in a collage of disturbing images, here is Hemingway’s innovative rhetoric. In its way, ''In Our Time'' is as significant culturally as T. S. Eliot’s ''The Waste Land'' (1922), published three years earlier. Matthew Stewart suggests that this “remains the most insistently experimental of all his books because it is the product of the one {{pg|332|333}}period of his life when he participated intently in a literary scene, and the temper of that milieu was distinctly modernist.”{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=12}}

Two decades later, a parallel to Hemingway’s rhetoric is Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{sfn|Mailer|1948}} Toward the end of the novel, we find two sentences: “Quite naturally he assumed the point and led the platoon toward the pass. A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine-gun bullet which passed through his chest.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=602}} Like Hemingway, the language is sparse and fragmented, the tone objective. There is human rationality in one sentence and violent, irrational death in the next. Yet, the irrationality of Lt.Hearn’s death comes through the exercise of all too rational choices by others—those who designed and manufactured the machine-gun and bullet, the Japanese soldier who fired the fatal shot, and the murderous machinations of Staff Sergeant Croft that led Hearn to that particular point.

The Great War was to be “the war to end all wars.” History demonstrated that proposition to be false. World War Two extrapolated dramatically the horrors of 1914–1918, particularly in the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Here is revealed a demonic rationality, applied with supreme efficiency to the killing of human beings—on a scale not before seen. Label it postmodern, post-Christian, or post-human, there is no doubt that the world described by Hemingway had—by the time of Mailer—become ''more'' irrational, sinister, and far darker. As goes the world, so goes literary form.

These vignettes, a quarter century apart, illustrate the Modernist rhetoric of Hemingway and Mailer. For both authors, they mark a beginning, a revelation, a new Genesis. One thing is clear: unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of traditional concepts of God, a sense of Providence, a rational universe. We have ''left'' the Garden. Many have written on religious themes in Hemingway and in Mailer: certainly, the themes exist and can be discussed.{{efn|Recent articles include Buske,{{sfn|Buske|2002}} Stoneback,{{sfn|Stoneback|2003}} Lewis,{{sfn|Lewis|2004}} Stolzfus,{{sfn|Stolzfus|2005}} Adamowski,{{sfn|Adamowski|2005}} Kroupi,{{sfn|Kroupi|2008}} Bernstein,{{sfn|Bernstein|2008}} Cappell,{{sfn|Cappell|2008}} Sipioria,{{sfn|Sipiora|2008}} and Whalen-Bridge and Oon.{{sfn|Whalen-Bridge|Oon|2009}}}} But I would like to examine the overall ''matrix'' of Modernity in which those themes are embedded, focusing on the ''disenchantment'' of the world.

=== Modernity and Disenchantment ===

Lewis says the modern novel is “doubly secular,” representing a world vacated by God.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}} The representation is both thematic and formal. Much has been written about the changing status of religion in the era of Modernity—a period, shall we say, from roughly 1900 to the present day—and many{{pg|333|334}} concepts have been used, such as secularization, loss of faith, ironic cultures, cognitive minorities, the disenchantment of the world, the sacred and the profane, and modernist literature as religion substitute. As one might expect, the literature is considerable.{{efn|Owen Chadwick{{sfn|Chadwick|1975}} is a useful introduction to ''secularization.'' Modernity and Christianity are discussed in Hans Küng.{{sfn|Küng|1980}} Spirituality and modern man are the focus of Carl Jung.{{sfn|Jung|1955}} ''Ironic cultures'' are dealt with by Ernest Gellner,{{sfn|Gellner|1974}} while ''irony'' as a product of the Great War is in Paul Fussell.{{sfn|Fussell|1975}} ''Cognitive minority'' is used by Peter Berger,{{sfn|Berger|1969}} while Berger & Luckmannuse terms such as ''deviance, heresy,'' and ''symbolic universe.'' {{sfn|Berger|1966|p=98-100}} ''Disenchantment of the world'' goes back to Max Weber in the 1940s. Weber, ''sacred'' and ''profane,'' and modernism as ''religion substitute'' are described in Lewis.{{sfn|Lewis|2004}}}} After all, Modernity and the disenchantment of the world is a thing of complexity.{{efn|Secularization in England, for instance, involves Darwin’s ''The Origin of Species'' (1859) and the literary responses: including Tennyson’s ''In Memoriam'' (1850), Arnold’s ''Dover Beach'' (1867), and the novels of George Eliot such ''Silas Marner'' (1861) and ''Middlemarch'' (1871–72). Eliot translated two works of German radical theology, D. F. Strauss’ ''Life of Jesus'' (1835, ET 1846) and Feuerbach’s ''The Essence of Christianity'' (1841, ET 1854). Willey (1964), Brown (1969) and Chadwick (1975) are useful guides, as is Kucich (2001).}} But it cannot be undone.

For Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud onwards,“disenchanting” the world spelt the end of religion—the “death” of God—a process thought to be inevitable. The journey begins with Martin Luther in 1517, or earlier in Renaissance humanism. The rise of modern science, symbolized by ''On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres'' by Copernicus in 1543, is crucial: science advanced as it was able to provide mathematical explanations for phenomena attributed to God or magic. That reality is the heart of disenchantment. Skepticism, a rationalistic response to the Wars of Religion, was also significant. No wonder Popkin says, “Luther had indeed opened a Pandora’s box."{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=15}}

During the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions attacked the Divine Right of Kings. While their respective revolutionary documents retain a “veneer of religion,"{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=39}} this effectively begins the modern secular state. In 1843, Karl Marx, following Feuerbach in arguing that “Man makes religion,"{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243}} in memorable phrases described religion as “the heart of a heartless world” and “the opium of the people."{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=244}}{{efn| “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the ''opium'' of the people."{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243-244, emphasis in original}}}} After 1917, the Soviet Union mandated the “death” of God. A host of epistemological challenges—Descartes, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg—obviously contributed to this process we call modernity.

But religion persisted. Partly, this was an aggressive counter-revolution, including Pope Pius IX (1792–1878), with his ''Syllabus of Errors'' (1864) and Definition of Papal Infallibility (1871), and Protestant fundamentalism, seen in ''The Fundamentals'' (1910–1915) and proclaiming another form of infallibility—an inerrant text. Within the infallible world of Marxist-Leninism, religion grew, maybe because it was attacked. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989,Marx’s critique of religion has lost much, but not all, of its potency. The secularization thesis requires modification.

An example of such modification is Peter Berger’s book, ''A Rumor of Angels.''{{sfn|Berger|1969}} My title alludes to his book, and to a recent usage by Philip Yancey (1997). Berger suggests that there exist certain “signals of transcendence”—such as the human desire for order—that point beyond a purely naturalistic reality.{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}{{efn| “By signals of transcendence I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our ‘natural’ reality but that appear to point beyond that reality”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}}} However, as Berger recognizes, for most people the{{pg|334|335}} predominant reality is still that secular mind-set. Thus, religious language is used by a “cognitive minority." {{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}{{efn| “By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society. Put differently, a cognitive minority is a group formed around a body of deviant ‘knowledge.’”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}}} This position is uncomfortable, needing to be buttressed socially and epistemologically. But the position exists.

Today, the relationship between religion and modernity is more nuanced than in the naturalistic Nineteenth Century. We recognize a wide spectrum from faith through doubt to atheism. But at the risk of simplification, there seem to be two main approaches. For conservative Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be expressed as a ''rejection'' of modernity, using an either/or approach to truth. For those with liberal perspectives on Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be regarded as ''complementary'' to modernity, utilizing a both/and approach to truth. That complementary perspective may remind us of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. This is not simply a literary trope.{{efn| Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg revealed the inescapable reality of indeterminacy in our world.}} In both humanities and physical sciences, there will be no return to rigid determinism.

=== God-Language in Hemingway: "Scared Stiff Looking at It" ===

It is easy to list God-language in Hemingway: deciding significance is harder. The title of ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} came perhaps unconsciously from an English Prayer: “Give us peace in our time, O Lord.”{{sfn|The 1928 Book of Common Prayer|1993|p=31}} {{efn|“Give us peace in our time, O Lord” can be found in the 1928 Episcopal ''Book of Common Prayer'',{{sfn|The 1928 Book of Common Prayer|1993|p=31}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, ''peace'' and ''Lord'' are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}}}} In this work, however, there is little overt God-language, maybe the awkwardness of Krebs with his mother’s sentimentalism in a “A Soldier’s Home”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=76}} or the unnamed soldier’s fearful bargaining with God in the accompanying vignette.{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=67}} Perhaps the final story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” with Nick Adams dealing with an indeterminate trauma by returning to Nature, has echoes of Genesis in its simple declarative sentences, “It was a good camp” and “It was a good feeling."{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=147}} The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it,"{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} could be seen as a ''signifier'' of modernism, much as the final words of Kurtz, “The horror, the horror”{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=178}} from ''Heart of Darkness.'' Conrad’s words, Cedric Watts suggests, “serve as a thematic nexus, a climatic but highly ambiguous utterance which sums up, without resolving, several of the paradoxical themes of the tale."{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=215}} A quarter century later, Hemingway’s ''In Our Time'' offers yet another such thematic nexus.

In ''The Sun Also Rises,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} two themes are balanced. One epigraph,“You are all a lost generation,” from Gertrude Stein, suggests that the narrative is a war novel, although the war seems absent. The other epigraph from Ecclesiastes, perhaps the most secular passage in the bible, includes the words, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth {{pg|335|336}}abideth for ever."{{sfn|King James Bible|2008|loc=Ecc. 1:4–7}} This theme, the continuation of the earth, is a metonymy for the continuation of humanity. Linda Wagner-Martin suggests this theme “maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}{{efn|“Considering the two epigraphs in tandem, no reader could stay focused for long on the ‘lost generation’ image. The tone of the second epigraph is clearly positive; it is much longer; it maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}} Maybe this motif is an attenuated form of providence.

There is a kind of balance in Jake and Brett’s conversation following the Romero ''debacle.'' Brett’s decision “not to be a bitch” represents she claims, “sort of what we have instead of God."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} Jake counters, “Some people have God, quite a lot,” but Brett replies, “He never worked very well with me."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} The famous ending is poised among irony, ambiguity, and pessimism. Partly a verdict on Jake and Brett’s tragic relationship, it becomes a larger evaluation of life. With Brett, we like to believe we can have “a damned good time;" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}} we hope the world is a place of order. But in answer, the novel offers only indeterminacy: a delicate balance between covert God-language and hard-boiled modernism. We are left with Jake’s summary: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}}

''A Farewell to Arms''{{sfn|Hemingway|1929}} marks a new skepticism, with Hemingway’s famous dismissal of war’s high diction as “obscene.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=185}} It was also a low point for Hemingway, considering his divorce from Hadley in 1927 and his father’s suicide in 1928. As Reynolds argues, Hemingway frames the Italian retreat from Caporetto as a ''synecdoche'' of a larger human defeat.{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=274}} This, says Reynolds, was the “final conclusion” of the war generation {{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}{{efn|“Some discovered such a truth in the trenches during the war; others discovered it in war prisons or in front of firing squads. Hemingway did not finally understand it until ten years after the war.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}}} But what of the priest in ''A Farewell to Arms:'' is the Abruzzi a kind of sacred space? It might be, butHenry cannot seem to get there. As a modern man, he seems to be “banished.”{{sfn|Civello|1994|p=78}}{{efn|“The Abruzzi, however, is an anomaly in the modern world, and the Christian order it represents no longer exists beyond its boundaries. Frederick Henry, the epitome of the modern displaced hero, yearns nostalgically for that ‘other country’ yet finds himself ‘banished’ from it by his own modern sensibilities." {{sfn|Civello|1994|p=77-78}}}} Heroism still exists, but the irrationality of modern warfare—or the cruelty of Fate—renders it tragically absurd. Toward the end, we read

<blockquote>If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. {{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=249}} </blockquote>

There is a foreshadowing of Catherine’s death, but the words have more resonance
as a statement on human destiny. Yes, there may be a rumor of grace
in the phrase, “many are strong at the broken places,” but the pervasive tone{{pg|336|337}} is bleak. There seems an ''absence'' of God-language, providence, any orderly universe. So, have we not left the Garden for the wasteland?

Indeed we have. But this diction is ''still'' theological language. Mankind’s estrangement from the Garden may be part of Modernism, but it is at the heart of the biblical story—and another element in ''disenchantment.'' In Genesis, we read that “the LORD God drove [Adam] out of the garden of Eden,"{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 3.23}} that “Cain went out from the LORD’s presence,"{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.16}} becoming a “vagrant and a wanderer on earth."{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.12}} Here is ''alienation''—being a stranger, a fugitive. Linked with Hegel and early Marx, alienation has deep biblical roots. In God-language, all are sons of Adam and brothers to Cain.{{efn|“Alienation is the experience of being a stranger, ‘away from home,’ estranged from others and from oneself . . . Alienation is also a theme of the Scriptures as a whole. Adam’s eviction from Eden, Cain’s wandering as a fugitive, Israel’s servitude in Egypt and later exile in Babylon. All symbolize an alienation that is the lot of mankind. . . . from the 1940s, the word was used increasingly to describe social and cultural estrangement. Influences include the vast disorientation caused by World War II, and the writings of Weber, Kierkegaard, and Tillich. A major source was the newly discovered Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of Marx. . . . Alienation, an important concept in social psychology, has its roots in a basic theological reality: that mankind is alienated from God, his fellows, and himself."{{sfn|Vince|1988|p=15}}}} Here, the rhetoric of modernism and Genesis intersect: Garden and wasteland belong ''both'' to a biblical vocabulary and ''also to'' the vocabulary of modernity.

Among Hemingway’s short stories from the 1930s, we have a profound existential parable, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In the café, old man and waiters stave off life’s ''nada'' experience. In his own, each character faces his ''nada'' or emptiness, seen in other Hemingway stories from the period.{{efn|“Nowhere is this ''nada'' (the void, emptiness, meaninglessness) more insistent than in Hemingway’s two African stories, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ and ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro.’” {{sfn|Stolzfus|2005|p=206}}}} The story echoes Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son—and Cain’s angry question to God.{{efn|The Parable begins, “There was once a man who had two sons . . .”{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Luke 15.11}} Both stories have simplicity and profundity. Both seem answers to Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.9}} Both have strong Existentialist perspectives. “The parable, then, is a microcosm of the human situation . . . a picture of man’s alienation from his essential self, from the world, and from society, and is a crystallization of our human condition.”{{sfn|Jones|1964|p=184}}}} The “clean, well-lighted place” seems a poignant ''synecdoche'' for the Garden, representing the search for a lost home, the quest for order. By story’s end, the older waiter better understands the old man’s despair, answering positively Cain’s ancient question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.9}} Yet, the waiter ''demythologizes'' the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary, central to the God-language of Catholicism.{{efn|In a 1941 essay, “New Testament and Mythology,” Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) introduced ''demythologizing,'' influential in the post-war theology.{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=187}}}} Surely, this representation is the ''absence'' of God-language? After all, absence is said to be characteristic of modernism—we think of Hemingway’s iceberg motif. The waiter has replaced ''grace''—and every other theologically significant word—with ''nada,'' nothingness, emptiness. God is dead. Grace has left the building. Nihilism rules.

Yet, two points may be made. First, the Judeo-Christian tradition yields many parallels to the ''nada'' experience: the reflections of Job; the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53; the ocean as symbol of chaos, “the dark night of the soul” from the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the ''via negativa'' of medieval theology; the abandonment of Christ on the Cross; creation as the transforming of an earth “without form and void."{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 1.1–2}} Before Hemingway’s epigraph from Ecclesiastes, we read, “Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty."{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Ecc. 1.2}} Much of modern{{pg|337|338}} theology has a strong existentialist flavor.{{efn|Shaped by Heidegger, Sartre and post-war anomie, Existentialism has earlier sources in the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, and is seen in theologians Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. On American Existentialism, Adamowski{{sfn|Adamowski|2005}} is crucial.}} Yes, two different “language games” are being played here, but they are not necessarily incompatible with one another.

The second point on the ''nada'' experience concerns the structure of the story. Several times the bleakness of ''nada'' seems mitigated. Immediately following the stark words, "Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee," we red this: "He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991a|p=33}} A smile and steaming coffee chase away the ''nada'' experience—for a moment. Then the waiter reaches home, ''nada'' reappears and kills his sleep until daylight. But again, a form of rhetorical balance, for the older waiter dismisses the severity of ''nada.'' "After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991a|p=33}} So, the presence of ''nada'' is not necessarily the negation of God-language.

In For ''Whom the Bell Tolls,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1940}} title and epigraph are from poet priest, John Donne (1572–1631), but God-language again is infrequent. Written close to Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in our Time” speech (September 1938), Hemingway rejects appeasement.{{efn|“As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade."{{sfn|Auden|2007|p=95}}}} Quoting Donne, “No man is an ''Iland,'' intire of it self . . . I am involved in ''Mankinde,''” Hemingway commits to the struggle of the Spanish people.{{sfn|Donne|2003|p=243}} Baker describes the novel as “a study of the betrayal of the Spanish people both by what lay within them and what had been thrust upon them."{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=241}} By 1940, the battle against Fascism in Spain was lost: the greater war was just beginning. Hemingway’s narrative has relevance for both.

The religious context of the Spanish War was tragic: the Church was allied with the Fascists. Anselmo, the old man, hopes to be forgiven for the sin of killing. But forgiven by whom? “‘Who knows?’” he says, “‘Since we do not have God here anymore, neither His Son nor the Holy Ghost, who forgives? I do not know.’”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} Jordan asks, “‘You have not God anymore?’” Anselmo refers not to the Left’s “death” of God but to the ancient problem of ''theodicy,'' replying,

<blockquote>“No. Man. Certainly not. If there were God, never would He have permitted what I have seen with my eyes. Let them have God.
“They claim Him.”
“Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} </blockquote>{{pg|338|339}}

After making love with Maria, Jordan criticizes his political ''clichés.''{{efn|“Hard-shell Baptist” was applied to the Primitive Baptists, a group dating from early nineteenth century splits.}} “He had gotten to be as bigoted and hide-bound about his politics as a hardshelled Baptist. . . . Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=164}} Finally, in the novel’s last few pages, Jordan reflects on facing death “with religion” and “taking it straight.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}} Here Jordan’s perspective, echoing Feuerbach and Freud, is typical of the rhetoric of modernism. “Who do you suppose has it easier? Ones with religion or just taking it straight? It comforts them very much but we know there is no thing to fear.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}}

There is more God-language that could be quoted. The child’s prayer in “Now I Lay Me,"{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=276-282}} the Crucifixion told by the Roman soldiers in “Today Is Friday,”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=271-273}} the quest for an original paradise in ''The Garden of Eden,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1986}} but these examples may be sufficient. In summary, what can be said? The rhetoric of Modernism is integral to Hemingway’s writing: always and everywhere, his God-language is embedded in that cognitive framework. Inherently, modernism is interrogative and indeterminate—suspicious of dogma, skeptical of organized religion. The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} may serve as a signifier of modernity, revealing Hemingway’s vision of a world “that was adrift."{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=113}} Modernism presents a hard-boiled picture of the world, stripped of traditional certainties, bereft of religion’s “opium." This was the world of which, like the dying Harry in “Snows," Hemingway must write.{{efn|“Harry thinks, “There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the events . . . He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1991b|p=17}}}} This is the world we have inherited.

But what is the ''cognitive'' status of Hemingway’s God-language? Is it merely an ironic use of ancient myths—seen in T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and others—with no underlying substance? Hemingway had little sympathy with the moralistic faith of his parents, leaving their Congregationalism for Catholicism. Morris Buske suggests that his father’s “corporal punishment with a religious orientation” may have contributed to his “psychic difficulties.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=86}} Indeed. We might also envisage some religious impact. Perhaps there is a psychoanalytic link between the Liberal Protestant Fatherhood of God,Nietzsche’s “death of God,” and the suicide of Hemingway’s father.{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} So, is Hemingway’s God-language ironic, emotional and bereft of cognitive reality?{{pg|339|340}}
Following Buske and Stoneback, I suggest not. Buske suggests that Hemingway’s early experiences “led him to embrace Catholicism.” {{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}}} H. R. Stoneback denies that Hemingway’s Catholicism was only nominal:

<blockquote>Hemingway’s personal religious pilgrimage takes him through a rejection of Puritanism, and far beyond the social-gospel brand of Protestantism, into an ever-deepening discovery of Catholicism. This personal faith-journey is manifest . . . with the aesthetic and historical and spiritual sensibility centered in ritual and ceremony (e.g., most obviously, as in the world of ''Toreo,'' or the bullfight; and, less obviously, in the vision of life-as-pilgrimage). Hemingway’s rootedness in the sacramental sense of experience, in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity, grows ever deeper.{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} </blockquote>

Stoneback’s argument is plausible. Yes, Hemingway’s rhetoric is always unsentimental, open-ended, embedded in modernity: that is hard to dispute. Cleanth Brooks said Hemingway confined himself to“his secular terms.”{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} I think that he went further. Granted, in Hemingway there is no parallel to T. S. Eliot’s pilgrimage from the agnosticism of ''The Waste Land'' (1922) to the faith of ''Four Quartets'' (1943). But then most of the Modernists felt unable to follow Eliot in his particular journey. Nor is there any equivalent to Mailer’s final book, ''On God,''{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}} his “quest into the nature and context of ‘reality,’ particularly non-material entities”—in effect “Mailer’s metaphysics.”{{sfn|Sipiora|2008|p=503}}

If Hemingway had not encountered physical and psychological problems, if his memory had not been gravely impaired, what at the end would he have written? We can never know what ''might'' have been. But Stoneback puts it well, “Pilgrimage, the notion and motion of spiritualized travel, is at the center of Hemingway’s religious vision and his work from his earliest stories to the final, unfinished and posthumously published novels and memoirs.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=49}} With great skill, and with a high degree of indeterminacy,Hemingway’s rhetoric appears poised between the language-game of God and that of modernism. Some claim the two games are inherently incompatible. I argue otherwise.

Hemingway did struggle against nihilism, at times teetering on the edge of chaos. Of his writing, Ihab Hassan says, “literary statement approaches{{pg|340|341}} the edge; language implies the abolition of statement."{{sfn|Hassan|1987|p=299}} Yet, Hemingway also redefines the ''sacred,'' reformulating ''grace'' beyond the borders of organized religion. Without ceasing to be a modernist, he is also deeply rooted, as Stoneback claims, “in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} Like Kierkegaard, his God-language is covert and subtle; but it does exist.{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal” Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}}}

=== God-Language in Mailer: Protagonist in the Cosmic Struggle ===

With Norman Mailer, we have a different rhetorical situation. Partly, this difference is a time shift: Hemingway was shaped by the Great War, Mailer by World War II, the generation haunted by the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Hence, there is a religious shift: Hemingway grew up in Oak Park Protestantism before moving to Catholicism, whereas Mailer’s roots were in the Judaism of Brooklyn. To characterize Mailer’s God-language, I use the phrase ''protagonist in the cosmic struggle.'' J. Michael Lennon says that Mailer’s writing is “shot through with his ideas on God and the Devil and the struggle in which they are locked.”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}}

''Harlot’s Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991}} has myriad themes: betrayals ideological and sexual, haunting of sons by fathers, the “compartmentalization of the heart.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=13}} Using the CIA as a ''synecdoche'' for a world of modernity, Mailer shows the boundary between fiction and non-fiction to be extraordinarily indeterminate. That indeterminacy applies to language but also to the ''realpolitic'' world of intelligence. But perhaps the most fascinating example of God-language appears in the last few pages of ''Harlot’s Ghost.'' It comes from Hugh Montague, codename “Harlot”—a mysterious protagonist loosely based on a real person, the enigmatic onetime poet and chief of CIA Counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton (1917–1987).{{efn|There is no consensus on Angleton. Was he the greatest practitioner of counter-intelligence, or, like Kim Philby in British Intelligence, was he a Russian mole? Mailer describes him as “a most complex and convoluted gentleman."{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1132}}}} Harlot speculates that the whole cosmos revealed in modernity fossils, evolution, solar system—to be God’s “‘majestic cover story,’”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280}} an exercise in ''disinformation'' and misdirection from the Lord of Spies, Jehovah.

<blockquote>“‘What would I do if I were Jehovah . . . . I have created him, after all, in My image, so he will wish to discover My nature in order to seize My throne. Would I ever have permitted such a contract in the first place, therefore, if I had not taken the wise precaution to fashion a cover story?’ . . . .“ You can say the universe is a splendidly worked-up system of disinformation calculated to make{{pg|341|342}}us believe in evolution and so divert us away from God. Yes, that is exactly what I would do if I were the Lord and could not trust My own creation.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280-1}} </blockquote>

Mailer presents an astonishing degree of humor, irony, and ambiguity, worthy of Nabokov. Can we take Harlot’s speculation seriously? Mailer provides a complex play of ''metaphor, metonymy,'' and ''metaphysics'' in three arenas—character and plot in the modern novel; theology and cosmology in the universe; and the quest for meaning among the contingencies of life.

Sixteen years later, Mailer returns to these themes in his final book, ''On God.''{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}} There, among other topics, he discusses modern science, fundamentalism, and intelligent design, bringing insight into the nature of plot in the novels of Henry James, Hemingway, James Joyce, and others.{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=143-161}} He suggests, for example, that James and Hemingway were “avatars of Intelligent Design”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=150}} whereas Joyce “plays at the very edge of chaos."{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=151}} It is no coincidence that Mailer moves smoothly between God-language and an analysis of plot in the modern novel—for two reasons.

First, his central theological motif is that God is an ''artist''—a limited Creator doing the best he can. At the start of ''On God,'' Mailer says, “I see God, rather, as a Creator, as the greatest artist. I see human beings as His most developed artworks."{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=5}} He draws, therefore, an analogy between the Creator and the creative artist—like Hemingway, James, Joyce, or himself. Second, Mailer recognizes that literary ''plot'' is a synecdoche for the larger search for meaning, religion being only one manifestation of that search. Just as Mailer is suspicious of a ''plot'' that is too contrived in a novel, so he is also wary of a ''faith'' in God that is too dogmatic, not sufficiently aware of the indeterminacy and chaos of existence.{{efn|“The reason I don’t like plots to prevail is that they don’t allow the figures in the book, the characters, to push their own limits to the point where they make the plot unacceptable and so throw the design into chaos."{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=151}}}} Such fundamentalism misreads the nature of the world, keeping human beings infantile, even dog-like.{{efn|“The worst to be said about Fundamentalism is that it reduces people to the reflexes of a good dog. . . . No great writer ever came out of Fundamentalism, nor any great scientist."{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=71-72}}}}

Mailer’s ''The Gospel According to the Son''{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} is an intriguing work. Rewriting the gospel in first person, he retells the story of Jesus, ''focalizing'' the inner thoughts of the Son of God. To call this narrative bold is an understatement, but the book is more successful than many critics allow. Here, implicitly comparing gospel and story, Jesus compares his account with the canonical gospels:

<blockquote>While I would not say that Mark’s gospel is false, it has much exaggeration. And I would offer less for Matthew, and for Luke and {{pg|342|343}}John, who gave me words I never uttered and described me as gentle when I was pale with rage. Their words were written many years after I was gone and only repeat what old men told them. Very old men. Such tales are to be leaned upon no more than a bush that tears free from its roots and blows about in the wind.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=3-4}}</blockquote>

A kind of mirror image to Gospel is Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} In reconstructing the beginning of Hitler, Mailer explores two opposing entities—God and the Devil—and their cosmic struggle. Like ''Gospel,'' this work questions the boundaries of language, plumbing deep realms of cosmology. Mailer is writing literature, but he is also writing theology. Not all theology arises in seminary, church, or synagogue: God-language may emerge even in the world of modernity.

But here we may find a cognitive divide on the nature of language. Theological fundamentalists believe language to be essentially literal, ''determined'' for all time, even restricted to the letters of the King James Bible of 1611. Theological liberals, on the other hand, will see language as metaphorical, ''indeterminate,'' always in flux. As with Hemingway, Mailer’s God language would seem incompatible with that fundamentalist perspective, but compatible with a more liberal viewpoint.

Mailer asks hard questions. In ''Gospel,'' he asks if there is a God who is more than nostalgia enshrined in ancient words. In ''Castle,'' he asks if we shall avoid the lure of Fascism and another Hitler. Is there a God who speaks to modernity and the evils of the Holocaust? With D.T. as narrator in ''Castle,'' we encounter a Nazi officer in the SS. Then we discover he is also “an officer of the Evil One.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Mailer recognizes the risk that he runs, “Given the present authority of the scientific world, most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Robert Begiebing comments, “The suspension of disbelief required is audacious.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} But Mailer reminds us that our modern world has little understanding of Hitler, “the most mysterious human being of the century.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=72}}

As in ''Gospel'' ten years earlier, ''The Castle'' in the Forest operates in two distinct realms, “the metaphysical and the mundane.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} Metaphysical language is hard to decode. In fact, in the 1920s Logical Positivists denied ''any'' meaning to such metaphysical language, a view later modified by{{pg|343|344}} Karl Popper. God and Satan “appear” in a strange No Man’s Land, at the frontiers of human experience. But thinkers from Augustine to Einstein have recognized that strangeness, using tropes of analogy and metaphor.

However, boundaries are always problematic, be they political, racial, or metaphysical. God-language is found at the ''liminal'' places of life, border regions of indeterminacy and danger. Such language is disturbing, even dangerous. It disturbs our expectations, confusing our maps of modernity. Max Born the physicist said, “We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe, and the vaguer and cloudier.”{{sfn|Born|1951|p=277}} If that be true of physics, other disciplines certainly share that mystery. If all human language exhibits indeterminacy, then religious language will have it in spades.

Since the days of the Puritans, the place of Satan in American culture has become drastically attenuated, the current strength of Fundamentalism notwithstanding. A survey of this trend in American Literature is Andrew Delbanco’s ''The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost their Sense of Evil.'' {{sfn|Delbanco|1995}} He speaks of a dialectic in our culture “between the dispossession of Satan under the pressure of modernity and the hunger to get him back."{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=234}} Whatever our beliefs on his ''being,'' Satan’s ''function'' in society is fairly easily charted, as America moved from belief to irony. Mailer is a protagonist in this cosmic struggle between God and the Devil, but using the metaphors of modernity.{{efn|Delbanco suggests that modernity “has doomed us to see the world through metaphors that cannot be ratified by any appeal to transcendence.”{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=224}}}} However, Mailer leaves us with indeterminacy. We learn that what “enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers—there are only questions.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=467}}

=== Conclusions: The Sacred, Indeterminacy, and Grace ===

There is still much left to explore. Both men redefine the realm of the ''sacred'' outside the boundaries of the Church. They also redefine the profane, in language and belief. There are theological precedents, but much of organized religion finds such redefinition problematic, particularly fundamentalists. For Hemingway, the sacred is found particularly in the natural world—rumors maybe of the original Garden? In Mailer, I am not sure: maybe the sacred is found in the moral struggle—the eternal battle between God and the Devil.

''Indeterminacy'' and suspicion of rigid dogma are also at the heart of both men’s writing, as in Modernity itself. ''Grace,'' however, is a problem within{{pg|344|345}} modernity: “The world starves for grace,” says Yancey.{{sfn|Yancey|2002|p=40}} But grace is a problem also for contemporary religion, as Bawer and Yancey demonstrate. Grace may have its antonym in Hemingway's ''nada'' or Mailer’s “absurdity” of life. Grace may be implicit in Mailer’s belief that, “stories bring order to the absurdity."{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=156-157}} Good fiction, says Mailer, is “nourishing to our sense of reality.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1299}} Stories, after all, have always been part of our lives. Novelist and theologian Fred Buechner has said, “Listen to your life . . . in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”{{sfn|Buechner|1983|p=87}} In this world of modernity, maybe it is through fiction and narrative that we still hear rumors of grace.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

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* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1925 |title=In Our Time|location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 1995 |ref=harv }}

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* {{cite journal |last=Kucich |first=John |title=Intellectual Debate in the Victorian Novel: Religion, Science, and the Professional |journal=The Victorian Novel|date=2001| location=Ed. Deirdre David. Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |pages=212-233 |ref=harv }}

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* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

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* {{cite book |title=New English Bible, The [NEB] | date=1970 | location=Ed. Samuel Sandmel. Oxford Study Edition. New York |publisher= Oxford University Press |ref={{harvid|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970}} }}

* {{cite book |title=The 1928 Book of Common Prayer | date=1993 |location=New York |publisher= Oxford University Press |ref={{harvid|The 1928 Book of Common Prayer|1993}} }}

* {{cite book |last=Popkin |first=Richard H. |date=2003 |title=The History of Skepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle |location=Oxford |publisher=Oxford University Press |ref=harv }}

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* {{cite book |last=Stewart |first=Matthew |date=2001 |title=Modernism and Tradition in Hemingway's In Our Time |location= Rochester|publisher=Camden House |ref=harv }}

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* {{cite book |last=Willey |first=Basil |date=1964 |title=Nineteenth-Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold. |location= Harmondsworth:|publisher=Penguin |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Yancey |first=Philip |date=2002 |title=What's So Amazing About Grace? |location= Grand Rapids|publisher=Zondervan |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer}}

[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer

2025-04-07T02:29:15Z

JKilchenmann: update to Mailer|Lennon two authors

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
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{{byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|abstract=In both Ernest Hemingway and [[Norman_Mailer|Norman Mailer]], their rhetoric announces a new beginning, a new Genesis. But, unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of God, providence, a rational universe. But how does the residual God-language in Hemingway and Mailer actually work? Is grace—a crucial Judeo-Christian reality—to be replaced by ''nada'', signaled in Hemingway's "A Clean Well-Lighted Place"? Or, in an absurd post-human world, does narrative "make sense of life?" Is God-language part of the rhetoric of modernity—or its antithesis? Paradoxically, both may be true.|url=https://projectmailer.net/pm/Raymond_M._Vince}}

{{cquote|This book is fiction. But there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.|author=Ernest Hemingway|source=''A Moveable Feast''{{sfn|Hemingway|2009|p=230}}}}

{{cquote|[I]t is the author’s contention that good fiction—if the writer can achieve it—is more real, that is, more nourishing to our sense of reality, than non-fiction. . . . novelists have a unique opportunity—they can create superior histories out of an enhancement of the real, the unverified, and the wholly fictional.|author=Norman Mailer|source=''Harlot's Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1287-8}}}}

{{dc|dc=W|hat is the rhetoric of modernism?}} Is the Modern novel “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God?”{{sfn|Lukács|1971|p=88}} If so, why do religious themes still appear? Are they the Cheshire Cat’s grin, nostalgic echoes of a vanished age, cosmic footprints left in the wasteland of Modernity? Or are they rumors of grace? How does God-language function in the work of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and Norman Mailer (1923–2007)?

This issue could be a problem in narrative theory, constructing modernity, contemporary religion, or all three. In any case, why does religion persist? Why is some God-language compatible with Modernity—and some not? I shall first discuss the rhetoric of Modernism, then Modernity and disenchantment, before moving on to my selection of God-language of Hemingway and Mailer. I briefly emphasize the sacred, indeterminacy, and grace.{{pg|331|332}}
=== The Rhetoric of Modernism ===

The epigraphs speak of the role of fiction in our lives. For Mailer, paradoxically, good fiction nourishes “our sense of reality.” For Hemingway, fiction “may throw some light” on the facts. The strange relationship between fiction and fact seems linked with Modernism—and the problematic nature of “reality.” I call this the ''rhetoric'' of Modernism. But is that rhetoric—seen in the Modern novel—necessarily linked with secularization? Pericles Lewis suggests that it may be the following:

<blockquote>If the novel is indeed the art form of secularization, “the representative art-form of our age” in Lukács’s words, and if modernity is indeed a secular age, then we could expect the modern novel to be doubly secular. {{sfn|Lukács|1971|p=93}} Many major novels of the early twentieth century do in fact seem to represent a “world that has been abandoned by God,” inasmuch as virtually none of their characters expresses any concrete religious faith and no gods intervene in the course of the action.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}}{{efn|“Novels of the period that do address theological themes more directly seem to be excluded from the modernist canon precisely because of their express interest in religion . . .”{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=690}}}} </blockquote>

But does the novel represents a world “abandoned by God”—or is this statement more hyperbole than argument? Either way, how do we explain these vestiges of God-language? Is this merely etymology—like using ''Wednesday'' without necessarily invoking the god ''Woden?'' I suggest that God-language has more significance than that. But what is the rhetoric of Modernism? Here are two samples.

We start with Hemingway and ''In Our Time.''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} At the end of chapter two’s vignette, we read three sentences: “There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} The impact of war, fragmenting of form, juxtaposing of birth and death, distancing of trauma, the phrase ''scared sick looking'' stripped of its subject, the absence of any clear antecedent to the pronoun ''it,'' the naturalistic symbol of rain—combine in Hemingway’s language. Shaped by modern warfare, in a collage of disturbing images, here is Hemingway’s innovative rhetoric. In its way, ''In Our Time'' is as significant culturally as T. S. Eliot’s ''The Waste Land'' (1922), published three years earlier. Matthew Stewart suggests that this “remains the most insistently experimental of all his books because it is the product of the one {{pg|332|333}}period of his life when he participated intently in a literary scene, and the temper of that milieu was distinctly modernist.”{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=12}}

Two decades later, a parallel to Hemingway’s rhetoric is Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{sfn|Mailer|1948}} Toward the end of the novel, we find two sentences: “Quite naturally he assumed the point and led the platoon toward the pass. A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine-gun bullet which passed through his chest.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=602}} Like Hemingway, the language is sparse and fragmented, the tone objective. There is human rationality in one sentence and violent, irrational death in the next. Yet, the irrationality of Lt.Hearn’s death comes through the exercise of all too rational choices by others—those who designed and manufactured the machine-gun and bullet, the Japanese soldier who fired the fatal shot, and the murderous machinations of Staff Sergeant Croft that led Hearn to that particular point.

The Great War was to be “the war to end all wars.” History demonstrated that proposition to be false. World War Two extrapolated dramatically the horrors of 1914–1918, particularly in the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Here is revealed a demonic rationality, applied with supreme efficiency to the killing of human beings—on a scale not before seen. Label it postmodern, post-Christian, or post-human, there is no doubt that the world described by Hemingway had—by the time of Mailer—become ''more'' irrational, sinister, and far darker. As goes the world, so goes literary form.

These vignettes, a quarter century apart, illustrate the Modernist rhetoric of Hemingway and Mailer. For both authors, they mark a beginning, a revelation, a new Genesis. One thing is clear: unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of traditional concepts of God, a sense of Providence, a rational universe. We have ''left'' the Garden. Many have written on religious themes in Hemingway and in Mailer: certainly, the themes exist and can be discussed.{{efn|Recent articles include Buske,{{sfn|Buske|2002}} Stoneback,{{sfn|Stoneback|2003}} Lewis,{{sfn|Lewis|2004}} Stolzfus,{{sfn|Stolzfus|2005}} Adamowski,{{sfn|Adamowski|2005}} Kroupi,{{sfn|Kroupi|2008}} Bernstein,{{sfn|Bernstein|2008}} Cappell,{{sfn|Cappell|2008}} Sipioria,{{sfn|Sipiora|2008}} and Whalen-Bridge and Oon.{{sfn|Whalen-Bridge|2009}}}} But I would like to examine the overall ''matrix'' of Modernity in which those themes are embedded, focusing on the ''disenchantment'' of the world.

=== Modernity and Disenchantment ===

Lewis says the modern novel is “doubly secular,” representing a world vacated by God.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}} The representation is both thematic and formal. Much has been written about the changing status of religion in the era of Modernity—a period, shall we say, from roughly 1900 to the present day—and many{{pg|333|334}} concepts have been used, such as secularization, loss of faith, ironic cultures, cognitive minorities, the disenchantment of the world, the sacred and the profane, and modernist literature as religion substitute. As one might expect, the literature is considerable.{{efn|Owen Chadwick{{sfn|Chadwick|1975}} is a useful introduction to ''secularization.'' Modernity and Christianity are discussed in Hans Küng.{{sfn|Küng|1980}} Spirituality and modern man are the focus of Carl Jung.{{sfn|Jung|1955}} ''Ironic cultures'' are dealt with by Ernest Gellner,{{sfn|Gellner|1974}} while ''irony'' as a product of the Great War is in Paul Fussell.{{sfn|Fussell|1975}} ''Cognitive minority'' is used by Peter Berger,{{sfn|Berger|1969}} while Berger & Luckmannuse terms such as ''deviance, heresy,'' and ''symbolic universe.'' {{sfn|Berger|1966|p=98-100}} ''Disenchantment of the world'' goes back to Max Weber in the 1940s. Weber, ''sacred'' and ''profane,'' and modernism as ''religion substitute'' are described in Lewis.{{sfn|Lewis|2004}}}} After all, Modernity and the disenchantment of the world is a thing of complexity.{{efn|Secularization in England, for instance, involves Darwin’s ''The Origin of Species'' (1859) and the literary responses: including Tennyson’s ''In Memoriam'' (1850), Arnold’s ''Dover Beach'' (1867), and the novels of George Eliot such ''Silas Marner'' (1861) and ''Middlemarch'' (1871–72). Eliot translated two works of German radical theology, D. F. Strauss’ ''Life of Jesus'' (1835, ET 1846) and Feuerbach’s ''The Essence of Christianity'' (1841, ET 1854). Willey (1964), Brown (1969) and Chadwick (1975) are useful guides, as is Kucich (2001).}} But it cannot be undone.

For Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud onwards,“disenchanting” the world spelt the end of religion—the “death” of God—a process thought to be inevitable. The journey begins with Martin Luther in 1517, or earlier in Renaissance humanism. The rise of modern science, symbolized by ''On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres'' by Copernicus in 1543, is crucial: science advanced as it was able to provide mathematical explanations for phenomena attributed to God or magic. That reality is the heart of disenchantment. Skepticism, a rationalistic response to the Wars of Religion, was also significant. No wonder Popkin says, “Luther had indeed opened a Pandora’s box."{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=15}}

During the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions attacked the Divine Right of Kings. While their respective revolutionary documents retain a “veneer of religion,"{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=39}} this effectively begins the modern secular state. In 1843, Karl Marx, following Feuerbach in arguing that “Man makes religion,"{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243}} in memorable phrases described religion as “the heart of a heartless world” and “the opium of the people."{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=244}}{{efn| “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the ''opium'' of the people."{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243-244, emphasis in original}}}} After 1917, the Soviet Union mandated the “death” of God. A host of epistemological challenges—Descartes, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg—obviously contributed to this process we call modernity.

But religion persisted. Partly, this was an aggressive counter-revolution, including Pope Pius IX (1792–1878), with his ''Syllabus of Errors'' (1864) and Definition of Papal Infallibility (1871), and Protestant fundamentalism, seen in ''The Fundamentals'' (1910–1915) and proclaiming another form of infallibility—an inerrant text. Within the infallible world of Marxist-Leninism, religion grew, maybe because it was attacked. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989,Marx’s critique of religion has lost much, but not all, of its potency. The secularization thesis requires modification.

An example of such modification is Peter Berger’s book, ''A Rumor of Angels.''{{sfn|Berger|1969}} My title alludes to his book, and to a recent usage by Philip Yancey (1997). Berger suggests that there exist certain “signals of transcendence”—such as the human desire for order—that point beyond a purely naturalistic reality.{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}{{efn| “By signals of transcendence I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our ‘natural’ reality but that appear to point beyond that reality”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}}} However, as Berger recognizes, for most people the{{pg|334|335}} predominant reality is still that secular mind-set. Thus, religious language is used by a “cognitive minority." {{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}{{efn| “By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society. Put differently, a cognitive minority is a group formed around a body of deviant ‘knowledge.’”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}}} This position is uncomfortable, needing to be buttressed socially and epistemologically. But the position exists.

Today, the relationship between religion and modernity is more nuanced than in the naturalistic Nineteenth Century. We recognize a wide spectrum from faith through doubt to atheism. But at the risk of simplification, there seem to be two main approaches. For conservative Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be expressed as a ''rejection'' of modernity, using an either/or approach to truth. For those with liberal perspectives on Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be regarded as ''complementary'' to modernity, utilizing a both/and approach to truth. That complementary perspective may remind us of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. This is not simply a literary trope.{{efn| Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg revealed the inescapable reality of indeterminacy in our world.}} In both humanities and physical sciences, there will be no return to rigid determinism.

=== God-Language in Hemingway: "Scared Stiff Looking at It" ===

It is easy to list God-language in Hemingway: deciding significance is harder. The title of ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} came perhaps unconsciously from an English Prayer: “Give us peace in our time, O Lord.”{{sfn|The 1928 Book of Common Prayer|1993|p=31}} {{efn|“Give us peace in our time, O Lord” can be found in the 1928 Episcopal ''Book of Common Prayer'',{{sfn|The 1928 Book of Common Prayer|1993|p=31}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, ''peace'' and ''Lord'' are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}}}} In this work, however, there is little overt God-language, maybe the awkwardness of Krebs with his mother’s sentimentalism in a “A Soldier’s Home”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=76}} or the unnamed soldier’s fearful bargaining with God in the accompanying vignette.{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=67}} Perhaps the final story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” with Nick Adams dealing with an indeterminate trauma by returning to Nature, has echoes of Genesis in its simple declarative sentences, “It was a good camp” and “It was a good feeling."{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=147}} The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it,"{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} could be seen as a ''signifier'' of modernism, much as the final words of Kurtz, “The horror, the horror”{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=178}} from ''Heart of Darkness.'' Conrad’s words, Cedric Watts suggests, “serve as a thematic nexus, a climatic but highly ambiguous utterance which sums up, without resolving, several of the paradoxical themes of the tale."{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=215}} A quarter century later, Hemingway’s ''In Our Time'' offers yet another such thematic nexus.

In ''The Sun Also Rises,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} two themes are balanced. One epigraph,“You are all a lost generation,” from Gertrude Stein, suggests that the narrative is a war novel, although the war seems absent. The other epigraph from Ecclesiastes, perhaps the most secular passage in the bible, includes the words, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth {{pg|335|336}}abideth for ever."{{sfn|King James Bible|2008|loc=Ecc. 1:4–7}} This theme, the continuation of the earth, is a metonymy for the continuation of humanity. Linda Wagner-Martin suggests this theme “maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}{{efn|“Considering the two epigraphs in tandem, no reader could stay focused for long on the ‘lost generation’ image. The tone of the second epigraph is clearly positive; it is much longer; it maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}} Maybe this motif is an attenuated form of providence.

There is a kind of balance in Jake and Brett’s conversation following the Romero ''debacle.'' Brett’s decision “not to be a bitch” represents she claims, “sort of what we have instead of God."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} Jake counters, “Some people have God, quite a lot,” but Brett replies, “He never worked very well with me."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} The famous ending is poised among irony, ambiguity, and pessimism. Partly a verdict on Jake and Brett’s tragic relationship, it becomes a larger evaluation of life. With Brett, we like to believe we can have “a damned good time;" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}} we hope the world is a place of order. But in answer, the novel offers only indeterminacy: a delicate balance between covert God-language and hard-boiled modernism. We are left with Jake’s summary: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}}

''A Farewell to Arms''{{sfn|Hemingway|1929}} marks a new skepticism, with Hemingway’s famous dismissal of war’s high diction as “obscene.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=185}} It was also a low point for Hemingway, considering his divorce from Hadley in 1927 and his father’s suicide in 1928. As Reynolds argues, Hemingway frames the Italian retreat from Caporetto as a ''synecdoche'' of a larger human defeat.{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=274}} This, says Reynolds, was the “final conclusion” of the war generation {{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}{{efn|“Some discovered such a truth in the trenches during the war; others discovered it in war prisons or in front of firing squads. Hemingway did not finally understand it until ten years after the war.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}}} But what of the priest in ''A Farewell to Arms:'' is the Abruzzi a kind of sacred space? It might be, butHenry cannot seem to get there. As a modern man, he seems to be “banished.”{{sfn|Civello|1994|p=78}}{{efn|“The Abruzzi, however, is an anomaly in the modern world, and the Christian order it represents no longer exists beyond its boundaries. Frederick Henry, the epitome of the modern displaced hero, yearns nostalgically for that ‘other country’ yet finds himself ‘banished’ from it by his own modern sensibilities." {{sfn|Civello|1994|p=77-78}}}} Heroism still exists, but the irrationality of modern warfare—or the cruelty of Fate—renders it tragically absurd. Toward the end, we read

<blockquote>If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. {{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=249}} </blockquote>

There is a foreshadowing of Catherine’s death, but the words have more resonance
as a statement on human destiny. Yes, there may be a rumor of grace
in the phrase, “many are strong at the broken places,” but the pervasive tone{{pg|336|337}} is bleak. There seems an ''absence'' of God-language, providence, any orderly universe. So, have we not left the Garden for the wasteland?

Indeed we have. But this diction is ''still'' theological language. Mankind’s estrangement from the Garden may be part of Modernism, but it is at the heart of the biblical story—and another element in ''disenchantment.'' In Genesis, we read that “the LORD God drove [Adam] out of the garden of Eden,"{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 3.23}} that “Cain went out from the LORD’s presence,"{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.16}} becoming a “vagrant and a wanderer on earth."{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.12}} Here is ''alienation''—being a stranger, a fugitive. Linked with Hegel and early Marx, alienation has deep biblical roots. In God-language, all are sons of Adam and brothers to Cain.{{efn|“Alienation is the experience of being a stranger, ‘away from home,’ estranged from others and from oneself . . . Alienation is also a theme of the Scriptures as a whole. Adam’s eviction from Eden, Cain’s wandering as a fugitive, Israel’s servitude in Egypt and later exile in Babylon. All symbolize an alienation that is the lot of mankind. . . . from the 1940s, the word was used increasingly to describe social and cultural estrangement. Influences include the vast disorientation caused by World War II, and the writings of Weber, Kierkegaard, and Tillich. A major source was the newly discovered Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of Marx. . . . Alienation, an important concept in social psychology, has its roots in a basic theological reality: that mankind is alienated from God, his fellows, and himself."{{sfn|Vince|1988|p=15}}}} Here, the rhetoric of modernism and Genesis intersect: Garden and wasteland belong ''both'' to a biblical vocabulary and ''also to'' the vocabulary of modernity.

Among Hemingway’s short stories from the 1930s, we have a profound existential parable, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In the café, old man and waiters stave off life’s ''nada'' experience. In his own, each character faces his ''nada'' or emptiness, seen in other Hemingway stories from the period.{{efn|“Nowhere is this ''nada'' (the void, emptiness, meaninglessness) more insistent than in Hemingway’s two African stories, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ and ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro.’” {{sfn|Stolzfus|2005|p=206}}}} The story echoes Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son—and Cain’s angry question to God.{{efn|The Parable begins, “There was once a man who had two sons . . .”{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Luke 15.11}} Both stories have simplicity and profundity. Both seem answers to Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.9}} Both have strong Existentialist perspectives. “The parable, then, is a microcosm of the human situation . . . a picture of man’s alienation from his essential self, from the world, and from society, and is a crystallization of our human condition.”{{sfn|Jones|1964|p=184}}}} The “clean, well-lighted place” seems a poignant ''synecdoche'' for the Garden, representing the search for a lost home, the quest for order. By story’s end, the older waiter better understands the old man’s despair, answering positively Cain’s ancient question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.9}} Yet, the waiter ''demythologizes'' the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary, central to the God-language of Catholicism.{{efn|In a 1941 essay, “New Testament and Mythology,” Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) introduced ''demythologizing,'' influential in the post-war theology.{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=187}}}} Surely, this representation is the ''absence'' of God-language? After all, absence is said to be characteristic of modernism—we think of Hemingway’s iceberg motif. The waiter has replaced ''grace''—and every other theologically significant word—with ''nada,'' nothingness, emptiness. God is dead. Grace has left the building. Nihilism rules.

Yet, two points may be made. First, the Judeo-Christian tradition yields many parallels to the ''nada'' experience: the reflections of Job; the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53; the ocean as symbol of chaos, “the dark night of the soul” from the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the ''via negativa'' of medieval theology; the abandonment of Christ on the Cross; creation as the transforming of an earth “without form and void."{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 1.1–2}} Before Hemingway’s epigraph from Ecclesiastes, we read, “Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty."{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Ecc. 1.2}} Much of modern{{pg|337|338}} theology has a strong existentialist flavor.{{efn|Shaped by Heidegger, Sartre and post-war anomie, Existentialism has earlier sources in the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, and is seen in theologians Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. On American Existentialism, Adamowski{{sfn|Adamowski|2005}} is crucial.}} Yes, two different “language games” are being played here, but they are not necessarily incompatible with one another.

The second point on the ''nada'' experience concerns the structure of the story. Several times the bleakness of ''nada'' seems mitigated. Immediately following the stark words, "Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee," we red this: "He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991a|p=33}} A smile and steaming coffee chase away the ''nada'' experience—for a moment. Then the waiter reaches home, ''nada'' reappears and kills his sleep until daylight. But again, a form of rhetorical balance, for the older waiter dismisses the severity of ''nada.'' "After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991a|p=33}} So, the presence of ''nada'' is not necessarily the negation of God-language.

In For ''Whom the Bell Tolls,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1940}} title and epigraph are from poet priest, John Donne (1572–1631), but God-language again is infrequent. Written close to Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in our Time” speech (September 1938), Hemingway rejects appeasement.{{efn|“As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade."{{sfn|Auden|2007|p=95}}}} Quoting Donne, “No man is an ''Iland,'' intire of it self . . . I am involved in ''Mankinde,''” Hemingway commits to the struggle of the Spanish people.{{sfn|Donne|2003|p=243}} Baker describes the novel as “a study of the betrayal of the Spanish people both by what lay within them and what had been thrust upon them."{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=241}} By 1940, the battle against Fascism in Spain was lost: the greater war was just beginning. Hemingway’s narrative has relevance for both.

The religious context of the Spanish War was tragic: the Church was allied with the Fascists. Anselmo, the old man, hopes to be forgiven for the sin of killing. But forgiven by whom? “‘Who knows?’” he says, “‘Since we do not have God here anymore, neither His Son nor the Holy Ghost, who forgives? I do not know.’”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} Jordan asks, “‘You have not God anymore?’” Anselmo refers not to the Left’s “death” of God but to the ancient problem of ''theodicy,'' replying,

<blockquote>“No. Man. Certainly not. If there were God, never would He have permitted what I have seen with my eyes. Let them have God.
“They claim Him.”
“Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} </blockquote>{{pg|338|339}}

After making love with Maria, Jordan criticizes his political ''clichés.''{{efn|“Hard-shell Baptist” was applied to the Primitive Baptists, a group dating from early nineteenth century splits.}} “He had gotten to be as bigoted and hide-bound about his politics as a hardshelled Baptist. . . . Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=164}} Finally, in the novel’s last few pages, Jordan reflects on facing death “with religion” and “taking it straight.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}} Here Jordan’s perspective, echoing Feuerbach and Freud, is typical of the rhetoric of modernism. “Who do you suppose has it easier? Ones with religion or just taking it straight? It comforts them very much but we know there is no thing to fear.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}}

There is more God-language that could be quoted. The child’s prayer in “Now I Lay Me,"{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=276-282}} the Crucifixion told by the Roman soldiers in “Today Is Friday,”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=271-273}} the quest for an original paradise in ''The Garden of Eden,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1986}} but these examples may be sufficient. In summary, what can be said? The rhetoric of Modernism is integral to Hemingway’s writing: always and everywhere, his God-language is embedded in that cognitive framework. Inherently, modernism is interrogative and indeterminate—suspicious of dogma, skeptical of organized religion. The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} may serve as a signifier of modernity, revealing Hemingway’s vision of a world “that was adrift."{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=113}} Modernism presents a hard-boiled picture of the world, stripped of traditional certainties, bereft of religion’s “opium." This was the world of which, like the dying Harry in “Snows," Hemingway must write.{{efn|“Harry thinks, “There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the events . . . He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1991b|p=17}}}} This is the world we have inherited.

But what is the ''cognitive'' status of Hemingway’s God-language? Is it merely an ironic use of ancient myths—seen in T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and others—with no underlying substance? Hemingway had little sympathy with the moralistic faith of his parents, leaving their Congregationalism for Catholicism. Morris Buske suggests that his father’s “corporal punishment with a religious orientation” may have contributed to his “psychic difficulties.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=86}} Indeed. We might also envisage some religious impact. Perhaps there is a psychoanalytic link between the Liberal Protestant Fatherhood of God,Nietzsche’s “death of God,” and the suicide of Hemingway’s father.{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} So, is Hemingway’s God-language ironic, emotional and bereft of cognitive reality?{{pg|339|340}}
Following Buske and Stoneback, I suggest not. Buske suggests that Hemingway’s early experiences “led him to embrace Catholicism.” {{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}}} H. R. Stoneback denies that Hemingway’s Catholicism was only nominal:

<blockquote>Hemingway’s personal religious pilgrimage takes him through a rejection of Puritanism, and far beyond the social-gospel brand of Protestantism, into an ever-deepening discovery of Catholicism. This personal faith-journey is manifest . . . with the aesthetic and historical and spiritual sensibility centered in ritual and ceremony (e.g., most obviously, as in the world of ''Toreo,'' or the bullfight; and, less obviously, in the vision of life-as-pilgrimage). Hemingway’s rootedness in the sacramental sense of experience, in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity, grows ever deeper.{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} </blockquote>

Stoneback’s argument is plausible. Yes, Hemingway’s rhetoric is always unsentimental, open-ended, embedded in modernity: that is hard to dispute. Cleanth Brooks said Hemingway confined himself to“his secular terms.”{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} I think that he went further. Granted, in Hemingway there is no parallel to T. S. Eliot’s pilgrimage from the agnosticism of ''The Waste Land'' (1922) to the faith of ''Four Quartets'' (1943). But then most of the Modernists felt unable to follow Eliot in his particular journey. Nor is there any equivalent to Mailer’s final book, ''On God,''{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}} his “quest into the nature and context of ‘reality,’ particularly non-material entities”—in effect “Mailer’s metaphysics.”{{sfn|Sipiora|2008|p=503}}

If Hemingway had not encountered physical and psychological problems, if his memory had not been gravely impaired, what at the end would he have written? We can never know what ''might'' have been. But Stoneback puts it well, “Pilgrimage, the notion and motion of spiritualized travel, is at the center of Hemingway’s religious vision and his work from his earliest stories to the final, unfinished and posthumously published novels and memoirs.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=49}} With great skill, and with a high degree of indeterminacy,Hemingway’s rhetoric appears poised between the language-game of God and that of modernism. Some claim the two games are inherently incompatible. I argue otherwise.

Hemingway did struggle against nihilism, at times teetering on the edge of chaos. Of his writing, Ihab Hassan says, “literary statement approaches{{pg|340|341}} the edge; language implies the abolition of statement."{{sfn|Hassan|1987|p=299}} Yet, Hemingway also redefines the ''sacred,'' reformulating ''grace'' beyond the borders of organized religion. Without ceasing to be a modernist, he is also deeply rooted, as Stoneback claims, “in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} Like Kierkegaard, his God-language is covert and subtle; but it does exist.{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal” Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}}}

=== God-Language in Mailer: Protagonist in the Cosmic Struggle ===

With Norman Mailer, we have a different rhetorical situation. Partly, this difference is a time shift: Hemingway was shaped by the Great War, Mailer by World War II, the generation haunted by the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Hence, there is a religious shift: Hemingway grew up in Oak Park Protestantism before moving to Catholicism, whereas Mailer’s roots were in the Judaism of Brooklyn. To characterize Mailer’s God-language, I use the phrase ''protagonist in the cosmic struggle.'' J. Michael Lennon says that Mailer’s writing is “shot through with his ideas on God and the Devil and the struggle in which they are locked.”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}}

''Harlot’s Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991}} has myriad themes: betrayals ideological and sexual, haunting of sons by fathers, the “compartmentalization of the heart.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=13}} Using the CIA as a ''synecdoche'' for a world of modernity, Mailer shows the boundary between fiction and non-fiction to be extraordinarily indeterminate. That indeterminacy applies to language but also to the ''realpolitic'' world of intelligence. But perhaps the most fascinating example of God-language appears in the last few pages of ''Harlot’s Ghost.'' It comes from Hugh Montague, codename “Harlot”—a mysterious protagonist loosely based on a real person, the enigmatic onetime poet and chief of CIA Counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton (1917–1987).{{efn|There is no consensus on Angleton. Was he the greatest practitioner of counter-intelligence, or, like Kim Philby in British Intelligence, was he a Russian mole? Mailer describes him as “a most complex and convoluted gentleman."{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1132}}}} Harlot speculates that the whole cosmos revealed in modernity fossils, evolution, solar system—to be God’s “‘majestic cover story,’”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280}} an exercise in ''disinformation'' and misdirection from the Lord of Spies, Jehovah.

<blockquote>“‘What would I do if I were Jehovah . . . . I have created him, after all, in My image, so he will wish to discover My nature in order to seize My throne. Would I ever have permitted such a contract in the first place, therefore, if I had not taken the wise precaution to fashion a cover story?’ . . . .“ You can say the universe is a splendidly worked-up system of disinformation calculated to make{{pg|341|342}}us believe in evolution and so divert us away from God. Yes, that is exactly what I would do if I were the Lord and could not trust My own creation.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280-1}} </blockquote>

Mailer presents an astonishing degree of humor, irony, and ambiguity, worthy of Nabokov. Can we take Harlot’s speculation seriously? Mailer provides a complex play of ''metaphor, metonymy,'' and ''metaphysics'' in three arenas—character and plot in the modern novel; theology and cosmology in the universe; and the quest for meaning among the contingencies of life.

Sixteen years later, Mailer returns to these themes in his final book, ''On God.''{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}} There, among other topics, he discusses modern science, fundamentalism, and intelligent design, bringing insight into the nature of plot in the novels of Henry James, Hemingway, James Joyce, and others.{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=143-161}} He suggests, for example, that James and Hemingway were “avatars of Intelligent Design”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=150}} whereas Joyce “plays at the very edge of chaos."{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=151}} It is no coincidence that Mailer moves smoothly between God-language and an analysis of plot in the modern novel—for two reasons.

First, his central theological motif is that God is an ''artist''—a limited Creator doing the best he can. At the start of ''On God,'' Mailer says, “I see God, rather, as a Creator, as the greatest artist. I see human beings as His most developed artworks."{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=5}} He draws, therefore, an analogy between the Creator and the creative artist—like Hemingway, James, Joyce, or himself. Second, Mailer recognizes that literary ''plot'' is a synecdoche for the larger search for meaning, religion being only one manifestation of that search. Just as Mailer is suspicious of a ''plot'' that is too contrived in a novel, so he is also wary of a ''faith'' in God that is too dogmatic, not sufficiently aware of the indeterminacy and chaos of existence.{{efn|“The reason I don’t like plots to prevail is that they don’t allow the figures in the book, the characters, to push their own limits to the point where they make the plot unacceptable and so throw the design into chaos."{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=151}}}} Such fundamentalism misreads the nature of the world, keeping human beings infantile, even dog-like.{{efn|“The worst to be said about Fundamentalism is that it reduces people to the reflexes of a good dog. . . . No great writer ever came out of Fundamentalism, nor any great scientist."{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=71-72}}}}

Mailer’s ''The Gospel According to the Son''{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} is an intriguing work. Rewriting the gospel in first person, he retells the story of Jesus, ''focalizing'' the inner thoughts of the Son of God. To call this narrative bold is an understatement, but the book is more successful than many critics allow. Here, implicitly comparing gospel and story, Jesus compares his account with the canonical gospels:

<blockquote>While I would not say that Mark’s gospel is false, it has much exaggeration. And I would offer less for Matthew, and for Luke and {{pg|342|343}}John, who gave me words I never uttered and described me as gentle when I was pale with rage. Their words were written many years after I was gone and only repeat what old men told them. Very old men. Such tales are to be leaned upon no more than a bush that tears free from its roots and blows about in the wind.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=3-4}}</blockquote>

A kind of mirror image to Gospel is Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} In reconstructing the beginning of Hitler, Mailer explores two opposing entities—God and the Devil—and their cosmic struggle. Like ''Gospel,'' this work questions the boundaries of language, plumbing deep realms of cosmology. Mailer is writing literature, but he is also writing theology. Not all theology arises in seminary, church, or synagogue: God-language may emerge even in the world of modernity.

But here we may find a cognitive divide on the nature of language. Theological fundamentalists believe language to be essentially literal, ''determined'' for all time, even restricted to the letters of the King James Bible of 1611. Theological liberals, on the other hand, will see language as metaphorical, ''indeterminate,'' always in flux. As with Hemingway, Mailer’s God language would seem incompatible with that fundamentalist perspective, but compatible with a more liberal viewpoint.

Mailer asks hard questions. In ''Gospel,'' he asks if there is a God who is more than nostalgia enshrined in ancient words. In ''Castle,'' he asks if we shall avoid the lure of Fascism and another Hitler. Is there a God who speaks to modernity and the evils of the Holocaust? With D.T. as narrator in ''Castle,'' we encounter a Nazi officer in the SS. Then we discover he is also “an officer of the Evil One.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Mailer recognizes the risk that he runs, “Given the present authority of the scientific world, most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Robert Begiebing comments, “The suspension of disbelief required is audacious.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} But Mailer reminds us that our modern world has little understanding of Hitler, “the most mysterious human being of the century.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=72}}

As in ''Gospel'' ten years earlier, ''The Castle'' in the Forest operates in two distinct realms, “the metaphysical and the mundane.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} Metaphysical language is hard to decode. In fact, in the 1920s Logical Positivists denied ''any'' meaning to such metaphysical language, a view later modified by{{pg|343|344}} Karl Popper. God and Satan “appear” in a strange No Man’s Land, at the frontiers of human experience. But thinkers from Augustine to Einstein have recognized that strangeness, using tropes of analogy and metaphor.

However, boundaries are always problematic, be they political, racial, or metaphysical. God-language is found at the ''liminal'' places of life, border regions of indeterminacy and danger. Such language is disturbing, even dangerous. It disturbs our expectations, confusing our maps of modernity. Max Born the physicist said, “We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe, and the vaguer and cloudier.”{{sfn|Born|1951|p=277}} If that be true of physics, other disciplines certainly share that mystery. If all human language exhibits indeterminacy, then religious language will have it in spades.

Since the days of the Puritans, the place of Satan in American culture has become drastically attenuated, the current strength of Fundamentalism notwithstanding. A survey of this trend in American Literature is Andrew Delbanco’s ''The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost their Sense of Evil.'' {{sfn|Delbanco|1995}} He speaks of a dialectic in our culture “between the dispossession of Satan under the pressure of modernity and the hunger to get him back."{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=234}} Whatever our beliefs on his ''being,'' Satan’s ''function'' in society is fairly easily charted, as America moved from belief to irony. Mailer is a protagonist in this cosmic struggle between God and the Devil, but using the metaphors of modernity.{{efn|Delbanco suggests that modernity “has doomed us to see the world through metaphors that cannot be ratified by any appeal to transcendence.”{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=224}}}} However, Mailer leaves us with indeterminacy. We learn that what “enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers—there are only questions.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=467}}

=== Conclusions: The Sacred, Indeterminacy, and Grace ===

There is still much left to explore. Both men redefine the realm of the ''sacred'' outside the boundaries of the Church. They also redefine the profane, in language and belief. There are theological precedents, but much of organized religion finds such redefinition problematic, particularly fundamentalists. For Hemingway, the sacred is found particularly in the natural world—rumors maybe of the original Garden? In Mailer, I am not sure: maybe the sacred is found in the moral struggle—the eternal battle between God and the Devil.

''Indeterminacy'' and suspicion of rigid dogma are also at the heart of both men’s writing, as in Modernity itself. ''Grace,'' however, is a problem within{{pg|344|345}} modernity: “The world starves for grace,” says Yancey.{{sfn|Yancey|2002|p=40}} But grace is a problem also for contemporary religion, as Bawer and Yancey demonstrate. Grace may have its antonym in Hemingway's ''nada'' or Mailer’s “absurdity” of life. Grace may be implicit in Mailer’s belief that, “stories bring order to the absurdity."{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=156-157}} Good fiction, says Mailer, is “nourishing to our sense of reality.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1299}} Stories, after all, have always been part of our lives. Novelist and theologian Fred Buechner has said, “Listen to your life . . . in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”{{sfn|Buechner|1983|p=87}} In this world of modernity, maybe it is through fiction and narrative that we still hear rumors of grace.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

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{{Refend}}

{{Review}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer}}

[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer

2025-04-07T02:17:57Z

JKilchenmann: updates to references

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
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{{byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|abstract=In both Ernest Hemingway and [[Norman_Mailer|Norman Mailer]], their rhetoric announces a new beginning, a new Genesis. But, unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of God, providence, a rational universe. But how does the residual God-language in Hemingway and Mailer actually work? Is grace—a crucial Judeo-Christian reality—to be replaced by ''nada'', signaled in Hemingway's "A Clean Well-Lighted Place"? Or, in an absurd post-human world, does narrative "make sense of life?" Is God-language part of the rhetoric of modernity—or its antithesis? Paradoxically, both may be true.|url=https://projectmailer.net/pm/Raymond_M._Vince}}

{{cquote|This book is fiction. But there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.|author=Ernest Hemingway|source=''A Moveable Feast''{{sfn|Hemingway|2009|p=230}}}}

{{cquote|[I]t is the author’s contention that good fiction—if the writer can achieve it—is more real, that is, more nourishing to our sense of reality, than non-fiction. . . . novelists have a unique opportunity—they can create superior histories out of an enhancement of the real, the unverified, and the wholly fictional.|author=Norman Mailer|source=''Harlot's Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1287-8}}}}

{{dc|dc=W|hat is the rhetoric of modernism?}} Is the Modern novel “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God?”{{sfn|Lukács|1971|p=88}} If so, why do religious themes still appear? Are they the Cheshire Cat’s grin, nostalgic echoes of a vanished age, cosmic footprints left in the wasteland of Modernity? Or are they rumors of grace? How does God-language function in the work of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and Norman Mailer (1923–2007)?

This issue could be a problem in narrative theory, constructing modernity, contemporary religion, or all three. In any case, why does religion persist? Why is some God-language compatible with Modernity—and some not? I shall first discuss the rhetoric of Modernism, then Modernity and disenchantment, before moving on to my selection of God-language of Hemingway and Mailer. I briefly emphasize the sacred, indeterminacy, and grace.{{pg|331|332}}
=== The Rhetoric of Modernism ===

The epigraphs speak of the role of fiction in our lives. For Mailer, paradoxically, good fiction nourishes “our sense of reality.” For Hemingway, fiction “may throw some light” on the facts. The strange relationship between fiction and fact seems linked with Modernism—and the problematic nature of “reality.” I call this the ''rhetoric'' of Modernism. But is that rhetoric—seen in the Modern novel—necessarily linked with secularization? Pericles Lewis suggests that it may be the following:

<blockquote>If the novel is indeed the art form of secularization, “the representative art-form of our age” in Lukács’s words, and if modernity is indeed a secular age, then we could expect the modern novel to be doubly secular. {{sfn|Lukács|1971|p=93}} Many major novels of the early twentieth century do in fact seem to represent a “world that has been abandoned by God,” inasmuch as virtually none of their characters expresses any concrete religious faith and no gods intervene in the course of the action.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}}{{efn|“Novels of the period that do address theological themes more directly seem to be excluded from the modernist canon precisely because of their express interest in religion . . .”{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=690}}}} </blockquote>

But does the novel represents a world “abandoned by God”—or is this statement more hyperbole than argument? Either way, how do we explain these vestiges of God-language? Is this merely etymology—like using ''Wednesday'' without necessarily invoking the god ''Woden?'' I suggest that God-language has more significance than that. But what is the rhetoric of Modernism? Here are two samples.

We start with Hemingway and ''In Our Time.''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} At the end of chapter two’s vignette, we read three sentences: “There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} The impact of war, fragmenting of form, juxtaposing of birth and death, distancing of trauma, the phrase ''scared sick looking'' stripped of its subject, the absence of any clear antecedent to the pronoun ''it,'' the naturalistic symbol of rain—combine in Hemingway’s language. Shaped by modern warfare, in a collage of disturbing images, here is Hemingway’s innovative rhetoric. In its way, ''In Our Time'' is as significant culturally as T. S. Eliot’s ''The Waste Land'' (1922), published three years earlier. Matthew Stewart suggests that this “remains the most insistently experimental of all his books because it is the product of the one {{pg|332|333}}period of his life when he participated intently in a literary scene, and the temper of that milieu was distinctly modernist.”{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=12}}

Two decades later, a parallel to Hemingway’s rhetoric is Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{sfn|Mailer|1948}} Toward the end of the novel, we find two sentences: “Quite naturally he assumed the point and led the platoon toward the pass. A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine-gun bullet which passed through his chest.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=602}} Like Hemingway, the language is sparse and fragmented, the tone objective. There is human rationality in one sentence and violent, irrational death in the next. Yet, the irrationality of Lt.Hearn’s death comes through the exercise of all too rational choices by others—those who designed and manufactured the machine-gun and bullet, the Japanese soldier who fired the fatal shot, and the murderous machinations of Staff Sergeant Croft that led Hearn to that particular point.

The Great War was to be “the war to end all wars.” History demonstrated that proposition to be false. World War Two extrapolated dramatically the horrors of 1914–1918, particularly in the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Here is revealed a demonic rationality, applied with supreme efficiency to the killing of human beings—on a scale not before seen. Label it postmodern, post-Christian, or post-human, there is no doubt that the world described by Hemingway had—by the time of Mailer—become ''more'' irrational, sinister, and far darker. As goes the world, so goes literary form.

These vignettes, a quarter century apart, illustrate the Modernist rhetoric of Hemingway and Mailer. For both authors, they mark a beginning, a revelation, a new Genesis. One thing is clear: unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of traditional concepts of God, a sense of Providence, a rational universe. We have ''left'' the Garden. Many have written on religious themes in Hemingway and in Mailer: certainly, the themes exist and can be discussed.{{efn|Recent articles include Buske,{{sfn|Buske|2002}} Stoneback,{{sfn|Stoneback|2003}} Lewis,{{sfn|Lewis|2004}} Stolzfus,{{sfn|Stolzfus|2005}} Adamowski,{{sfn|Adamowski|2005}} Kroupi,{{sfn|Kroupi|2008}} Bernstein,{{sfn|Bernstein|2008}} Cappell,{{sfn|Cappell|2008}} Sipioria,{{sfn|Sipiora|2008}} and Whalen-Bridge and Oon.{{sfn|Whalen-Bridge|2009}}}} But I would like to examine the overall ''matrix'' of Modernity in which those themes are embedded, focusing on the ''disenchantment'' of the world.

=== Modernity and Disenchantment ===

Lewis says the modern novel is “doubly secular,” representing a world vacated by God.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}} The representation is both thematic and formal. Much has been written about the changing status of religion in the era of Modernity—a period, shall we say, from roughly 1900 to the present day—and many{{pg|333|334}} concepts have been used, such as secularization, loss of faith, ironic cultures, cognitive minorities, the disenchantment of the world, the sacred and the profane, and modernist literature as religion substitute. As one might expect, the literature is considerable.{{efn|Owen Chadwick{{sfn|Chadwick|1975}} is a useful introduction to ''secularization.'' Modernity and Christianity are discussed in Hans Küng.{{sfn|Küng|1980}} Spirituality and modern man are the focus of Carl Jung.{{sfn|Jung|1955}} ''Ironic cultures'' are dealt with by Ernest Gellner,{{sfn|Gellner|1974}} while ''irony'' as a product of the Great War is in Paul Fussell.{{sfn|Fussell|1975}} ''Cognitive minority'' is used by Peter Berger,{{sfn|Berger|1969}} while Berger & Luckmannuse terms such as ''deviance, heresy,'' and ''symbolic universe.'' {{sfn|Berger|1966|p=98-100}} ''Disenchantment of the world'' goes back to Max Weber in the 1940s. Weber, ''sacred'' and ''profane,'' and modernism as ''religion substitute'' are described in Lewis.{{sfn|Lewis|2004}}}} After all, Modernity and the disenchantment of the world is a thing of complexity.{{efn|Secularization in England, for instance, involves Darwin’s ''The Origin of Species'' (1859) and the literary responses: including Tennyson’s ''In Memoriam'' (1850), Arnold’s ''Dover Beach'' (1867), and the novels of George Eliot such ''Silas Marner'' (1861) and ''Middlemarch'' (1871–72). Eliot translated two works of German radical theology, D. F. Strauss’ ''Life of Jesus'' (1835, ET 1846) and Feuerbach’s ''The Essence of Christianity'' (1841, ET 1854). Willey (1964), Brown (1969) and Chadwick (1975) are useful guides, as is Kucich (2001).}} But it cannot be undone.

For Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud onwards,“disenchanting” the world spelt the end of religion—the “death” of God—a process thought to be inevitable. The journey begins with Martin Luther in 1517, or earlier in Renaissance humanism. The rise of modern science, symbolized by ''On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres'' by Copernicus in 1543, is crucial: science advanced as it was able to provide mathematical explanations for phenomena attributed to God or magic. That reality is the heart of disenchantment. Skepticism, a rationalistic response to the Wars of Religion, was also significant. No wonder Popkin says, “Luther had indeed opened a Pandora’s box."{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=15}}

During the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions attacked the Divine Right of Kings. While their respective revolutionary documents retain a “veneer of religion,"{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=39}} this effectively begins the modern secular state. In 1843, Karl Marx, following Feuerbach in arguing that “Man makes religion,"{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243}} in memorable phrases described religion as “the heart of a heartless world” and “the opium of the people."{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=244}}{{efn| “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the ''opium'' of the people."{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243-244, emphasis in original}}}} After 1917, the Soviet Union mandated the “death” of God. A host of epistemological challenges—Descartes, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg—obviously contributed to this process we call modernity.

But religion persisted. Partly, this was an aggressive counter-revolution, including Pope Pius IX (1792–1878), with his ''Syllabus of Errors'' (1864) and Definition of Papal Infallibility (1871), and Protestant fundamentalism, seen in ''The Fundamentals'' (1910–1915) and proclaiming another form of infallibility—an inerrant text. Within the infallible world of Marxist-Leninism, religion grew, maybe because it was attacked. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989,Marx’s critique of religion has lost much, but not all, of its potency. The secularization thesis requires modification.

An example of such modification is Peter Berger’s book, ''A Rumor of Angels.''{{sfn|Berger|1969}} My title alludes to his book, and to a recent usage by Philip Yancey (1997). Berger suggests that there exist certain “signals of transcendence”—such as the human desire for order—that point beyond a purely naturalistic reality.{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}{{efn| “By signals of transcendence I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our ‘natural’ reality but that appear to point beyond that reality”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}}} However, as Berger recognizes, for most people the{{pg|334|335}} predominant reality is still that secular mind-set. Thus, religious language is used by a “cognitive minority." {{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}{{efn| “By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society. Put differently, a cognitive minority is a group formed around a body of deviant ‘knowledge.’”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}}} This position is uncomfortable, needing to be buttressed socially and epistemologically. But the position exists.

Today, the relationship between religion and modernity is more nuanced than in the naturalistic Nineteenth Century. We recognize a wide spectrum from faith through doubt to atheism. But at the risk of simplification, there seem to be two main approaches. For conservative Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be expressed as a ''rejection'' of modernity, using an either/or approach to truth. For those with liberal perspectives on Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be regarded as ''complementary'' to modernity, utilizing a both/and approach to truth. That complementary perspective may remind us of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. This is not simply a literary trope.{{efn| Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg revealed the inescapable reality of indeterminacy in our world.}} In both humanities and physical sciences, there will be no return to rigid determinism.

=== God-Language in Hemingway: "Scared Stiff Looking at It" ===

It is easy to list God-language in Hemingway: deciding significance is harder. The title of ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} came perhaps unconsciously from an English Prayer: “Give us peace in our time, O Lord.”{{sfn|The 1928 Book of Common Prayer|1993|p=31}} {{efn|“Give us peace in our time, O Lord” can be found in the 1928 Episcopal ''Book of Common Prayer'',{{sfn|The 1928 Book of Common Prayer|1993|p=31}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, ''peace'' and ''Lord'' are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}}}} In this work, however, there is little overt God-language, maybe the awkwardness of Krebs with his mother’s sentimentalism in a “A Soldier’s Home”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=76}} or the unnamed soldier’s fearful bargaining with God in the accompanying vignette.{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=67}} Perhaps the final story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” with Nick Adams dealing with an indeterminate trauma by returning to Nature, has echoes of Genesis in its simple declarative sentences, “It was a good camp” and “It was a good feeling."{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=147}} The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it,"{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} could be seen as a ''signifier'' of modernism, much as the final words of Kurtz, “The horror, the horror”{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=178}} from ''Heart of Darkness.'' Conrad’s words, Cedric Watts suggests, “serve as a thematic nexus, a climatic but highly ambiguous utterance which sums up, without resolving, several of the paradoxical themes of the tale."{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=215}} A quarter century later, Hemingway’s ''In Our Time'' offers yet another such thematic nexus.

In ''The Sun Also Rises,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} two themes are balanced. One epigraph,“You are all a lost generation,” from Gertrude Stein, suggests that the narrative is a war novel, although the war seems absent. The other epigraph from Ecclesiastes, perhaps the most secular passage in the bible, includes the words, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth {{pg|335|336}}abideth for ever."{{sfn|King James Bible|2008|p=Ecc. 1:4–7}} This theme, the continuation of the earth, is a metonymy for the continuation of humanity. Linda Wagner-Martin suggests this theme “maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}{{efn|“Considering the two epigraphs in tandem, no reader could stay focused for long on the ‘lost generation’ image. The tone of the second epigraph is clearly positive; it is much longer; it maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}} Maybe this motif is an attenuated form of providence.

There is a kind of balance in Jake and Brett’s conversation following the Romero ''debacle.'' Brett’s decision “not to be a bitch” represents she claims, “sort of what we have instead of God."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} Jake counters, “Some people have God, quite a lot,” but Brett replies, “He never worked very well with me."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} The famous ending is poised among irony, ambiguity, and pessimism. Partly a verdict on Jake and Brett’s tragic relationship, it becomes a larger evaluation of life. With Brett, we like to believe we can have “a damned good time;" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}} we hope the world is a place of order. But in answer, the novel offers only indeterminacy: a delicate balance between covert God-language and hard-boiled modernism. We are left with Jake’s summary: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}}

''A Farewell to Arms''{{sfn|Hemingway|1929}} marks a new skepticism, with Hemingway’s famous dismissal of war’s high diction as “obscene.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=185}} It was also a low point for Hemingway, considering his divorce from Hadley in 1927 and his father’s suicide in 1928. As Reynolds argues, Hemingway frames the Italian retreat from Caporetto as a ''synecdoche'' of a larger human defeat.{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=274}} This, says Reynolds, was the “final conclusion” of the war generation {{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}{{efn|“Some discovered such a truth in the trenches during the war; others discovered it in war prisons or in front of firing squads. Hemingway did not finally understand it until ten years after the war.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}}} But what of the priest in ''A Farewell to Arms:'' is the Abruzzi a kind of sacred space? It might be, butHenry cannot seem to get there. As a modern man, he seems to be “banished.”{{sfn|Civello|1994|p=78}}{{efn|“The Abruzzi, however, is an anomaly in the modern world, and the Christian order it represents no longer exists beyond its boundaries. Frederick Henry, the epitome of the modern displaced hero, yearns nostalgically for that ‘other country’ yet finds himself ‘banished’ from it by his own modern sensibilities." {{sfn|Civello|1994|p=77-78}}}} Heroism still exists, but the irrationality of modern warfare—or the cruelty of Fate—renders it tragically absurd. Toward the end, we read

<blockquote>If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. {{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=249}} </blockquote>

There is a foreshadowing of Catherine’s death, but the words have more resonance
as a statement on human destiny. Yes, there may be a rumor of grace
in the phrase, “many are strong at the broken places,” but the pervasive tone{{pg|336|337}} is bleak. There seems an ''absence'' of God-language, providence, any orderly universe. So, have we not left the Garden for the wasteland?

Indeed we have. But this diction is ''still'' theological language. Mankind’s estrangement from the Garden may be part of Modernism, but it is at the heart of the biblical story—and another element in ''disenchantment.'' In Genesis, we read that “the LORD God drove [Adam] out of the garden of Eden,"{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 3.23}} that “Cain went out from the LORD’s presence,"{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.16}} becoming a “vagrant and a wanderer on earth."{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.12}} Here is ''alienation''—being a stranger, a fugitive. Linked with Hegel and early Marx, alienation has deep biblical roots. In God-language, all are sons of Adam and brothers to Cain.{{efn|“Alienation is the experience of being a stranger, ‘away from home,’ estranged from others and from oneself . . . Alienation is also a theme of the Scriptures as a whole. Adam’s eviction from Eden, Cain’s wandering as a fugitive, Israel’s servitude in Egypt and later exile in Babylon. All symbolize an alienation that is the lot of mankind. . . . from the 1940s, the word was used increasingly to describe social and cultural estrangement. Influences include the vast disorientation caused by World War II, and the writings of Weber, Kierkegaard, and Tillich. A major source was the newly discovered Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of Marx. . . . Alienation, an important concept in social psychology, has its roots in a basic theological reality: that mankind is alienated from God, his fellows, and himself."{{sfn|Vince|1988|p=15}}}} Here, the rhetoric of modernism and Genesis intersect: Garden and wasteland belong ''both'' to a biblical vocabulary and ''also to'' the vocabulary of modernity.

Among Hemingway’s short stories from the 1930s, we have a profound existential parable, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In the café, old man and waiters stave off life’s ''nada'' experience. In his own, each character faces his ''nada'' or emptiness, seen in other Hemingway stories from the period.{{efn|“Nowhere is this ''nada'' (the void, emptiness, meaninglessness) more insistent than in Hemingway’s two African stories, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ and ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro.’” {{sfn|Stolzfus|2005|p=206}}}} The story echoes Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son—and Cain’s angry question to God.{{efn|The Parable begins, “There was once a man who had two sons . . .”{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Luke 15.11}} Both stories have simplicity and profundity. Both seem answers to Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.9}} Both have strong Existentialist perspectives. “The parable, then, is a microcosm of the human situation . . . a picture of man’s alienation from his essential self, from the world, and from society, and is a crystallization of our human condition.”{{sfn|Jones|1964|p=184}}}} The “clean, well-lighted place” seems a poignant ''synecdoche'' for the Garden, representing the search for a lost home, the quest for order. By story’s end, the older waiter better understands the old man’s despair, answering positively Cain’s ancient question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.9}} Yet, the waiter ''demythologizes'' the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary, central to the God-language of Catholicism.{{efn|In a 1941 essay, “New Testament and Mythology,” Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) introduced ''demythologizing,'' influential in the post-war theology.{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=187}}}} Surely, this representation is the ''absence'' of God-language? After all, absence is said to be characteristic of modernism—we think of Hemingway’s iceberg motif. The waiter has replaced ''grace''—and every other theologically significant word—with ''nada,'' nothingness, emptiness. God is dead. Grace has left the building. Nihilism rules.

Yet, two points may be made. First, the Judeo-Christian tradition yields many parallels to the ''nada'' experience: the reflections of Job; the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53; the ocean as symbol of chaos, “the dark night of the soul” from the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the ''via negativa'' of medieval theology; the abandonment of Christ on the Cross; creation as the transforming of an earth “without form and void."{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 1.1–2}} Before Hemingway’s epigraph from Ecclesiastes, we read, “Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty."{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Ecc. 1.2}} Much of modern{{pg|337|338}} theology has a strong existentialist flavor.{{efn|Shaped by Heidegger, Sartre and post-war anomie, Existentialism has earlier sources in the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, and is seen in theologians Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. On American Existentialism, Adamowski{{sfn|Adamowski|2005}} is crucial.}} Yes, two different “language games” are being played here, but they are not necessarily incompatible with one another.

The second point on the ''nada'' experience concerns the structure of the story. Several times the bleakness of ''nada'' seems mitigated. Immediately following the stark words, "Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee," we red this: "He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991a|p=33}} A smile and steaming coffee chase away the ''nada'' experience—for a moment. Then the waiter reaches home, ''nada'' reappears and kills his sleep until daylight. But again, a form of rhetorical balance, for the older waiter dismisses the severity of ''nada.'' "After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991a|p=33}} So, the presence of ''nada'' is not necessarily the negation of God-language.

In For ''Whom the Bell Tolls,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1940}} title and epigraph are from poet priest, John Donne (1572–1631), but God-language again is infrequent. Written close to Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in our Time” speech (September 1938), Hemingway rejects appeasement.{{efn|“As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade."{{sfn|Auden|2007|p=95}}}} Quoting Donne, “No man is an ''Iland,'' intire of it self . . . I am involved in ''Mankinde,''” Hemingway commits to the struggle of the Spanish people.{{sfn|Donne|2003|p=243}} Baker describes the novel as “a study of the betrayal of the Spanish people both by what lay within them and what had been thrust upon them."{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=241}} By 1940, the battle against Fascism in Spain was lost: the greater war was just beginning. Hemingway’s narrative has relevance for both.

The religious context of the Spanish War was tragic: the Church was allied with the Fascists. Anselmo, the old man, hopes to be forgiven for the sin of killing. But forgiven by whom? “‘Who knows?’” he says, “‘Since we do not have God here anymore, neither His Son nor the Holy Ghost, who forgives? I do not know.’”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} Jordan asks, “‘You have not God anymore?’” Anselmo refers not to the Left’s “death” of God but to the ancient problem of ''theodicy,'' replying,

<blockquote>“No. Man. Certainly not. If there were God, never would He have permitted what I have seen with my eyes. Let them have God.
“They claim Him.”
“Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} </blockquote>{{pg|338|339}}

After making love with Maria, Jordan criticizes his political ''clichés.''{{efn|“Hard-shell Baptist” was applied to the Primitive Baptists, a group dating from early nineteenth century splits.}} “He had gotten to be as bigoted and hide-bound about his politics as a hardshelled Baptist. . . . Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=164}} Finally, in the novel’s last few pages, Jordan reflects on facing death “with religion” and “taking it straight.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}} Here Jordan’s perspective, echoing Feuerbach and Freud, is typical of the rhetoric of modernism. “Who do you suppose has it easier? Ones with religion or just taking it straight? It comforts them very much but we know there is no thing to fear.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}}

There is more God-language that could be quoted. The child’s prayer in “Now I Lay Me,"{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=276-282}} the Crucifixion told by the Roman soldiers in “Today Is Friday,”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=271-273}} the quest for an original paradise in ''The Garden of Eden,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1986}} but these examples may be sufficient. In summary, what can be said? The rhetoric of Modernism is integral to Hemingway’s writing: always and everywhere, his God-language is embedded in that cognitive framework. Inherently, modernism is interrogative and indeterminate—suspicious of dogma, skeptical of organized religion. The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} may serve as a signifier of modernity, revealing Hemingway’s vision of a world “that was adrift."{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=113}} Modernism presents a hard-boiled picture of the world, stripped of traditional certainties, bereft of religion’s “opium." This was the world of which, like the dying Harry in “Snows," Hemingway must write.{{efn|“Harry thinks, “There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the events . . . He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1991b|p=17}}}} This is the world we have inherited.

But what is the ''cognitive'' status of Hemingway’s God-language? Is it merely an ironic use of ancient myths—seen in T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and others—with no underlying substance? Hemingway had little sympathy with the moralistic faith of his parents, leaving their Congregationalism for Catholicism. Morris Buske suggests that his father’s “corporal punishment with a religious orientation” may have contributed to his “psychic difficulties.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=86}} Indeed. We might also envisage some religious impact. Perhaps there is a psychoanalytic link between the Liberal Protestant Fatherhood of God,Nietzsche’s “death of God,” and the suicide of Hemingway’s father.{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} So, is Hemingway’s God-language ironic, emotional and bereft of cognitive reality?{{pg|339|340}}
Following Buske and Stoneback, I suggest not. Buske suggests that Hemingway’s early experiences “led him to embrace Catholicism.” {{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}}} H. R. Stoneback denies that Hemingway’s Catholicism was only nominal:

<blockquote>Hemingway’s personal religious pilgrimage takes him through a rejection of Puritanism, and far beyond the social-gospel brand of Protestantism, into an ever-deepening discovery of Catholicism. This personal faith-journey is manifest . . . with the aesthetic and historical and spiritual sensibility centered in ritual and ceremony (e.g., most obviously, as in the world of ''Toreo,'' or the bullfight; and, less obviously, in the vision of life-as-pilgrimage). Hemingway’s rootedness in the sacramental sense of experience, in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity, grows ever deeper.{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} </blockquote>

Stoneback’s argument is plausible. Yes, Hemingway’s rhetoric is always unsentimental, open-ended, embedded in modernity: that is hard to dispute. Cleanth Brooks said Hemingway confined himself to“his secular terms.”{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} I think that he went further. Granted, in Hemingway there is no parallel to T. S. Eliot’s pilgrimage from the agnosticism of ''The Waste Land'' (1922) to the faith of ''Four Quartets'' (1943). But then most of the Modernists felt unable to follow Eliot in his particular journey. Nor is there any equivalent to Mailer’s final book, ''On God,''{{sfn|Mailer|2007b}} his “quest into the nature and context of ‘reality,’ particularly non-material entities”—in effect “Mailer’s metaphysics.”{{sfn|Sipiora|2008|p=503}}

If Hemingway had not encountered physical and psychological problems, if his memory had not been gravely impaired, what at the end would he have written? We can never know what ''might'' have been. But Stoneback puts it well, “Pilgrimage, the notion and motion of spiritualized travel, is at the center of Hemingway’s religious vision and his work from his earliest stories to the final, unfinished and posthumously published novels and memoirs.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=49}} With great skill, and with a high degree of indeterminacy,Hemingway’s rhetoric appears poised between the language-game of God and that of modernism. Some claim the two games are inherently incompatible. I argue otherwise.

Hemingway did struggle against nihilism, at times teetering on the edge of chaos. Of his writing, Ihab Hassan says, “literary statement approaches{{pg|340|341}} the edge; language implies the abolition of statement."{{sfn|Hassan|1987|p=299}} Yet, Hemingway also redefines the ''sacred,'' reformulating ''grace'' beyond the borders of organized religion. Without ceasing to be a modernist, he is also deeply rooted, as Stoneback claims, “in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} Like Kierkegaard, his God-language is covert and subtle; but it does exist.{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal” Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}}}

=== God-Language in Mailer: Protagonist in the Cosmic Struggle ===

With Norman Mailer, we have a different rhetorical situation. Partly, this difference is a time shift: Hemingway was shaped by the Great War, Mailer by World War II, the generation haunted by the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Hence, there is a religious shift: Hemingway grew up in Oak Park Protestantism before moving to Catholicism, whereas Mailer’s roots were in the Judaism of Brooklyn. To characterize Mailer’s God-language, I use the phrase ''protagonist in the cosmic struggle.'' J. Michael Lennon says that Mailer’s writing is “shot through with his ideas on God and the Devil and the struggle in which they are locked.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007b}}

''Harlot’s Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991}} has myriad themes: betrayals ideological and sexual, haunting of sons by fathers, the “compartmentalization of the heart.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=13}} Using the CIA as a ''synecdoche'' for a world of modernity, Mailer shows the boundary between fiction and non-fiction to be extraordinarily indeterminate. That indeterminacy applies to language but also to the ''realpolitic'' world of intelligence. But perhaps the most fascinating example of God-language appears in the last few pages of ''Harlot’s Ghost.'' It comes from Hugh Montague, codename “Harlot”—a mysterious protagonist loosely based on a real person, the enigmatic onetime poet and chief of CIA Counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton (1917–1987).{{efn|There is no consensus on Angleton. Was he the greatest practitioner of counter-intelligence, or, like Kim Philby in British Intelligence, was he a Russian mole? Mailer describes him as “a most complex and convoluted gentleman."{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1132}}}} Harlot speculates that the whole cosmos revealed in modernity fossils, evolution, solar system—to be God’s “‘majestic cover story,’”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280}} an exercise in ''disinformation'' and misdirection from the Lord of Spies, Jehovah.

<blockquote>“‘What would I do if I were Jehovah . . . . I have created him, after all, in My image, so he will wish to discover My nature in order to seize My throne. Would I ever have permitted such a contract in the first place, therefore, if I had not taken the wise precaution to fashion a cover story?’ . . . .“ You can say the universe is a splendidly worked-up system of disinformation calculated to make{{pg|341|342}}us believe in evolution and so divert us away from God. Yes, that is exactly what I would do if I were the Lord and could not trust My own creation.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280-1}} </blockquote>

Mailer presents an astonishing degree of humor, irony, and ambiguity, worthy of Nabokov. Can we take Harlot’s speculation seriously? Mailer provides a complex play of ''metaphor, metonymy,'' and ''metaphysics'' in three arenas—character and plot in the modern novel; theology and cosmology in the universe; and the quest for meaning among the contingencies of life.

Sixteen years later, Mailer returns to these themes in his final book, ''On God.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007b}} There, among other topics, he discusses modern science, fundamentalism, and intelligent design, bringing insight into the nature of plot in the novels of Henry James, Hemingway, James Joyce, and others.{{sfn|Mailer|2007b|p=143-161}} He suggests, for example, that James and Hemingway were “avatars of Intelligent Design”{{sfn|Mailer|2007b|p=150}} whereas Joyce “plays at the very edge of chaos."{{sfn|Mailer|2007b|p=151}} It is no coincidence that Mailer moves smoothly between God-language and an analysis of plot in the modern novel—for two reasons.

First, his central theological motif is that God is an ''artist''—a limited Creator doing the best he can. At the start of ''On God,'' Mailer says, “I see God, rather, as a Creator, as the greatest artist. I see human beings as His most developed artworks."{{sfn|Mailer|2007b|p=5}} He draws, therefore, an analogy between the Creator and the creative artist—like Hemingway, James, Joyce, or himself. Second, Mailer recognizes that literary ''plot'' is a synecdoche for the larger search for meaning, religion being only one manifestation of that search. Just as Mailer is suspicious of a ''plot'' that is too contrived in a novel, so he is also wary of a ''faith'' in God that is too dogmatic, not sufficiently aware of the indeterminacy and chaos of existence.{{efn|“The reason I don’t like plots to prevail is that they don’t allow the figures in the book, the characters, to push their own limits to the point where they make the plot unacceptable and so throw the design into chaos."{{sfn|Mailer|2007b|p=151}}}} Such fundamentalism misreads the nature of the world, keeping human beings infantile, even dog-like.{{efn|“The worst to be said about Fundamentalism is that it reduces people to the reflexes of a good dog. . . . No great writer ever came out of Fundamentalism, nor any great scientist."{{sfn|Mailer|2007b|p=71-72}}}}

Mailer’s ''The Gospel According to the Son''{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} is an intriguing work. Rewriting the gospel in first person, he retells the story of Jesus, ''focalizing'' the inner thoughts of the Son of God. To call this narrative bold is an understatement, but the book is more successful than many critics allow. Here, implicitly comparing gospel and story, Jesus compares his account with the canonical gospels:

<blockquote>While I would not say that Mark’s gospel is false, it has much exaggeration. And I would offer less for Matthew, and for Luke and {{pg|342|343}}John, who gave me words I never uttered and described me as gentle when I was pale with rage. Their words were written many years after I was gone and only repeat what old men told them. Very old men. Such tales are to be leaned upon no more than a bush that tears free from its roots and blows about in the wind.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=3-4}}</blockquote>

A kind of mirror image to Gospel is Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007a}} In reconstructing the beginning of Hitler, Mailer explores two opposing entities—God and the Devil—and their cosmic struggle. Like ''Gospel,'' this work questions the boundaries of language, plumbing deep realms of cosmology. Mailer is writing literature, but he is also writing theology. Not all theology arises in seminary, church, or synagogue: God-language may emerge even in the world of modernity.

But here we may find a cognitive divide on the nature of language. Theological fundamentalists believe language to be essentially literal, ''determined'' for all time, even restricted to the letters of the King James Bible of 1611. Theological liberals, on the other hand, will see language as metaphorical, ''indeterminate,'' always in flux. As with Hemingway, Mailer’s God language would seem incompatible with that fundamentalist perspective, but compatible with a more liberal viewpoint.

Mailer asks hard questions. In ''Gospel,'' he asks if there is a God who is more than nostalgia enshrined in ancient words. In ''Castle,'' he asks if we shall avoid the lure of Fascism and another Hitler. Is there a God who speaks to modernity and the evils of the Holocaust? With D.T. as narrator in ''Castle,'' we encounter a Nazi officer in the SS. Then we discover he is also “an officer of the Evil One.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007a|p=71}} Mailer recognizes the risk that he runs, “Given the present authority of the scientific world, most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007a|p=71}} Robert Begiebing comments, “The suspension of disbelief required is audacious.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} But Mailer reminds us that our modern world has little understanding of Hitler, “the most mysterious human being of the century.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007a|p=72}}

As in ''Gospel'' ten years earlier, ''The Castle'' in the Forest operates in two distinct realms, “the metaphysical and the mundane.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} Metaphysical language is hard to decode. In fact, in the 1920s Logical Positivists denied ''any'' meaning to such metaphysical language, a view later modified by{{pg|343|344}} Karl Popper. God and Satan “appear” in a strange No Man’s Land, at the frontiers of human experience. But thinkers from Augustine to Einstein have recognized that strangeness, using tropes of analogy and metaphor.

However, boundaries are always problematic, be they political, racial, or metaphysical. God-language is found at the ''liminal'' places of life, border regions of indeterminacy and danger. Such language is disturbing, even dangerous. It disturbs our expectations, confusing our maps of modernity. Max Born the physicist said, “We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe, and the vaguer and cloudier.”{{sfn|Born|1951|p=277}} If that be true of physics, other disciplines certainly share that mystery. If all human language exhibits indeterminacy, then religious language will have it in spades.

Since the days of the Puritans, the place of Satan in American culture has become drastically attenuated, the current strength of Fundamentalism notwithstanding. A survey of this trend in American Literature is Andrew Delbanco’s ''The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost their Sense of Evil.'' {{sfn|Delbanco|1995}} He speaks of a dialectic in our culture “between the dispossession of Satan under the pressure of modernity and the hunger to get him back."{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=234}} Whatever our beliefs on his ''being,'' Satan’s ''function'' in society is fairly easily charted, as America moved from belief to irony. Mailer is a protagonist in this cosmic struggle between God and the Devil, but using the metaphors of modernity.{{efn|Delbanco suggests that modernity “has doomed us to see the world through metaphors that cannot be ratified by any appeal to transcendence.”{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=224}}}} However, Mailer leaves us with indeterminacy. We learn that what “enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers—there are only questions.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007a|p=467}}

=== Conclusions: The Sacred, Indeterminacy, and Grace ===

There is still much left to explore. Both men redefine the realm of the ''sacred'' outside the boundaries of the Church. They also redefine the profane, in language and belief. There are theological precedents, but much of organized religion finds such redefinition problematic, particularly fundamentalists. For Hemingway, the sacred is found particularly in the natural world—rumors maybe of the original Garden? In Mailer, I am not sure: maybe the sacred is found in the moral struggle—the eternal battle between God and the Devil.

''Indeterminacy'' and suspicion of rigid dogma are also at the heart of both men’s writing, as in Modernity itself. ''Grace,'' however, is a problem within{{pg|344|345}} modernity: “The world starves for grace,” says Yancey.{{sfn|Yancey|2002|p=40}} But grace is a problem also for contemporary religion, as Bawer and Yancey demonstrate. Grace may have its antonym in Hemingway's ''nada'' or Mailer’s “absurdity” of life. Grace may be implicit in Mailer’s belief that, “stories bring order to the absurdity."{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=156-157}} Good fiction, says Mailer, is “nourishing to our sense of reality.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1299}} Stories, after all, have always been part of our lives. Novelist and theologian Fred Buechner has said, “Listen to your life . . . in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”{{sfn|Buechner|1983|p=87}} In this world of modernity, maybe it is through fiction and narrative that we still hear rumors of grace.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

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{{Refend}}

{{Review}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer}}

[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer

2025-04-06T23:55:29Z

JKilchenmann: no authors fix

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}}
{{byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|abstract=In both Ernest Hemingway and [[Norman_Mailer|Norman Mailer]], their rhetoric announces a new beginning, a new Genesis. But, unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of God, providence, a rational universe. But how does the residual God-language in Hemingway and Mailer actually work? Is grace—a crucial Judeo-Christian reality—to be replaced by ''nada'', signaled in Hemingway's "A Clean Well-Lighted Place"? Or, in an absurd post-human world, does narrative "make sense of life?" Is God-language part of the rhetoric of modernity—or its antithesis? Paradoxically, both may be true.|url=https://projectmailer.net/pm/Raymond_M._Vince}}

{{cquote|This book is fiction. But there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.|author=Ernest Hemingway|source=''A Moveable Feast''{{sfn|Hemingway|2009|p=230}}}}

{{cquote|[I]t is the author’s contention that good fiction—if the writer can achieve it—is more real, that is, more nourishing to our sense of reality, than non-fiction. . . . novelists have a unique opportunity—they can create superior histories out of an enhancement of the real, the unverified, and the wholly fictional.|author=Norman Mailer|source=''Harlot's Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1287-8}}}}

{{dc|dc=W|hat is the rhetoric of modernism?}} Is the Modern novel “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God?”{{sfn|Lucáks|1971|p=88}} If so, why do religious themes still appear? Are they the Cheshire Cat’s grin, nostalgic echoes of a vanished age, cosmic footprints left in the wasteland of Modernity? Or are they rumors of grace? How does God-language function in the work of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and Norman Mailer (1923–2007)?

This issue could be a problem in narrative theory, constructing modernity, contemporary religion, or all three. In any case, why does religion persist? Why is some God-language compatible with Modernity—and some not? I shall first discuss the rhetoric of Modernism, then Modernity and disenchantment, before moving on to my selection of God-language of Hemingway and Mailer. I briefly emphasize the sacred, indeterminacy, and grace.{{pg|331|332}}
=== The Rhetoric of Modernism ===

The epigraphs speak of the role of fiction in our lives. For Mailer, paradoxically, good fiction nourishes “our sense of reality.” For Hemingway, fiction “may throw some light” on the facts. The strange relationship between fiction and fact seems linked with Modernism—and the problematic nature of “reality.” I call this the ''rhetoric'' of Modernism. But is that rhetoric—seen in the Modern novel—necessarily linked with secularization? Pericles Lewis suggests that it may be the following:

<blockquote>If the novel is indeed the art form of secularization, “the representative art-form of our age” in Lukács’s words, and if modernity is indeed a secular age, then we could expect the modern novel to be doubly secular. {{sfn|Lucáks|1971|p=93}} Many major novels of the early twentieth century do in fact seem to represent a “world that has been abandoned by God,” inasmuch as virtually none of their characters expresses any concrete religious faith and no gods intervene in the course of the action.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}}{{efn|“Novels of the period that do address theological themes more directly seem to be excluded from the modernist canon precisely because of their express interest in religion . . .”{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=690}}}} </blockquote>

But does the novel represents a world “abandoned by God”—or is this statement more hyperbole than argument? Either way, how do we explain these vestiges of God-language? Is this merely etymology—like using ''Wednesday'' without necessarily invoking the god ''Woden?'' I suggest that God-language has more significance than that. But what is the rhetoric of Modernism? Here are two samples.

We start with Hemingway and ''In Our Time.''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} At the end of chapter two’s vignette, we read three sentences: “There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} The impact of war, fragmenting of form, juxtaposing of birth and death, distancing of trauma, the phrase ''scared sick looking'' stripped of its subject, the absence of any clear antecedent to the pronoun ''it,'' the naturalistic symbol of rain—combine in Hemingway’s language. Shaped by modern warfare, in a collage of disturbing images, here is Hemingway’s innovative rhetoric. In its way, ''In Our Time'' is as significant culturally as T. S. Eliot’s ''The Waste Land'' (1922), published three years earlier. Matthew Stewart suggests that this “remains the most insistently experimental of all his books because it is the product of the one {{pg|332|333}}period of his life when he participated intently in a literary scene, and the temper of that milieu was distinctly modernist.”{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=12}}

Two decades later, a parallel to Hemingway’s rhetoric is Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{sfn|Mailer|1948}} Toward the end of the novel, we find two sentences: “Quite naturally he assumed the point and led the platoon toward the pass. A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine-gun bullet which passed through his chest.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=602}} Like Hemingway, the language is sparse and fragmented, the tone objective. There is human rationality in one sentence and violent, irrational death in the next. Yet, the irrationality of Lt.Hearn’s death comes through the exercise of all too rational choices by others—those who designed and manufactured the machine-gun and bullet, the Japanese soldier who fired the fatal shot, and the murderous machinations of Staff Sergeant Croft that led Hearn to that particular point.

The Great War was to be “the war to end all wars.” History demonstrated that proposition to be false. World War Two extrapolated dramatically the horrors of 1914–1918, particularly in the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Here is revealed a demonic rationality, applied with supreme efficiency to the killing of human beings—on a scale not before seen. Label it postmodern, post-Christian, or post-human, there is no doubt that the world described by Hemingway had—by the time of Mailer—become ''more'' irrational, sinister, and far darker. As goes the world, so goes literary form.

These vignettes, a quarter century apart, illustrate the Modernist rhetoric of Hemingway and Mailer. For both authors, they mark a beginning, a revelation, a new Genesis. One thing is clear: unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of traditional concepts of God, a sense of Providence, a rational universe. We have ''left'' the Garden. Many have written on religious themes in Hemingway and in Mailer: certainly, the themes exist and can be discussed.{{efn|Recent articles include Buske,{{sfn|Buske|2002}} Stoneback,{{sfn|Stoneback|2003}} Lewis,{{sfn|Lewis|2004}} Stolzfus,{{sfn|Stolzfus|2005}} Adamowski,{{sfn|Adamowski|2005}} Kroupi,{{sfn|Kroupi|2008}} Bernstein,{{sfn|Bernstein|2008}} Cappell,{{sfn|Cappell|2008}} Sipioria,{{sfn|Sipiora|2008}} and Whalen-Bridge and Oon.{{sfn|Whalen-Bridge|2009}}}} But I would like to examine the overall ''matrix'' of Modernity in which those themes are embedded, focusing on the ''disenchantment'' of the world.

=== Modernity and Disenchantment ===

Lewis says the modern novel is “doubly secular,” representing a world vacated by God.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}} The representation is both thematic and formal. Much has been written about the changing status of religion in the era of Modernity—a period, shall we say, from roughly 1900 to the present day—and many{{pg|333|334}} concepts have been used, such as secularization, loss of faith, ironic cultures, cognitive minorities, the disenchantment of the world, the sacred and the profane, and modernist literature as religion substitute. As one might expect, the literature is considerable.{{efn|Owen Chadwick{{sfn|Chadwick|1975}} is a useful introduction to ''secularization.'' Modernity and Christianity are discussed in Hans Küng.{{sfn|Küng|1980}} Spirituality and modern man are the focus of Carl Jung.{{sfn|Jung|1955}} ''Ironic cultures'' are dealt with by Ernest Gellner,{{sfn|Gellner|1975}} while ''irony'' as a product of the Great War is in Paul Fussell.{{sfn|Fussell|1975}} ''Cognitive minority'' is used by Peter Berger,{{sfn|Berger|1969}} while Berger & Luckmannuse terms such as ''deviance, heresy,'' and ''symbolic universe.'' {{sfn|Berger|1966|p=98-100}} ''Disenchantment of the world'' goes back to Max Weber in the 1940s. Weber, ''sacred'' and ''profane,'' and modernism as ''religion substitute'' are described in Lewis.{{sfn|Lewis|2004}}}} After all, Modernity and the disenchantment of the world is a thing of complexity.{{efn|Secularization in England, for instance, involves Darwin’s ''The Origin of Species'' (1859) and the literary responses: including Tennyson’s ''In Memoriam'' (1850), Arnold’s ''Dover Beach'' (1867), and the novels of George Eliot such ''Silas Marner'' (1861) and ''Middlemarch'' (1871–72). Eliot translated two works of German radical theology, D. F. Strauss’ ''Life of Jesus'' (1835, ET 1846) and Feuerbach’s ''The Essence of Christianity'' (1841, ET 1854). Willey (1964), Brown (1969) and Chadwick (1975) are useful guides, as is Kucich (2001).}} But it cannot be undone.

For Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud onwards,“disenchanting” the world spelt the end of religion—the “death” of God—a process thought to be inevitable. The journey begins with Martin Luther in 1517, or earlier in Renaissance humanism. The rise of modern science, symbolized by ''On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres'' by Copernicus in 1543, is crucial: science advanced as it was able to provide mathematical explanations for phenomena attributed to God or magic. That reality is the heart of disenchantment. Skepticism, a rationalistic response to the Wars of Religion, was also significant. No wonder Popkin says, “Luther had indeed opened a Pandora’s box."{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=15}}

During the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions attacked the Divine Right of Kings. While their respective revolutionary documents retain a “veneer of religion,"{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=39}} this effectively begins the modern secular state. In 1843, Karl Marx, following Feuerbach in arguing that “Man makes religion,"{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243}} in memorable phrases described religion as “the heart of a heartless world” and “the opium of the people."{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=244}}{{efn| “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the ''opium'' of the people."{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243-244, emphasis in original}}}} After 1917, the Soviet Union mandated the “death” of God. A host of epistemological challenges—Descartes, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg—obviously contributed to this process we call modernity.

But religion persisted. Partly, this was an aggressive counter-revolution, including Pope Pius IX (1792–1878), with his ''Syllabus of Errors'' (1864) and Definition of Papal Infallibility (1871), and Protestant fundamentalism, seen in ''The Fundamentals'' (1910–1915) and proclaiming another form of infallibility—an inerrant text. Within the infallible world of Marxist-Leninism, religion grew, maybe because it was attacked. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989,Marx’s critique of religion has lost much, but not all, of its potency. The secularization thesis requires modification.

An example of such modification is Peter Berger’s book, ''A Rumor of Angels.''{{sfn|Berger|1969}} My title alludes to his book, and to a recent usage by Philip Yancey (1997). Berger suggests that there exist certain “signals of transcendence”—such as the human desire for order—that point beyond a purely naturalistic reality.{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}{{efn| “By signals of transcendence I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our ‘natural’ reality but that appear to point beyond that reality”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}}} However, as Berger recognizes, for most people the{{pg|334|335}} predominant reality is still that secular mind-set. Thus, religious language is used by a “cognitive minority." {{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}{{efn| “By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society. Put differently, a cognitive minority is a group formed around a body of deviant ‘knowledge.’”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}}} This position is uncomfortable, needing to be buttressed socially and epistemologically. But the position exists.

Today, the relationship between religion and modernity is more nuanced than in the naturalistic Nineteenth Century. We recognize a wide spectrum from faith through doubt to atheism. But at the risk of simplification, there seem to be two main approaches. For conservative Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be expressed as a ''rejection'' of modernity, using an either/or approach to truth. For those with liberal perspectives on Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be regarded as ''complementary'' to modernity, utilizing a both/and approach to truth. That complementary perspective may remind us of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. This is not simply a literary trope.{{efn| Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg revealed the inescapable reality of indeterminacy in our world.}} In both humanities and physical sciences, there will be no return to rigid determinism.

=== God-Language in Hemingway: "Scared Stiff Looking at It" ===

It is easy to list God-language in Hemingway: deciding significance is harder. The title of ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} came perhaps unconsciously from an English Prayer: “Give us peace in our time, O Lord.”{{sfn|The 1928 Book of Common Prayer|1993|p=31}} {{efn|“Give us peace in our time, O Lord” can be found in the 1928 Episcopal ''Book of Common Prayer'',{{sfn|The 1928 Book of Common Prayer|1993|p=31}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, ''peace'' and ''Lord'' are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}}}} In this work, however, there is little overt God-language, maybe the awkwardness of Krebs with his mother’s sentimentalism in a “A Soldier’s Home”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=76}} or the unnamed soldier’s fearful bargaining with God in the accompanying vignette.{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=67}} Perhaps the final story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” with Nick Adams dealing with an indeterminate trauma by returning to Nature, has echoes of Genesis in its simple declarative sentences, “It was a good camp” and “It was a good feeling."{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=147}} The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it,"{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} could be seen as a ''signifier'' of modernism, much as the final words of Kurtz, “The horror, the horror”{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=178}} from ''Heart of Darkness.'' Conrad’s words, Cedric Watts suggests, “serve as a thematic nexus, a climatic but highly ambiguous utterance which sums up, without resolving, several of the paradoxical themes of the tale."{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=215}} A quarter century later, Hemingway’s ''In Our Time'' offers yet another such thematic nexus.

In ''The Sun Also Rises,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} two themes are balanced. One epigraph,“You are all a lost generation,” from Gertrude Stein, suggests that the narrative is a war novel, although the war seems absent. The other epigraph from Ecclesiastes, perhaps the most secular passage in the bible, includes the words, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth {{pg|335|336}}abideth for ever."{{sfn|King James Bible|2008|p=Ecc. 1.4–7}} This theme, the continuation of the earth, is a metonymy for the continuation of humanity. Linda Wagner-Martin suggests this theme “maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}{{efn|“Considering the two epigraphs in tandem, no reader could stay focused for long on the ‘lost generation’ image. The tone of the second epigraph is clearly positive; it is much longer; it maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}} Maybe this motif is an attenuated form of providence.

There is a kind of balance in Jake and Brett’s conversation following the Romero ''debacle.'' Brett’s decision “not to be a bitch” represents she claims, “sort of what we have instead of God."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} Jake counters, “Some people have God, quite a lot,” but Brett replies, “He never worked very well with me."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} The famous ending is poised among irony, ambiguity, and pessimism. Partly a verdict on Jake and Brett’s tragic relationship, it becomes a larger evaluation of life. With Brett, we like to believe we can have “a damned good time;" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}} we hope the world is a place of order. But in answer, the novel offers only indeterminacy: a delicate balance between covert God-language and hard-boiled modernism. We are left with Jake’s summary: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}}

''A Farewell to Arms''{{sfn|Hemingway|1929}} marks a new skepticism, with Hemingway’s famous dismissal of war’s high diction as “obscene.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=185}} It was also a low point for Hemingway, considering his divorce from Hadley in 1927 and his father’s suicide in 1928. As Reynolds argues, Hemingway frames the Italian retreat from Caporetto as a ''synecdoche'' of a larger human defeat.{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=274}} This, says Reynolds, was the “final conclusion” of the war generation {{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}{{efn|“Some discovered such a truth in the trenches during the war; others discovered it in war prisons or in front of firing squads. Hemingway did not finally understand it until ten years after the war.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}}} But what of the priest in ''A Farewell to Arms:'' is the Abruzzi a kind of sacred space? It might be, butHenry cannot seem to get there. As a modern man, he seems to be “banished.”{{sfn|Civello|1994|p=78}}{{efn|“The Abruzzi, however, is an anomaly in the modern world, and the Christian order it represents no longer exists beyond its boundaries. Frederick Henry, the epitome of the modern displaced hero, yearns nostalgically for that ‘other country’ yet finds himself ‘banished’ from it by his own modern sensibilities." {{sfn|Civello|1994|p=77-78}}}} Heroism still exists, but the irrationality of modern warfare—or the cruelty of Fate—renders it tragically absurd. Toward the end, we read

<blockquote>If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. {{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=249}} </blockquote>

There is a foreshadowing of Catherine’s death, but the words have more resonance
as a statement on human destiny. Yes, there may be a rumor of grace
in the phrase, “many are strong at the broken places,” but the pervasive tone{{pg|336|337}} is bleak. There seems an ''absence'' of God-language, providence, any orderly universe. So, have we not left the Garden for the wasteland?

Indeed we have. But this diction is ''still'' theological language. Mankind’s estrangement from the Garden may be part of Modernism, but it is at the heart of the biblical story—and another element in ''disenchantment.'' In Genesis, we read that “the LORD God drove [Adam] out of the garden of Eden,"{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 3.23}} that “Cain went out from the LORD’s presence,"{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.16}} becoming a “vagrant and a wanderer on earth."{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.12}} Here is ''alienation''—being a stranger, a fugitive. Linked with Hegel and early Marx, alienation has deep biblical roots. In God-language, all are sons of Adam and brothers to Cain.{{efn|“Alienation is the experience of being a stranger, ‘away from home,’ estranged from others and from oneself . . . Alienation is also a theme of the Scriptures as a whole. Adam’s eviction from Eden, Cain’s wandering as a fugitive, Israel’s servitude in Egypt and later exile in Babylon. All symbolize an alienation that is the lot of mankind. . . . from the 1940s, the word was used increasingly to describe social and cultural estrangement. Influences include the vast disorientation caused by World War II, and the writings of Weber, Kierkegaard, and Tillich. A major source was the newly discovered Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of Marx. . . . Alienation, an important concept in social psychology, has its roots in a basic theological reality: that mankind is alienated from God, his fellows, and himself."{{sfn|Vince|1988|p=15}}}} Here, the rhetoric of modernism and Genesis intersect: Garden and wasteland belong ''both'' to a biblical vocabulary and ''also to'' the vocabulary of modernity.

Among Hemingway’s short stories from the 1930s, we have a profound existential parable, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In the café, old man and waiters stave off life’s ''nada'' experience. In his own, each character faces his ''nada'' or emptiness, seen in other Hemingway stories from the period.{{efn|“Nowhere is this ''nada'' (the void, emptiness, meaninglessness) more insistent than in Hemingway’s two African stories, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ and ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro.’” {{sfn|Stolzfus|2005|p=206}}}} The story echoes Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son—and Cain’s angry question to God.{{efn|The Parable begins, “There was once a man who had two sons . . .”{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Luke 15.11}} Both stories have simplicity and profundity. Both seem answers to Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.9}} Both have strong Existentialist perspectives. “The parable, then, is a microcosm of the human situation . . . a picture of man’s alienation from his essential self, from the world, and from society, and is a crystallization of our human condition.”{{sfn|Jones|1964|p=184}}}} The “clean, well-lighted place” seems a poignant ''synecdoche'' for the Garden, representing the search for a lost home, the quest for order. By story’s end, the older waiter better understands the old man’s despair, answering positively Cain’s ancient question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.9}} Yet, the waiter ''demythologizes'' the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary, central to the God-language of Catholicism.{{efn|In a 1941 essay, “New Testament and Mythology,” Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) introduced ''demythologizing,'' influential in the post-war theology.{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=187}}}} Surely, this representation is the ''absence'' of God-language? After all, absence is said to be characteristic of modernism—we think of Hemingway’s iceberg motif. The waiter has replaced ''grace''—and every other theologically significant word—with ''nada,'' nothingness, emptiness. God is dead. Grace has left the building. Nihilism rules.

Yet, two points may be made. First, the Judeo-Christian tradition yields many parallels to the ''nada'' experience: the reflections of Job; the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53; the ocean as symbol of chaos, “the dark night of the soul” from the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the ''via negativa'' of medieval theology; the abandonment of Christ on the Cross; creation as the transforming of an earth “without form and void."{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 1.1–2}} Before Hemingway’s epigraph from Ecclesiastes, we read, “Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty."{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Ecc. 1.2}} Much of modern{{pg|337|338}} theology has a strong existentialist flavor.{{efn|Shaped by Heidegger, Sartre and post-war anomie, Existentialism has earlier sources in the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, and is seen in theologians Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. On American Existentialism, Adamowski{{sfn|Adamowski|2005}} is crucial.}} Yes, two different “language games” are being played here, but they are not necessarily incompatible with one another.

The second point on the ''nada'' experience concerns the structure of the story. Several times the bleakness of ''nada'' seems mitigated. Immediately following the stark words, "Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee," we red this: "He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991|p=33}} A smile and steaming coffee chase away the ''nada'' experience—for a moment. Then the waiter reaches home, ''nada'' reappears and kills his sleep until daylight. But again, a form of rhetorical balance, for the older waiter dismisses the severity of ''nada.'' "After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991|p=33}} So, the presence of ''nada'' is not necessarily the negation of God-language.

In For ''Whom the Bell Tolls,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1940}} title and epigraph are from poet priest, John Donne (1572–1631), but God-language again is infrequent. Written close to Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in our Time” speech (September 1938), Hemingway rejects appeasement.{{efn|“As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade."{{sfn|Auden|2007|p=95}}}} Quoting Donne, “No man is an ''Iland,'' intire of it self . . . I am involved in ''Mankinde,''” Hemingway commits to the struggle of the Spanish people.{{sfn|Donne|2003|p=243}} Baker describes the novel as “a study of the betrayal of the Spanish people both by what lay within them and what had been thrust upon them."{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=241}} By 1940, the battle against Fascism in Spain was lost: the greater war was just beginning. Hemingway’s narrative has relevance for both.

The religious context of the Spanish War was tragic: the Church was allied with the Fascists. Anselmo, the old man, hopes to be forgiven for the sin of killing. But forgiven by whom? “‘Who knows?’” he says, “‘Since we do not have God here anymore, neither His Son nor the Holy Ghost, who forgives? I do not know.’”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} Jordan asks, “‘You have not God anymore?’” Anselmo refers not to the Left’s “death” of God but to the ancient problem of ''theodicy,'' replying,

<blockquote>“No. Man. Certainly not. If there were God, never would He have permitted what I have seen with my eyes. Let them have God.
“They claim Him.”
“Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} </blockquote>{{pg|338|339}}

After making love with Maria, Jordan criticizes his political ''clichés.''{{efn|“Hard-shell Baptist” was applied to the Primitive Baptists, a group dating from early nineteenth century splits.}} “He had gotten to be as bigoted and hide-bound about his politics as a hardshelled Baptist. . . . Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=164}} Finally, in the novel’s last few pages, Jordan reflects on facing death “with religion” and “taking it straight.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}} Here Jordan’s perspective, echoing Feuerbach and Freud, is typical of the rhetoric of modernism. “Who do you suppose has it easier? Ones with religion or just taking it straight? It comforts them very much but we know there is no thing to fear.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}}

There is more God-language that could be quoted. The child’s prayer in “Now I Lay Me,"{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=276-282}} the Crucifixion told by the Roman soldiers in “Today Is Friday,”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=271-273}} the quest for an original paradise in ''The Garden of Eden,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1986}} but these examples may be sufficient. In summary, what can be said? The rhetoric of Modernism is integral to Hemingway’s writing: always and everywhere, his God-language is embedded in that cognitive framework. Inherently, modernism is interrogative and indeterminate—suspicious of dogma, skeptical of organized religion. The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} may serve as a signifier of modernity, revealing Hemingway’s vision of a world “that was adrift."{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=113}} Modernism presents a hard-boiled picture of the world, stripped of traditional certainties, bereft of religion’s “opium." This was the world of which, like the dying Harry in “Snows," Hemingway must write.{{efn|“Harry thinks, “There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the events . . . He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1991|p=17}}}} This is the world we have inherited.

But what is the ''cognitive'' status of Hemingway’s God-language? Is it merely an ironic use of ancient myths—seen in T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and others—with no underlying substance? Hemingway had little sympathy with the moralistic faith of his parents, leaving their Congregationalism for Catholicism. Morris Buske suggests that his father’s “corporal punishment with a religious orientation” may have contributed to his “psychic difficulties.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=86}} Indeed. We might also envisage some religious impact. Perhaps there is a psychoanalytic link between the Liberal Protestant Fatherhood of God,Nietzsche’s “death of God,” and the suicide of Hemingway’s father.{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} So, is Hemingway’s God-language ironic, emotional and bereft of cognitive reality?{{pg|339|340}}
Following Buske and Stoneback, I suggest not. Buske suggests that Hemingway’s early experiences “led him to embrace Catholicism.” {{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}}} H. R. Stoneback denies that Hemingway’s Catholicism was only nominal:

<blockquote>Hemingway’s personal religious pilgrimage takes him through a rejection of Puritanism, and far beyond the social-gospel brand of Protestantism, into an ever-deepening discovery of Catholicism. This personal faith-journey is manifest . . . with the aesthetic and historical and spiritual sensibility centered in ritual and ceremony (e.g., most obviously, as in the world of ''Toreo,'' or the bullfight; and, less obviously, in the vision of life-as-pilgrimage). Hemingway’s rootedness in the sacramental sense of experience, in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity, grows ever deeper.{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} </blockquote>

Stoneback’s argument is plausible. Yes, Hemingway’s rhetoric is always unsentimental, open-ended, embedded in modernity: that is hard to dispute. Cleanth Brooks said Hemingway confined himself to“his secular terms.”{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} I think that he went further. Granted, in Hemingway there is no parallel to T. S. Eliot’s pilgrimage from the agnosticism of ''The Waste Land'' (1922) to the faith of ''Four Quartets'' (1943). But then most of the Modernists felt unable to follow Eliot in his particular journey. Nor is there any equivalent to Mailer’s final book, ''On God,''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} his “quest into the nature and context of ‘reality,’ particularly non-material entities”—in effect “Mailer’s metaphysics.”{{sfn|Sipiora|2008|p=503}}

If Hemingway had not encountered physical and psychological problems, if his memory had not been gravely impaired, what at the end would he have written? We can never know what ''might'' have been. But Stoneback puts it well, “Pilgrimage, the notion and motion of spiritualized travel, is at the center of Hemingway’s religious vision and his work from his earliest stories to the final, unfinished and posthumously published novels and memoirs.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=49}} With great skill, and with a high degree of indeterminacy,Hemingway’s rhetoric appears poised between the language-game of God and that of modernism. Some claim the two games are inherently incompatible. I argue otherwise.

Hemingway did struggle against nihilism, at times teetering on the edge of chaos. Of his writing, Ihab Hassan says, “literary statement approaches{{pg|340|341}} the edge; language implies the abolition of statement."{{sfn|Hassan|1987|p=299}} Yet, Hemingway also redefines the ''sacred,'' reformulating ''grace'' beyond the borders of organized religion. Without ceasing to be a modernist, he is also deeply rooted, as Stoneback claims, “in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} Like Kierkegaard, his God-language is covert and subtle; but it does exist.{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal” Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}}}

=== God-Language in Mailer: Protagonist in the Cosmic Struggle ===

With Norman Mailer, we have a different rhetorical situation. Partly, this difference is a time shift: Hemingway was shaped by the Great War, Mailer by World War II, the generation haunted by the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Hence, there is a religious shift: Hemingway grew up in Oak Park Protestantism before moving to Catholicism, whereas Mailer’s roots were in the Judaism of Brooklyn. To characterize Mailer’s God-language, I use the phrase ''protagonist in the cosmic struggle.'' J. Michael Lennon says that Mailer’s writing is “shot through with his ideas on God and the Devil and the struggle in which they are locked.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007}}

''Harlot’s Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991}} has myriad themes: betrayals ideological and sexual, haunting of sons by fathers, the “compartmentalization of the heart.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=13}} Using the CIA as a ''synecdoche'' for a world of modernity, Mailer shows the boundary between fiction and non-fiction to be extraordinarily indeterminate. That indeterminacy applies to language but also to the ''realpolitic'' world of intelligence. But perhaps the most fascinating example of God-language appears in the last few pages of ''Harlot’s Ghost.'' It comes from Hugh Montague, codename “Harlot”—a mysterious protagonist loosely based on a real person, the enigmatic onetime poet and chief of CIA Counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton (1917–1987).{{efn|There is no consensus on Angleton. Was he the greatest practitioner of counter-intelligence, or, like Kim Philby in British Intelligence, was he a Russian mole? Mailer describes him as “a most complex and convoluted gentleman."{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1132}}}} Harlot speculates that the whole cosmos revealed in modernity fossils, evolution, solar system—to be God’s “‘majestic cover story,’”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280}} an exercise in ''disinformation'' and misdirection from the Lord of Spies, Jehovah.

<blockquote>“‘What would I do if I were Jehovah . . . . I have created him, after all, in My image, so he will wish to discover My nature in order to seize My throne. Would I ever have permitted such a contract in the first place, therefore, if I had not taken the wise precaution to fashion a cover story?’ . . . .“ You can say the universe is a splendidly worked-up system of disinformation calculated to make{{pg|341|342}}us believe in evolution and so divert us away from God. Yes, that is exactly what I would do if I were the Lord and could not trust My own creation.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280-1}} </blockquote>

Mailer presents an astonishing degree of humor, irony, and ambiguity, worthy of Nabokov. Can we take Harlot’s speculation seriously? Mailer provides a complex play of ''metaphor, metonymy,'' and ''metaphysics'' in three arenas—character and plot in the modern novel; theology and cosmology in the universe; and the quest for meaning among the contingencies of life.

Sixteen years later, Mailer returns to these themes in his final book, ''On God.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} There, among other topics, he discusses modern science, fundamentalism, and intelligent design, bringing insight into the nature of plot in the novels of Henry James, Hemingway, James Joyce, and others.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=143-161}} He suggests, for example, that James and Hemingway were “avatars of Intelligent Design”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=150}} whereas Joyce “plays at the very edge of chaos."{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=151}} It is no coincidence that Mailer moves smoothly between God-language and an analysis of plot in the modern novel—for two reasons.

First, his central theological motif is that God is an ''artist''—a limited Creator doing the best he can. At the start of ''On God,'' Mailer says, “I see God, rather, as a Creator, as the greatest artist. I see human beings as His most developed artworks."{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=5}} He draws, therefore, an analogy between the Creator and the creative artist—like Hemingway, James, Joyce, or himself. Second, Mailer recognizes that literary ''plot'' is a synecdoche for the larger search for meaning, religion being only one manifestation of that search. Just as Mailer is suspicious of a ''plot'' that is too contrived in a novel, so he is also wary of a ''faith'' in God that is too dogmatic, not sufficiently aware of the indeterminacy and chaos of existence.{{efn|“The reason I don’t like plots to prevail is that they don’t allow the figures in the book, the characters, to push their own limits to the point where they make the plot unacceptable and so throw the design into chaos."{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=151}}}} Such fundamentalism misreads the nature of the world, keeping human beings infantile, even dog-like.{{efn|“The worst to be said about Fundamentalism is that it reduces people to the reflexes of a good dog. . . . No great writer ever came out of Fundamentalism, nor any great scientist."{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71-72}}}}

Mailer’s ''The Gospel According to the Son''{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} is an intriguing work. Rewriting the gospel in first person, he retells the story of Jesus, ''focalizing'' the inner thoughts of the Son of God. To call this narrative bold is an understatement, but the book is more successful than many critics allow. Here, implicitly comparing gospel and story, Jesus compares his account with the canonical gospels:

<blockquote>While I would not say that Mark’s gospel is false, it has much exaggeration. And I would offer less for Matthew, and for Luke and {{pg|342|343}}John, who gave me words I never uttered and described me as gentle when I was pale with rage. Their words were written many years after I was gone and only repeat what old men told them. Very old men. Such tales are to be leaned upon no more than a bush that tears free from its roots and blows about in the wind.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=3-4}}</blockquote>

A kind of mirror image to Gospel is Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} In reconstructing the beginning of Hitler, Mailer explores two opposing entities—God and the Devil—and their cosmic struggle. Like ''Gospel,'' this work questions the boundaries of language, plumbing deep realms of cosmology. Mailer is writing literature, but he is also writing theology. Not all theology arises in seminary, church, or synagogue: God-language may emerge even in the world of modernity.

But here we may find a cognitive divide on the nature of language. Theological fundamentalists believe language to be essentially literal, ''determined'' for all time, even restricted to the letters of the King James Bible of 1611. Theological liberals, on the other hand, will see language as metaphorical, ''indeterminate,'' always in flux. As with Hemingway, Mailer’s God language would seem incompatible with that fundamentalist perspective, but compatible with a more liberal viewpoint.

Mailer asks hard questions. In ''Gospel,'' he asks if there is a God who is more than nostalgia enshrined in ancient words. In ''Castle,'' he asks if we shall avoid the lure of Fascism and another Hitler. Is there a God who speaks to modernity and the evils of the Holocaust? With D.T. as narrator in ''Castle,'' we encounter a Nazi officer in the SS. Then we discover he is also “an officer of the Evil One.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Mailer recognizes the risk that he runs, “Given the present authority of the scientific world, most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Robert Begiebing comments, “The suspension of disbelief required is audacious.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} But Mailer reminds us that our modern world has little understanding of Hitler, “the most mysterious human being of the century.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=72}}

As in ''Gospel'' ten years earlier, ''The Castle'' in the Forest operates in two distinct realms, “the metaphysical and the mundane.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} Metaphysical language is hard to decode. In fact, in the 1920s Logical Positivists denied ''any'' meaning to such metaphysical language, a view later modified by{{pg|343|344}} Karl Popper. God and Satan “appear” in a strange No Man’s Land, at the frontiers of human experience. But thinkers from Augustine to Einstein have recognized that strangeness, using tropes of analogy and metaphor.

However, boundaries are always problematic, be they political, racial, or metaphysical. God-language is found at the ''liminal'' places of life, border regions of indeterminacy and danger. Such language is disturbing, even dangerous. It disturbs our expectations, confusing our maps of modernity. Max Born the physicist said, “We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe, and the vaguer and cloudier.”{{sfn|Born|1951|p=277}} If that be true of physics, other disciplines certainly share that mystery. If all human language exhibits indeterminacy, then religious language will have it in spades.

Since the days of the Puritans, the place of Satan in American culture has become drastically attenuated, the current strength of Fundamentalism notwithstanding. A survey of this trend in American Literature is Andrew Delbanco’s ''The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost their Sense of Evil.'' {{sfn|Delbanco|1995}} He speaks of a dialectic in our culture “between the dispossession of Satan under the pressure of modernity and the hunger to get him back."{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=234}} Whatever our beliefs on his ''being,'' Satan’s ''function'' in society is fairly easily charted, as America moved from belief to irony. Mailer is a protagonist in this cosmic struggle between God and the Devil, but using the metaphors of modernity.{{efn|Delbanco suggests that modernity “has doomed us to see the world through metaphors that cannot be ratified by any appeal to transcendence.”{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=224}}}} However, Mailer leaves us with indeterminacy. We learn that what “enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers—there are only questions.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=467}}

=== Conclusions: The Sacred, Indeterminacy, and Grace ===

There is still much left to explore. Both men redefine the realm of the ''sacred'' outside the boundaries of the Church. They also redefine the profane, in language and belief. There are theological precedents, but much of organized religion finds such redefinition problematic, particularly fundamentalists. For Hemingway, the sacred is found particularly in the natural world—rumors maybe of the original Garden? In Mailer, I am not sure: maybe the sacred is found in the moral struggle—the eternal battle between God and the Devil.

''Indeterminacy'' and suspicion of rigid dogma are also at the heart of both men’s writing, as in Modernity itself. ''Grace,'' however, is a problem within{{pg|344|345}} modernity: “The world starves for grace,” says Yancey.{{sfn|Yancey|2002|p=40}} But grace is a problem also for contemporary religion, as Bawer and Yancey demonstrate. Grace may have its antonym in Hemingway's ''nada'' or Mailer’s “absurdity” of life. Grace may be implicit in Mailer’s belief that, “stories bring order to the absurdity."{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=156-157}} Good fiction, says Mailer, is “nourishing to our sense of reality.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1299}} Stories, after all, have always been part of our lives. Novelist and theologian Fred Buechner has said, “Listen to your life . . . in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”{{sfn|Buechner|1983|p=87}} In this world of modernity, maybe it is through fiction and narrative that we still hear rumors of grace.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

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* {{cite book |title=New English Bible, The [NEB] | date=1970 | location=Ed. Samuel Sandmel. Oxford Study Edition. New York |publisher= Oxford University Press |ref={{harvid|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970}} }}

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* {{cite journal |last=Stoneback |first=H.R. |title=Pilgrimage Variations: Hemingway's Sacred Landscapes |journal=Religion and Literature |volume=35.2/3 |issue= |date=2003 |pages=49-65 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Vince |first=Raymond M. |date=1988 |title=Alienation |journal=New Dictionary of Theology |location= Ed. Sinclair B. Ferguson, David F. Wright, and J.I. Packer. Downers Grove, IL |publisher=Inter-Varsity Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Wagner-Martin |first=Linda |date=1987|title=Introduction |journal= New Essays on The Sun Also Rises |location= Cambridge|publisher=Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}

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{{Refend}}

{{Review}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer}}

[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of “Totalitarianism”

2025-04-06T23:45:06Z

JKilchenmann: remove "print" rom works cited

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline |last=Mantzaris |first=Alexandros |abstract=An examination of Mailer’s seemingly paradoxical position of “Left Conservatism” that may have its basis in certain mechanisms contained within the problematic concept of “totalitarianism.” |url=. . .}}
{{dc|dc=N}}'''ORMAN MAILER’S SEEMINGLY PARADOXICAL POSITION''' of “Left Conservatism” may have its basis in certain mechanisms contained within the problematic concept of “totalitarianism.” I suggest that there are two aspects to the broader problematic of totalitarianism. The first aspect has to do with what we could refer to as the historical phenomenon of totalitarianism. This phenomenon
is represented by certain political regimes and/or types of sociopolitical organizations called totalitarian, to which are attributed a number
of shared characteristics such as rule by a single party, an official ideology, and a monopoly of mass communications. From Mailer’s slightly different perspective, such totalitarian regimes are thought of as suppressing the past, suppressing myth, and imposing a cowardly conformity on their subjects. Here, in short, we find the view of “a system” exhibiting certain characteristics. There is also, however, another facet to the totalitarian problematic having to do with the discourse of totalitarianism itself. From this slightly diverging angle one would observe that the discourse of totalitarianism is one whose very logic confuses political “sides” and therefore destabilizes “standard” political antagonisms. What we have here is a convergence of political opposites, the plasticity of political/ideological oppositions, and a profound ideological ambivalence.{{pg|337|338}}

Not everyone would readily accept the central thesis of totalitarianism’s theorists, namely that the former USSR and Nazi Germany can be put in the same category. And, naturally, even fewer would accept that American democratic capitalism can itself be implicated in such a problematic category—yet, of course, that is what people like Mailer never tired of arguing.

Now, when Mailer critics discuss totalitarianism they usually refer to what I called the “phenomenon” of totalitarianism—that is, to a “system” with certain characteristics. Although there is much to be said in this area, I believe it is equally productive to approach totalitarianism as a discourse exhibiting certain paradoxical properties. In what sense is it helpful, then, to think of totalitarianism not just as a system but in the way I am suggesting—as a discourse perpetuating the political confusion that produces it in the first place? First of all, the view of totalitarianism as political confusion allows us to confirm that Mailer’s Left Conservatism does not surface for the first time in ''The Armies of the Night'', although it is there the term first appears, nor does it properly belong to Mailer’s 1960s work only. Left Conservatism, in other words, is not a later stage in Mailer’s ideological development. It is there from the start, in the uneasy relationship of the author of ''The Naked and the Dead'' to that book’s most fascinating characters, Cummings and Croft, both of whom are fascists.

Critics have discussed this tension, starting with ''The Naked and the Dead'' as well as its development in Mailer’s later works, in terms that are primarily moral, philosophical, aesthetic. Joseph Wenke, for example, has argued in his highly interesting study:

<blockquote>[I]t is clear that until Mailer was able to write “The White Negro,” totalitarianism was a particularly intimidating and intimate enemy of his art. In addition to representing an external political threat, it presented itself to Mailer as an immediate ''aesthetic'' problem that insinuated itself into the very creation of his first three novels.{{sfn|Wenke|1987|p=8}}(emphasis mine)
</blockquote>

The problem Wenke refers to is, precisely, the profound appeal that characters such as Croft and Cummings held for Mailer even as he was placing them on the side of the “heavies.” And, in general, I think it is fair to say that this tension has been mostly discussed in terms similar to Wenke’s. Indeed I sometimes have the sense that the political field has to be preserved intact in {{pg|338|339}} such critical efforts, as a sort of stable ground from which Mailer’s course can then be observed and appraised—so that, for example, in his opening to the violent (a)morality of Croft, Mailer can be said to be moving “to the Right.” This approach is somewhat problematic for, in my view, the problem or paradox here is first of all political in nature. Moral and other considerations follow. That is, it seems to me wrong to try and retain the political as a stable reference point, which can then help us explain aesthetic problems and/or moral ambiguities, because the origin of the ambiguity lies with politics and ideology.

The argument, then, is that when one is working within the framework of the discourse on totalitarianism, one is bound to activate a host of paradoxical political/ideological effects (or, perhaps, side-effects), which are conducive to the development of ambivalent and problematic stances such as Left Conservatism. There are effects we could discuss. To avoid too protracted an analysis, however, I have isolated two, of which I would like to say a little more in this essay. So, to recapitulate, totalitarianism is a discourse which ultimately functions to undermine standard political oppositions and which, therefore, causes great political and ideological confusion. When working within the framework of this discourse one is bound to become implicated in a number of paradoxes, such as (1) the force one sets in opposition to totalitarianism (that is to a totalitarian “system") often turns out to be itself totalitarian or potentially totalitarian; (2) within the context of a specific political/ideological antagonism, ''opposition'' to may finally be indistinguishable from ''support'' for whatever it is one is ostensibly opposing. Or, perhaps even more paradoxically, one’s political ends may be better served by supporting one’s political opponent: the best way of effectively opposing one’s opponents may finally be to support them.

With totalitarianism ''qua'' political confusion as our guide, then, we can attempt to tackle some of the salient curiosities in the development of Mailer’s ideology, which seem to me to have been often met with a sort of embarrassed silence. One such very interesting curiosity was already noted by Diana Trilling in her seminal, early essay on Mailer’s work:

<blockquote>[H]ad Mailer been of their period [i.e., that of D.H. Lawrence and W.B.Yeats] instead of ours, he would have similarly avoided the predicament of presenting us with a hero not easily distinguishable from his named political enemy. He would have been</blockquote>{{pg|339|340}}<blockquote>able to evade the political consequences of consigning the future of civilization to a personal authority morally identical with the dark reaction from which it is supposed to rescue us. Or, to put the matter in even cruder terms, he would not have exposed himself to our ridicule for offering us a God who is a fascist. {{sfn|Trilling|1971|p=127}}</blockquote>

I have not read many critics trying to follow the lead offered by Trilling here and to explain, if Mailer’s God is indeed “a fascist,” how we might be able to justify such a rather unexpected reversal? Yet there are places in Mailer’s work where this ''political'' exchange with fascism is more than obvious. The following example I take from “The White Negro,” where we are told:

<blockquote>[I]t is possible, since the hipster lives with his hatred, that many of them are the material for an élite of storm troopers ready to follow the first truly magnetic leader whose view of mass murder is phrased in a language which reaches their emotions.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=355}} </blockquote>

The first thing to note is that the very terms used by Mailer ("storm troopers,” “magnetic leader,” “mass murder”) take us beyond the field of morality and even aesthetics and points us clearly in the direction of organized politics. And I think that the way, finally, to explain such ironies is precisely with reference to the first paradox I spoke about. Namely, the idea that when one works within the totalitarian discourse, the force one posits as a counterweight to the dreaded totalitarian system will often turn out to be itself totalitarian
or potentially totalitarian.

The work of Georges Sorel (1847–1922), a French theorist of anarcho-syndicalism, is important for the proper understanding of our second paradox. ''Réflexions sur la Violence'', his best-known work to which I will refer, was published in 1908. For the sake of brevity I would not like to go into the details of what I hold to be Sorel’s own “Left Conservatism.” Instead I have chosen a few quotations, which will give an idea of the basis for the comparison to Mailer. The first comes from an essay on Sorel, written by Isaiah Berlin:

<blockquote>Sorel remains, as he was in his lifetime, unclassified; claimed and repudiated both by the right and by the left. . . . He appeared to</blockquote> {{pg|340|341}} <blockquote>have no fixed position. His critics often accused him of pursuing an erratic course.{{sfn|Berlin|1979|p=296, 297}} </blockquote>

I think that both the lack of political “fixity” but also, all the more so in fact, the idea of an interstitial position between “the right and the left” clearly points us in the direction of Left Conservatism. The second extract comes from the English author and painter Wyndham Lewis, according to whom

<blockquote>Georges Sorel is the key to all contemporary political thought. Sorel is, or was, a highly unstable and equivocal figure. He seems composed of a crowd of warring personalities, sometimes one being in the ascendent [sic], sometimes another, and which in any case he has not been able, or has not cared, to control.{{sfn|Lewis|1989|p=119}} </blockquote>

When I first read the above what instantly came to my mind was Mailer’s description of his own personality in ''The Armies of the Night'', where we read:

<blockquote>
[T]he architecture of [Mailer’s] personality bore resemblance to some provincial cathedral which warring orders of the church might have designed separately over several centuries, the particular cathedral falling into the hands of one architect, then his enemy.{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=28}} </blockquote>

Clearly, the two descriptions are nearly identical. Sorel’s “warring personalities” find their near-perfect equivalent in the “warring orders” of the church of Mailer’s personality. And I hope it is clear how the volatility of both personalities might be relevant to constructs such as Left Conservatism. Beyond the obvious resemblance suggested by the above extracts, it is possible to argue that Mailer often appears to share with Sorel a marked hostility towards what we perhaps could call social democracy but might be better off defining more carefully as social compromise, social peace and what Mailer has called politics as property.{{efn|Mailer discusses politics as property in Part Two, Chapter Six, of ''Miami and the Siege of Chicago''.}}

In her discussion of “In the Red Light,”{{efn|Mailer’s essay is included in ''Cannibals and Christians.''}} Jean Radford notes that while characterizing the support for Goldwater in rather negative terms, “Mailer is able to admit his own excitement at the thought of Goldwater’s victory.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=69}} She attributes this, in part, to what she calls Mailer’s “own ver-{{pg|341|342}}sion of ''‘politique du pire''{{' "}} (and with this idea of a ''politique du pire'' we enter the heart of our second paradox). “Johnson” she writes “will only blur the reality of America’s conflicts whereas Goldwater will polarize America and out of that polarization some hope for the revolution might come.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=69-70}} What is noteworthy here is the preference for an energetic, violent opposition, the prospect of which is better embodied, for Mailer, in the Goldwater candidacy. A variation on this motif is the idea from the ''Presidential Papers''{{efn|See the “Prefatory Paper” entitled “Heroes and Leaders.”}} that for the physical body as well as the body politic, an “acute” disease is preferable to a “faceless” one. According to Sorel, as he explains his own notion of ''politique du pire'', the success of a Marxian “catastrophic” revolution—his ideal—requires that the capitalist system be functioning properly up to the moment of revolt. In turn, this proper function demands an openly predatory middle class brutally and unapologetically exploiting a proletariat, which in response becomes progressively more militant. Thus, Sorel writes that the revolutionary doctrine

<blockquote>
will evidently be inapplicable if the middle class and the proletariat do not oppose each other implacably, with all the forces at their disposal; the more ardently capitalist the middle class is, the more the proletariat is full of a warlike spirit and confident of its revolutionary strength, the more certain will be the success of the proletarian movement.{{sfn|Sorel|1941|p=86}} </blockquote>

One of the more interesting elements in Sorel’s theory is that capitalism’s progress towards its self-dissolution appears as a sort of “unconscious” historical process:

<blockquote>
It might . . . be said that capitalism plays a part analogous to that attributed by [Eduard von] Hartmann to the Unconscious in nature, since it prepares the coming of social reforms which it did not intend to produce.{{sfn|Sorel|1941|p=85}}</blockquote>

Now, I don’t think that the “Unconscious” Sorel has in mind here is quite the same as the Freudian unconscious. In fact, I might as well admit that I may be “lost in translation” since Sorel obviously uses a French translation of a German term which T. E. Hulme, the British translator of ''Reflection'', renders as “Unconscious.” In any case, I think that for the Mailer critic this idea{{pg|342|343}}of an unconscious, natural process that is somehow undermined by social peace and compromise is a very interesting one indeed. So for Sorel any adulteration
of the implacable antagonism between the middle and working classes acts as a disruption of an unconscious development:

<blockquote>
If . . . the middle class, led astray by the ''chatter'' of the preachers of ethics and sociology . . . seek to correct the ''abuses'' of economics, and wish to break with the barbarism of their predecessors, then one part of the forces which were to further the development of capitalism is employed in hindering it, an arbitrary and irrational element is introduced, and the future of the world becomes completely indeterminate.{{sfn|Sorel|1941|p=87}} </blockquote>

Sorel refers to the state resulting from such “irrationality” as “decadent” and “degenerate,” and thus we have another clear parallel with Mailer’s idea of “the plague,” as in both cases we observe an attenuation of fundamental and essential conflicts.

My own extrapolation from Sorel’s idea is as follows. Someone acting in such a context and with such an understanding of how things work, he offers: would they not possibly come to believe that (please remember our second paradox) the best strategy of attaining their goals might be propping up the enemy? And is exactly this not an important part of Mailer’s strategy in the whole Goldwater affair and beyond? I am referring to all those ideas running through his 1960s work, about restoring a true Conservatism to its lost potency, so that a vital and drastic confrontation with the Left can be ensured. What is, perhaps, the best example of the paradoxical positions resulting from such an equally paradoxical attitude can be found in Mailer’s speech at the debate with William Buckley, Jr. There, what we might call a “freedom-loving” brand of Conservatism is pitted against a “Totalitarian” one and the Cold War itself is denounced as a sort of senseless distraction from another war that would be “welcome”: “the war which has meaning, that great and mortal debate between rebel and conservative where each would argue the other is an agent of the Devil.”{{sfn|Mailer|1976|p=187-8}}

Sorel’s own solution for reinforcing the essential antagonism between the middle and working classes is the employment of proletarian violence. The social peacemakers’ advances, we are told, must be met with “black ingratitude” and blows. The paradox here is that such violence will prevent more{{pg|343|344}}virulent and abhorrent violence on a grander scale. For a revolution erupting in the midst of capitalist decadence would, according to Sorel, lead either to a regression to barbarism and/or anarchy, or to “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” The latter represents Sorel’s worst nightmare, since by this term he understands a revolution led by his unconscionable opponents, the “parliamentary”
Socialists, and that revolution would be destined to repeat the worst excesses of the French Revolution.

Thus we are brought to the final resemblance between Mailer and Sorel, the idea that a form of limited violence can work to prevent what may be properly called “totalitarian” violence, which is organized violence on a massive scale employing the resources of the State. In fact, Sorel goes so far as to propose that, to avoid misunderstandings, we call all violence of this second type “force” and retain the term “violence” for all oppositional (notably, of course, proletarian) violent acts:

<blockquote>
Sometimes the terms ''force'' and ''violence'' are used in speaking of acts of authority, sometimes in speaking of acts of revolt . . . I think it would be better to adopt a terminology which would give rise to no ambiguity, and that the term ''violence'' should be employed only for acts of revolt; we should say, therefore, that the object of force is to impose a certain social order in which the minority governs, while violence tends to the destruction of that order. The middle class have used force since the beginning of modern times, while the proletariat now reacts against the middle class and against the State by violence.{{sfn|Sorel|1941|p=195}}
</blockquote>

This distinction between “force” and “violence” is one Mailer essentially shared with Sorel.

Let us, briefly, recapitulate our main points. Totalitarianism can be approached not only as “a system” but also as a discourse whose logic confuses political sides. A thinker operating within the framework of this discourse is bound, by dint of its logic, to get entangled within a certain political paradoxology, which is conducive to the formulation of highly idiosyncratic positions such as Mailer’s “Left Conservatism.” Indeed our central preoccupation throughout has been with the question, “How is a Left Conservative produced?” In response to this question we proposed a principle and highlighted what might initially appear as a certain conceptual “mech-{{pg|344|345}}anism.” The principle is that opposition to totalitarianism will often turn out to be itself, ''de facto'', totalitarian or potentially totalitarian. Between the two opposed “totalitarianisms,” then, the distinction between Left and Right will tend to be attenuated if not erased. The “mechanism” we termed, with the help of Jean Radford’s old but still very interesting study on Mailer, the ''politique du pire''.

The ''politique du pire'', being a policy (and hence a mechanism), could be initially approached in tactical or strategic terms as the idea that the tactical aggravation of oppression, exploitation, conflict (but therefore also the preservation in good shape of one’s opponent) will bring a strategic goal of revolution even closer. However, on closer inspection it turns out that, in the case of both Mailer and Sorel, whatever tactical or strategic deliberations might there be, the “mechanism” also actually conceals a principle. In Mailer’s characteristic terms, acute, inflammatory diseases are healthier than lingering, silent ones. The metaphor points to a rather complex economy of violence. We dealt with one of its facets, the opposition of subjective to objective violence. Placated once, subjective, visible, symptomatic violence feeds, through accumulation, into objective or better still, in our case, “totalitarian” violence. However, the two principles here interlock. The bearer of liberated subjective violence, the hipster, is himself potentially amenable to the call of a “magnetic leader” with visions of “mass murder.” We are still in the cycle of “totalitarianism.”

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

===Citations===
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Berlin |first=Isaiah |chapter=Georges Sorel |date=1979 |title=Against the Current |location=London |publisher=Hogarth Press |pages=296-332 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lewis |first=Wyndham |date=1989 |title=The Art of Being Ruled. |location=1926. Santa Rosa |publisher=Black Sparrow Press |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title=The Armies of the Night. |location=New York |publisher=Signet Books. |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1969 |chapter=In the Red Light |title=Cannibals and Christians |location=London |publisher=Sphere Books |pages=20-65 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1969 |title=Miami and the Siege of Chicago |location=Harmondsworth |publisher=Penguin. |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1976 |title=The Presidential Papers |location=London |publisher=Panther. |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1959 |chapter=The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster |title=Advertisements for Myself |location=New York |publisher=G. P. Putnam’s Sons |pages=337-358 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Radford |first=Jean |date=1975 |title=Norman Mailer: A Critical Study |location=London |publisher=Macmillan |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Sorel |first=Georges |date=1941 |title=Reflections On Violence. |location=Trans. T.E. Hulme. New York |publisher=Peter Smith |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Trilling |first=Diana |chapter=The Moral Radicalism of Norman Mailer |title=Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work |editor=Robert Lucid |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown & Co. |date=1971 |pages=108-36 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Wenke |first=Joseph |date=1987 |title=Mailer’s America |location=Hanover |publisher=University Press of New England |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of “Totalitarianism"}}

[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of “Totalitarianism”

2025-04-06T16:15:44Z

JKilchenmann: fixes to first line and apostrophes

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline |last=Mantzaris |first=Alexandros |abstract=An examination of Mailer’s seemingly paradoxical position of “Left Conservatism” that may have its basis in certain mechanisms contained within the problematic concept of “totalitarianism.” |url=. . .}}
{{dc|dc=N}}'''ORMAN MAILER’S SEEMINGLY PARADOXICAL POSITION''' of “Left Conservatism” may have its basis in certain mechanisms contained within the problematic concept of “totalitarianism.” I suggest that there are two aspects to the broader problematic of totalitarianism. The first aspect has to do with what we could refer to as the historical phenomenon of totalitarianism. This phenomenon
is represented by certain political regimes and/or types of sociopolitical organizations called totalitarian, to which are attributed a number
of shared characteristics such as rule by a single party, an official ideology, and a monopoly of mass communications. From Mailer’s slightly different perspective, such totalitarian regimes are thought of as suppressing the past, suppressing myth, and imposing a cowardly conformity on their subjects. Here, in short, we find the view of “a system” exhibiting certain characteristics. There is also, however, another facet to the totalitarian problematic having to do with the discourse of totalitarianism itself. From this slightly diverging angle one would observe that the discourse of totalitarianism is one whose very logic confuses political “sides” and therefore destabilizes “standard” political antagonisms. What we have here is a convergence of political opposites, the plasticity of political/ideological oppositions, and a profound ideological ambivalence.{{pg|337|338}}

Not everyone would readily accept the central thesis of totalitarianism’s theorists, namely that the former USSR and Nazi Germany can be put in the same category. And, naturally, even fewer would accept that American democratic capitalism can itself be implicated in such a problematic category—yet, of course, that is what people like Mailer never tired of arguing.

Now, when Mailer critics discuss totalitarianism they usually refer to what I called the “phenomenon” of totalitarianism—that is, to a “system” with certain characteristics. Although there is much to be said in this area, I believe it is equally productive to approach totalitarianism as a discourse exhibiting certain paradoxical properties. In what sense is it helpful, then, to think of totalitarianism not just as a system but in the way I am suggesting—as a discourse perpetuating the political confusion that produces it in the first place? First of all, the view of totalitarianism as political confusion allows us to confirm that Mailer’s Left Conservatism does not surface for the first time in ''The Armies of the Night'', although it is there the term first appears, nor does it properly belong to Mailer’s 1960s work only. Left Conservatism, in other words, is not a later stage in Mailer’s ideological development. It is there from the start, in the uneasy relationship of the author of ''The Naked and the Dead'' to that book’s most fascinating characters, Cummings and Croft, both of whom are fascists.

Critics have discussed this tension, starting with ''The Naked and the Dead'' as well as its development in Mailer’s later works, in terms that are primarily moral, philosophical, aesthetic. Joseph Wenke, for example, has argued in his highly interesting study:

<blockquote>[I]t is clear that until Mailer was able to write “The White Negro,” totalitarianism was a particularly intimidating and intimate enemy of his art. In addition to representing an external political threat, it presented itself to Mailer as an immediate ''aesthetic'' problem that insinuated itself into the very creation of his first three novels.{{sfn|Wenke|1987|p=8}}(emphasis mine)
</blockquote>

The problem Wenke refers to is, precisely, the profound appeal that characters such as Croft and Cummings held for Mailer even as he was placing them on the side of the “heavies.” And, in general, I think it is fair to say that this tension has been mostly discussed in terms similar to Wenke’s. Indeed I sometimes have the sense that the political field has to be preserved intact in {{pg|338|339}} such critical efforts, as a sort of stable ground from which Mailer’s course can then be observed and appraised—so that, for example, in his opening to the violent (a)morality of Croft, Mailer can be said to be moving “to the Right.” This approach is somewhat problematic for, in my view, the problem or paradox here is first of all political in nature. Moral and other considerations follow. That is, it seems to me wrong to try and retain the political as a stable reference point, which can then help us explain aesthetic problems and/or moral ambiguities, because the origin of the ambiguity lies with politics and ideology.

The argument, then, is that when one is working within the framework of the discourse on totalitarianism, one is bound to activate a host of paradoxical political/ideological effects (or, perhaps, side-effects), which are conducive to the development of ambivalent and problematic stances such as Left Conservatism. There are effects we could discuss. To avoid too protracted an analysis, however, I have isolated two, of which I would like to say a little more in this essay. So, to recapitulate, totalitarianism is a discourse which ultimately functions to undermine standard political oppositions and which, therefore, causes great political and ideological confusion. When working within the framework of this discourse one is bound to become implicated in a number of paradoxes, such as (1) the force one sets in opposition to totalitarianism (that is to a totalitarian “system") often turns out to be itself totalitarian or potentially totalitarian; (2) within the context of a specific political/ideological antagonism, ''opposition'' to may finally be indistinguishable from ''support'' for whatever it is one is ostensibly opposing. Or, perhaps even more paradoxically, one’s political ends may be better served by supporting one’s political opponent: the best way of effectively opposing one’s opponents may finally be to support them.

With totalitarianism ''qua'' political confusion as our guide, then, we can attempt to tackle some of the salient curiosities in the development of Mailer’s ideology, which seem to me to have been often met with a sort of embarrassed silence. One such very interesting curiosity was already noted by Diana Trilling in her seminal, early essay on Mailer’s work:

<blockquote>[H]ad Mailer been of their period [i.e., that of D.H. Lawrence and W.B.Yeats] instead of ours, he would have similarly avoided the predicament of presenting us with a hero not easily distinguishable from his named political enemy. He would have been</blockquote>{{pg|339|340}}<blockquote>able to evade the political consequences of consigning the future of civilization to a personal authority morally identical with the dark reaction from which it is supposed to rescue us. Or, to put the matter in even cruder terms, he would not have exposed himself to our ridicule for offering us a God who is a fascist. {{sfn|Trilling|1971|p=127}}</blockquote>

I have not read many critics trying to follow the lead offered by Trilling here and to explain, if Mailer’s God is indeed “a fascist,” how we might be able to justify such a rather unexpected reversal? Yet there are places in Mailer’s work where this ''political'' exchange with fascism is more than obvious. The following example I take from “The White Negro,” where we are told:

<blockquote>[I]t is possible, since the hipster lives with his hatred, that many of them are the material for an élite of storm troopers ready to follow the first truly magnetic leader whose view of mass murder is phrased in a language which reaches their emotions.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=355}} </blockquote>

The first thing to note is that the very terms used by Mailer ("storm troopers,” “magnetic leader,” “mass murder”) take us beyond the field of morality and even aesthetics and points us clearly in the direction of organized politics. And I think that the way, finally, to explain such ironies is precisely with reference to the first paradox I spoke about. Namely, the idea that when one works within the totalitarian discourse, the force one posits as a counterweight to the dreaded totalitarian system will often turn out to be itself totalitarian
or potentially totalitarian.

The work of Georges Sorel (1847–1922), a French theorist of anarcho-syndicalism, is important for the proper understanding of our second paradox. ''Réflexions sur la Violence'', his best-known work to which I will refer, was published in 1908. For the sake of brevity I would not like to go into the details of what I hold to be Sorel’s own “Left Conservatism.” Instead I have chosen a few quotations, which will give an idea of the basis for the comparison to Mailer. The first comes from an essay on Sorel, written by Isaiah Berlin:

<blockquote>Sorel remains, as he was in his lifetime, unclassified; claimed and repudiated both by the right and by the left. . . . He appeared to</blockquote> {{pg|340|341}} <blockquote>have no fixed position. His critics often accused him of pursuing an erratic course.{{sfn|Berlin|1979|p=296, 297}} </blockquote>

I think that both the lack of political “fixity” but also, all the more so in fact, the idea of an interstitial position between “the right and the left” clearly points us in the direction of Left Conservatism. The second extract comes from the English author and painter Wyndham Lewis, according to whom

<blockquote>Georges Sorel is the key to all contemporary political thought. Sorel is, or was, a highly unstable and equivocal figure. He seems composed of a crowd of warring personalities, sometimes one being in the ascendent [sic], sometimes another, and which in any case he has not been able, or has not cared, to control.{{sfn|Lewis|1989|p=119}} </blockquote>

When I first read the above what instantly came to my mind was Mailer’s description of his own personality in ''The Armies of the Night'', where we read:

<blockquote>
[T]he architecture of [Mailer’s] personality bore resemblance to some provincial cathedral which warring orders of the church might have designed separately over several centuries, the particular cathedral falling into the hands of one architect, then his enemy.{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=28}} </blockquote>

Clearly, the two descriptions are nearly identical. Sorel’s “warring personalities” find their near-perfect equivalent in the “warring orders” of the church of Mailer’s personality. And I hope it is clear how the volatility of both personalities might be relevant to constructs such as Left Conservatism. Beyond the obvious resemblance suggested by the above extracts, it is possible to argue that Mailer often appears to share with Sorel a marked hostility towards what we perhaps could call social democracy but might be better off defining more carefully as social compromise, social peace and what Mailer has called politics as property.{{efn|Mailer discusses politics as property in Part Two, Chapter Six, of ''Miami and the Siege of Chicago''.}}

In her discussion of “In the Red Light,”{{efn|Mailer’s essay is included in ''Cannibals and Christians.''}} Jean Radford notes that while characterizing the support for Goldwater in rather negative terms, “Mailer is able to admit his own excitement at the thought of Goldwater’s victory.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=69}} She attributes this, in part, to what she calls Mailer’s “own ver-{{pg|341|342}}sion of ''‘politique du pire''{{' "}} (and with this idea of a ''politique du pire'' we enter the heart of our second paradox). “Johnson” she writes “will only blur the reality of America’s conflicts whereas Goldwater will polarize America and out of that polarization some hope for the revolution might come.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=69-70}} What is noteworthy here is the preference for an energetic, violent opposition, the prospect of which is better embodied, for Mailer, in the Goldwater candidacy. A variation on this motif is the idea from the ''Presidential Papers''{{efn|See the “Prefatory Paper” entitled “Heroes and Leaders.”}} that for the physical body as well as the body politic, an “acute” disease is preferable to a “faceless” one. According to Sorel, as he explains his own notion of ''politique du pire'', the success of a Marxian “catastrophic” revolution—his ideal—requires that the capitalist system be functioning properly up to the moment of revolt. In turn, this proper function demands an openly predatory middle class brutally and unapologetically exploiting a proletariat, which in response becomes progressively more militant. Thus, Sorel writes that the revolutionary doctrine

<blockquote>
will evidently be inapplicable if the middle class and the proletariat do not oppose each other implacably, with all the forces at their disposal; the more ardently capitalist the middle class is, the more the proletariat is full of a warlike spirit and confident of its revolutionary strength, the more certain will be the success of the proletarian movement.{{sfn|Sorel|1941|p=86}} </blockquote>

One of the more interesting elements in Sorel’s theory is that capitalism’s progress towards its self-dissolution appears as a sort of “unconscious” historical process:

<blockquote>
It might . . . be said that capitalism plays a part analogous to that attributed by [Eduard von] Hartmann to the Unconscious in nature, since it prepares the coming of social reforms which it did not intend to produce.{{sfn|Sorel|1941|p=85}}</blockquote>

Now, I don’t think that the “Unconscious” Sorel has in mind here is quite the same as the Freudian unconscious. In fact, I might as well admit that I may be “lost in translation” since Sorel obviously uses a French translation of a German term which T. E. Hulme, the British translator of ''Reflection'', renders as “Unconscious.” In any case, I think that for the Mailer critic this idea{{pg|342|343}}of an unconscious, natural process that is somehow undermined by social peace and compromise is a very interesting one indeed. So for Sorel any adulteration
of the implacable antagonism between the middle and working classes acts as a disruption of an unconscious development:

<blockquote>
If . . . the middle class, led astray by the ''chatter'' of the preachers of ethics and sociology . . . seek to correct the ''abuses'' of economics, and wish to break with the barbarism of their predecessors, then one part of the forces which were to further the development of capitalism is employed in hindering it, an arbitrary and irrational element is introduced, and the future of the world becomes completely indeterminate.{{sfn|Sorel|1941|p=87}} </blockquote>

Sorel refers to the state resulting from such “irrationality” as “decadent” and “degenerate,” and thus we have another clear parallel with Mailer’s idea of “the plague,” as in both cases we observe an attenuation of fundamental and essential conflicts.

My own extrapolation from Sorel’s idea is as follows. Someone acting in such a context and with such an understanding of how things work, he offers: would they not possibly come to believe that (please remember our second paradox) the best strategy of attaining their goals might be propping up the enemy? And is exactly this not an important part of Mailer’s strategy in the whole Goldwater affair and beyond? I am referring to all those ideas running through his 1960s work, about restoring a true Conservatism to its lost potency, so that a vital and drastic confrontation with the Left can be ensured. What is, perhaps, the best example of the paradoxical positions resulting from such an equally paradoxical attitude can be found in Mailer’s speech at the debate with William Buckley, Jr. There, what we might call a “freedom-loving” brand of Conservatism is pitted against a “Totalitarian” one and the Cold War itself is denounced as a sort of senseless distraction from another war that would be “welcome”: “the war which has meaning, that great and mortal debate between rebel and conservative where each would argue the other is an agent of the Devil.”{{sfn|Mailer|1976|p=187-8}}

Sorel’s own solution for reinforcing the essential antagonism between the middle and working classes is the employment of proletarian violence. The social peacemakers’ advances, we are told, must be met with “black ingratitude” and blows. The paradox here is that such violence will prevent more{{pg|343|344}}virulent and abhorrent violence on a grander scale. For a revolution erupting in the midst of capitalist decadence would, according to Sorel, lead either to a regression to barbarism and/or anarchy, or to “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” The latter represents Sorel’s worst nightmare, since by this term he understands a revolution led by his unconscionable opponents, the “parliamentary”
Socialists, and that revolution would be destined to repeat the worst excesses of the French Revolution.

Thus we are brought to the final resemblance between Mailer and Sorel, the idea that a form of limited violence can work to prevent what may be properly called “totalitarian” violence, which is organized violence on a massive scale employing the resources of the State. In fact, Sorel goes so far as to propose that, to avoid misunderstandings, we call all violence of this second type “force” and retain the term “violence” for all oppositional (notably, of course, proletarian) violent acts:

<blockquote>
Sometimes the terms ''force'' and ''violence'' are used in speaking of acts of authority, sometimes in speaking of acts of revolt . . . I think it would be better to adopt a terminology which would give rise to no ambiguity, and that the term ''violence'' should be employed only for acts of revolt; we should say, therefore, that the object of force is to impose a certain social order in which the minority governs, while violence tends to the destruction of that order. The middle class have used force since the beginning of modern times, while the proletariat now reacts against the middle class and against the State by violence.{{sfn|Sorel|1941|p=195}}
</blockquote>

This distinction between “force” and “violence” is one Mailer essentially shared with Sorel.

Let us, briefly, recapitulate our main points. Totalitarianism can be approached not only as “a system” but also as a discourse whose logic confuses political sides. A thinker operating within the framework of this discourse is bound, by dint of its logic, to get entangled within a certain political paradoxology, which is conducive to the formulation of highly idiosyncratic positions such as Mailer’s “Left Conservatism.” Indeed our central preoccupation throughout has been with the question, “How is a Left Conservative produced?” In response to this question we proposed a principle and highlighted what might initially appear as a certain conceptual “mech-{{pg|344|345}}anism.” The principle is that opposition to totalitarianism will often turn out to be itself, ''de facto'', totalitarian or potentially totalitarian. Between the two opposed “totalitarianisms,” then, the distinction between Left and Right will tend to be attenuated if not erased. The “mechanism” we termed, with the help of Jean Radford’s old but still very interesting study on Mailer, the ''politique du pire''.

The ''politique du pire'', being a policy (and hence a mechanism), could be initially approached in tactical or strategic terms as the idea that the tactical aggravation of oppression, exploitation, conflict (but therefore also the preservation in good shape of one’s opponent) will bring a strategic goal of revolution even closer. However, on closer inspection it turns out that, in the case of both Mailer and Sorel, whatever tactical or strategic deliberations might there be, the “mechanism” also actually conceals a principle. In Mailer’s characteristic terms, acute, inflammatory diseases are healthier than lingering, silent ones. The metaphor points to a rather complex economy of violence. We dealt with one of its facets, the opposition of subjective to objective violence. Placated once, subjective, visible, symptomatic violence feeds, through accumulation, into objective or better still, in our case, “totalitarian” violence. However, the two principles here interlock. The bearer of liberated subjective violence, the hipster, is himself potentially amenable to the call of a “magnetic leader” with visions of “mass murder.” We are still in the cycle of “totalitarianism.”

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

===Citations===
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Berlin |first=Isaiah |chapter=Georges Sorel |date=1979 |title=Against the Current |location=London |publisher=Hogarth Press |pages=296-332 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lewis |first=Wyndham |date=1989 |title=The Art of Being Ruled. |location=1926. Santa Rosa |publisher=Black Sparrow Press |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title=The Armies of the Night. |location=New York |publisher=Signet Books. Print.|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1969 |chapter=In the Red Light |title=Cannibals and Christians |location=London |publisher=Sphere Books |pages=20-65 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1969 |title=Miami and the Siege of Chicago |location=Harmondsworth |publisher=Penguin. Print.|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1976 |title=The Presidential Papers |location=London |publisher=Panther. Print.|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1959 |chapter=The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster |title=Advertisements for Myself |location=New York |publisher=G. P. Putnam’s Sons |pages=337-358 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Radford |first=Jean |date=1975 |title=Norman Mailer: A Critical Study |location=London |publisher=Macmillan |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Sorel |first=Georges |date=1941 |title=Reflections On Violence. |location=Trans. T.E. Hulme. New York |publisher=Peter Smith |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Trilling |first=Diana |chapter=The Moral Radicalism of Norman Mailer |title=Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work |editor=Robert Lucid |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown & Co. |date=1971 |pages=108-36 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Wenke |first=Joseph |date=1987 |title=Mailer’s America |location=Hanover |publisher=University Press of New England |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of “Totalitarianism"}}

[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-06T01:22:35Z

JKilchenmann: /* Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway */ new section

{{Talk header}}

== Article Errors ==

I've added the body of the article to my sandbox page. What errors do I need to specifically change in order to make it correct?[[User:CDucharme|CDucharme]] ([[User talk:CDucharme|talk]]) 17:04, 14 September 2020 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|CDucharme}} Mostly you need to add the notes, citation, and read for typos. It’s meticulous, but that’s the job. (Thanks for signing.) —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:08, 14 September 2020 (EDT)

Hey, I need help with instructions for the Norman Mailer Bibliography for the remediation project. I am not sure what I am supposed to do.[[User:AJohnson|AJohnson]] ([[User talk:AJohnson|talk]]) 29 March 2021 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|AJohnson}} You need to remediate the bibliography by adding missing entries from the PDF to the article on this site using the correct templates. As the note on the bibliography says, you may use [[The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer Bibliography: 2007|Norman Mailer Bibliography: 2007]] as a model. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 14:48, 29 March 2021 (EDT)

== Final edits ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Erhernandez}} well done! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. I removed your banner after making a few corrections. Please have a look over it and move on to the next thing. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:06, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

Hello, Dr. Lucas, I finished editing my article. May I have the banner removed?[[User:KJordan|KJordan]] ([[User talk:KJordan|talk]]) 20:13, 22 September 2020 (EDT)KJordan
:{{Reply to|KJordan}} Maybe. You should always link to something you want me to have a look at, please. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 20:14, 22 September 2020 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished editing my article. Can you please review it? Thank You. Here is a link to it: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/The_Heart_of_the_Nation:_Jewish_Values_in_the_Fiction_of_Norman_Mailer --[[User:AMurray|AMurray]] ([[User talk:AMurray|talk]]) 21:56, 23 September 2020 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|AMurray}} Looking good! However, I still see quote a few typos. There should be no space before a footnote or citation.<ref>Like this.</ref> And all parenthetical citations need to be converted. I also see a lot of missing punctuation, especially around citations. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 24 September 2020 (EDT)

{{Reflist}}

Dr. Lucas, I finished editing my article. Will you please review?
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/The_Unknown_and_the_General --[[User:Jrdavisjr|Jrdavisjr]] ([[User talk:Jrdavisjr|talk]]) 09:00, 25 September 2020 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Jrdavisjr}} It looks good. Let's go through editing week and see if anything else comes up. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:15, 25 September 2020 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished editing my article. Can you please review it? Thank You
https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:JSheppard/sandbox [[User:JSheppard|JSheppard]] ([[User talk:JSheppard|talk]])
:{{Reply to| JSheppard}} You have a '''lot''' of work left to do. I see [[User:Jules Carry]] is helping, but you’re missing references and there are typos throughout. Keep working. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:19, 25 September 2020 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I finished my article.
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/More_Than_The_Dead_Know
[[User:RWalsh|RWalsh]] ([[User talk:RWalsh|talk]]) 15:15, 8 February 2021 (EST)
:{{reply to|RWalsh}} Not quite, but it's looking good. Clean it up and begin helping others. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:11, 9 February 2021 (EST)

Dr. Lucas, I believe I have finished editing my article. Will you please review?
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/%E2%80%9CHer_Problems_Were_Everyone%E2%80%99s_Problems%E2%80%9D:_Self_and_Gender_in_The_Deer_Park [[User:Klcrawford|Klcrawford]] ([[User talk:Klcrawford|talk]]) 09:06, 15 February 2021 (EST)
:{{Reply to|Klcrawford}} Great work. I have removed the working banner. I would appreciate it if you began to assist some of the other editors. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:04, 15 February 2021 (EST)

Hello Dr. Lucas, I have been making some edits, I am still looking to see if there is more, can you look through and give any feedback?https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/Angst,_Authorship,_Critics:_“The_Snows_of_Kilimanjaro,”_“The_Crack-Up,”_Advertisements_for_Myself [[User:JFordyce|JFordyce]] ([[User talk:JFordyce|talk]]) 18:27, 20 February 2021 (EST)JFordyce

Hello Dr. Lucas, I believe I have finished my article. Can you please review it? https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/Request [[User:EKrauskopf|EKrauskopf]] ([[User talk:EKrauskopf|talk]]) 13:06, 22 Februrary 2021 (EST)
:{{Reply to|EKrauskopf}} OK, looks good. Well done. Now please begin assisting others on getting volume 9 finished. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 06:41, 23 February 2021 (EST)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished and cleaned up my article. Could you please review it?
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/More_Than_The_Dead_Know [[User:RWalsh|RWalsh]] ([[User talk:RWalsh|talk]]) 12:35, 23 February 2021 (EST)
:{{Reply to|RWalsh}} OK, nice job. Now please begin assisting others on getting volume 9 finished. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:47, 23 February 2021 (EST)

Hello Dr.Lucas final edits have been made and the article is finished.https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/Angst,_Authorship,_Critics:_“The_Snows_of_Kilimanjaro,”_“The_Crack-Up,”_Advertisements_for_Myself[[User:JFordyce|JFordyce]] ([[User talk:JFordyce|talk]]) 22:27, 2 March 2021 (EST) JFordyce

Hello, Dr. Lucas! I have completed remediation on [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/The American Civil War in The Naked and the Dead and Across the River and Into the Trees]]. Can you please let me know if there's anything I need to correct? Thanks so much! [[User:KaraCroissant|KaraCroissant]] ([[User talk:KaraCroissant|talk]]) 17:11, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|KaraCroissant}} great work! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Other than that—great job! I have removed the banner, so you are free to help with the rest of the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:58, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

Hi, Dr. Lucas. I think I have finished my PM article:[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|Hemingway to Mailer-A Delayed Response to The Deer Park]]. Please let me know if there is anything else needed from me. [[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 17:54, 2 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Hobbitonya}} nice work. A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Look at punctuation placement and footnotes; commas go inside quotation marks; punctuation goes before footnotes. You still have some citation issues. Note the read errors at the bottom of the page. These need to be gone. (Check the Mailer 1963 short footnote; there is no corresponding citation for 1963.) Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:58, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

Hi Dr. Lucas. I think I have finished my article: https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Ernest_and_Norman:_A_Dialogue_in_Two_Acts&oldid=17870
Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. Also, let me know if the link is working. [[User:DSánchez|DSánchez]] ([[User talk:DSánchez|talk]]) 17:13, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| DSánchez}} looks good. I removed the banner, but please remove all the links. I understand what you were trying to do, but it's unnecessary. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:13, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

==Article Request==
Dr. Lucas. I have started working on another article. Would you be able to send me the PDF of "The Savage Poet-- Unlocking the Universe With Metaphor" so that I can help add to the article? [[User:Klcrawford|Klcrawford]] ([[User talk:Klcrawford|talk]]) 18:24, 23 February 2021 (EST)
:{{Reply to|Klcrawford}} Done. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:46, 24 February 2021 (EST)

== When we Were Kings 1st remediation ==

[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/When_We_Were_Kings:_Review_and_Commentary|https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/When_We_Were_Kings:_Review_and_Commentary]]

Here is the link for the remediation I did for this weeks assignment. I did not now where to place the link.

Thank you,
Trevor Ryals
:{{Reply to|TRyals}} Thank you, but this is unnecessary. Just do the work; I promise I will see it. (And be sure to sign your talk page posts.) —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 18:16, 2 February 2021 (EST)

==Summer 2021==
Can you please review my article? I have a couple errors that I do not understand how to fix. Other than that, I am finished. https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:PLowery/sandbox

Can you review my article again please? I think I might be done. [[User:PLowery|PLowery]] ([[User talk:PLowery|talk]])
:{{Reply to|PLowery}} In order for you to be finished, your entire article must be posted [[The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/A Favor for the Ages|in the mainspace]]. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:29, 21 June 2021 (EDT)
::Done
:::I believe I have it done correctly now.

My topic person is Marion Stegeman Hodgson,however she was not my first choice. There are four others who initially chose Hodgson, Tyler McMillan, Elizabeth Webb, Caleb Andrews, and Marguerite Walker. I haven't gotten in touch with either classmate as of this date however.[[User:KWilcox|KWilcox]] ([[User talk:KWilcox|talk]])Kenneth Wilcox(KWilcox)July 7, 2021[[User:KWilcox|KWilcox]] ([[User talk:KWilcox|talk]])
:{{Reply to|KWilcox}} This work should be done on Wikipedia. Please post all questions and work about project 2 on Wikipedia. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:12, 8 July 2021 (EDT)

My attempt at creating a draft article failed by creating a new page. My next attempt will be using the user page to create the draft article, is this correct?[[User:KWilcox|KWilcox]] ([[User talk:KWilcox|talk]]) 10:22, 8 July 2021 (EDT)Kenneth Wilcox, July 8, 2021, 10:21am[[User:KWilcox|KWilcox]] ([[User talk:KWilcox|talk]]) 10:22, 8 July 2021 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|KWilcox}} As I said: please post all questions for project 2 on Wikipedia. This is an inappropriate forum for them. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:27, 8 July 2021 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. I was able to get the 2 web citations to link correctly. But for some reason, I cannot get the Mailer 1967 film Wild 90 citation to link to the reference list. Please advise. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} OK, all fixed and published. Thanks. Please move on to another remediation. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:46, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} a stellar job. Well done. I removed the banner, so you can move on to another article. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:12, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} Well done! Banner removed, url added. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:18, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

==Oohh Normie Final Edits==
Hi Dr. Lucas, I have finished my article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/"Oohh_Normie_—_You're_Sooo_Hemingway":_Mailer_Memories_and_Encounters|Oohh Normie, You're Sooo Hemingway]]. Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. [[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 20:01, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Harlot%27s_Ghost,_Bildungsroman,_Masculinity_and_Hemingway

[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 21:22, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway

2025-04-06T01:12:05Z

JKilchenmann: typo fixes

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''Harlot's Ghost'', ''Bildungsroman'', Masculinity and Hemingway}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 

{{Byline |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |abstract=
''Harlot’s Ghost'' is the ''Bildungsroman'' of the education of Harry Hubbard. It is a novel of protagonist Harry Hubbard’s psychological, moral and social shaping in the course of his journey from youth—adolescence in Harry’s case—to a degree of consolidation of adulthood. ''Harlot'' also is a picaresque of that same education. Harry’s development as a man is marked mainly by his armoring himself ''against'' dangers, not by Harry initiating or escalating aggression. To draw on Hemingway, Harry’s “manly development” brings more of the grace under pressure of early Hemingway characters like Nick Adams and Jack Barnes than of the occasional public belligerence of the late Papa, or of the middle-aged Mailer.|url=. . .}}

{{dc|dc=''H}}'''ARLOT’S GHOST'' IS THE ''BILDUNGSROMAN'' OF THE EDUCATION''' of Harry
Hubbard. In calling ''Harlot’s Ghost'' a ''Bildungsroman'', I mean a novel of protagonist Harry Hubbard’s psychological, moral and social shaping in the course of his journey from youth—adolescence in Harry’s case—to a degree of consolidation of adulthood.{{efn|See Moretti.}} ''Harlot'' also is a picaresque of that same education.{{efn|By calling it a picaresque I mean a novel of its protagonists’ exploration of various sectors of the social world, like some cliques and stations of the CIA. For further information, see Stone.}}

Despite a lack of conventional closure, ''Harlot’s'' Harry moves through enough phases of an education toward full manhood for ''Harlot'' to constitute a contribution to the literature of the ''Bildungsroman''. Although the ''Bildungsroman'' typically moves toward a final resolution marked by one or another sort of consolidation of adulthood, whether happily triumphant as in
''David Copperfield'', or adaptive to a substantial degree of misfortune as in
''L’education Sentimental'' or ''Invisible Man'', or disastrous as in ''Illusions Perdue'', such final resolution is not all.{{efn|The relevance of the picaresque is merely touched on here, as the topic, once treated seriously, draws us into the copious details of ''Harlot'' as social document and history (but see notes 5 and
30). On the varieties of English and French ''Bildungsroman'', see Moretti.}} Lessons that yield impacts on character development
occur throughout the temporal course of ''Harlot'', as I will illustrate. Thus, the ''prima facie'' case for ''Harlot'' as ''Bildungsroman'' is not negated by the book’s ending with Harry still substantially unformed and the book’s
Omega tale unresolved.

In short, our actually existing, truncated ''Harlot'' offers some of the more episodic developmental satisfactions of the ''Bildungsroman'' (as well as the
picaresque). It is more than the incomplete narrative decried by adversarial
critics like John Simon. And not only does ''Harlot'' offer the cornucopia of
vibrant characters and tales suggested by such celebrants as Wilfred Sheed
{{pg|462|463}}
and William H Pritchard.{{efn|See John Simon, Wilfrid Sheed, and William F. Pritchard}} Its tales enthrall in good part because they cohere around phases of Harry’s education and because they gain force as Harry’s development cumulates, even if it does not conclude.{{efn|It also involves, entertains and instructs the reader in some social history as picaresque, a matter to which I’ll briefly return.}}

Space is not available here for an exhaustive accounting of the developmental episodes in the 1300-page ''Harlot'', but discussion of a few examples of such sequences for some of the work’s key developmental threads can substantiate
my argument. I will focus particularly on episodes in the development of Harry Hubbard’s masculine identity—first, his physical courage, second his sexual maturation and, finally, his manliness among men. These are key to the book and to Harry’s development as something like the “tough guy” aspect of writings by and about Mailer.

Harry’s education in physical courage begins with demands from father Cal Hubbard, during a skiing trip, for a manly Harry. When Harry falls on
a ski slope and does not quickly rise, Cal asks, “Will you rise to your feet,
you quitter?” When Harry indicates that he has broken something, Cal relents,
exclaiming “Your father, Carl Hubbard, is a fathead” and “you’re not
the worst kid”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=123-124}}. Harry’s struggle to attain the high
standard of physical courage set by Father Cal is begun.

A second physical challenge of note confronts Harry while rock climbing
“the precipices” with Hugh Tremont “Harlot” Montague. When Hugh leads Harry to a place where “a quick glimpse down . . . proved no easier than standing on the edge of a roof seven stories high that had no railing,”
Harry’s impulse is “to ask Mr. Montague if this was, for certain, the right
place.” Hugh responds, “This climb will test you” and adds that mastering
the test is “[j]ust a matter of learning a new vocabulary”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=147-150}} and a portion, perhaps, of the larger “language of men”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=122}}.
Harry meets the test of the precipices, climbing with increased composure
and confidence toward effective mastery of the new manly “vocabulary.” After the precipices, Harry seldom confronts physical dangers that emanate so much from nature as opposed to other people, but the dangers confronted do often include death. A key encounter with the risk of death involves
Harry’s participation alongside Dix Butler and Cuban anti-Castro forces in the landing on Playa Girón. In Harry’s words, “Adrenaline kept prayer at bay” and “[d]eath was a great temple” before which he “stood at the gate.” Yet Harry plays his role well. Indeed he reports, “I remember letting loose a prodigious whoop”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1139}}. Harry has become a happy warrior.
{{pg|463|464}}
Harry’s sexual development starts late and proceeds slowly and haltingly. There is no talk of High School coitus, no College news of more than some “petting.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=228}} During Company training, the bisexual Rosen and Dix Butler tint the atmosphere around Harry’s sexual development; and early during his Berlin mission Harry has an ambiguous encounter with Dix. He rebuffs an aggressive sexual advance from Dix but images of “Butler’s “knotted buttocks”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=330}} come to him as he approaches climax during his first intercourse, this with a German co-worker named Ingrid. Still, the sex is satisfying: Harry can write that afterwards he “was feeling a good bit better.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=330}} His sex life begins on an essentially heterosexual footing, if not the firmest. Harry’s return from Berlin brings a flowering of romantic and friendly feelings toward Kittredge Gardiner. This blooms most fully in
Harry’s letters to Kittredge from Montevideo station. On a more emphatically
sexual note, the Montevideo mission brings an adultery with Sally Porringer, trysts with many of the ladies of Montevideo’s brothels and fellatio from the Libertad la Lingual, a brothel hermaphrodite distinguished by strong feminine allure and, as it turns out to Harry’s consternation, male genitals.{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=669}} The Miami mission brings Harry intense, well-integrated romantic and sexual experience in the person of Modene Murthy, mistress also
to JFK and mob leader Sam Giancano. Enraptured by Modene’s “sexual lavishness,”
{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=796}} Harry comes, he writes, “into the place I had been expecting to enter all my life.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=818}} Beyond the compass of Modene’s thrall, Harry’s
epistolary romance with Kittredge continues. Although sexual fulfillment
with her lies beyond the extant Alpha, it can be read back from the pages of
the extant Omega on Harry and Kittredge—or Harry and Kittredge and mistress Chloe, a waitress who “could enjoy a lonely customer” and who could laugh at her own sexual escapades “with enough good humor to have been watching her own pornographic romp {{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=18-19}}.With Kittredge,

<blockquote>after all our years together, we still flew at each other. Kittredge, indeed, was as fierce as one of those wood-animals with claws and sharp teeth and fine fur that you can never quite tame. At its worst, there were times when I felt like a tomcat in with a raccoon. . . . I’d see God when the lightning flashed and we jolted our souls into one another. Afterward, was tenderness, and the sweetest domestic knowledge of how curious and wonderful we were for one another.{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=19}}</blockquote>
{{pg|464|465}}
In regard to Harry’s education in “manliness among men,” his education
in physical courage is relevant, for the latter typically involves meeting challenges in the company of mentors like Cal and Hugh. However, I stress aspects
of Harry’s learning of his trade that entail dealing in a competent and
dignified manner with his male co-workers at the Company. Here one key challenge appears to be attaining a degree of respect and support from mentors Cal Hubbard and Hugh Montague. Another appears to be averting both the self-destructive sexual passivity of Reed Arnold Rosen and the psychopathic
sexual extroversion of Dix Butler.

The trajectory of social learning and personal development that takes up the most of Mailer’s labor and Harry’s years in ''Harlot’s'' Alpha section involves Harry’s
work relations with William King “Wild Bill” Harvey. Early in Alpha, Harvey is Harry’s Station chief for Berlin Station Mission, and he is the focus of Harry’s activities during the Roman phase of Alpha’s final completed section, its “Afterword.” These work relations with “Wild Bill” provide virtual dramatic bookends to the Alpha’s account of Harry’s Company history, such as Mailer completed it. In the Berlin section of Alpha, Harry’s
drama and development largely consist of battles of wits and will with Harvey
over the secret identity of the insubordinate KU/CLOAKROOM who has made light of a request by Harvey and turns out to be none other than Harry himself.{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=271-278}} The drama is intensified because Harry is assigned
to uncover KU/CLOAKROOM for Harvey, because the cloak room uncovering is tied to the uncovering of the potentially dangerous Soviet agent KU/WILDBOAR and because Harry’s mentors Cal Hubbard and High Montague are antagonists of Harvey, both for their resented class pedigrees and
their opposition to Harvey in Company battles over the question of Kim
Philby—who proves to be the traitor Harvey had intimated.{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=276}} In their give and take with Harvey, Harry and his mentors emerge unscathed, but the contest between Harry and Harvey is rejoined a decade later in Rome.

In the Roman episode, Harry is charged by Company head Dick Helms with cleaning up the “mess” that Helms states that “Harvey is making of Station in Rome.” Harry must enact Helms’ decision to send Harvey “out to pasture.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1268-1269}} When Harry confronts Harvey in Rome, where he has been sent to notify him of the termination of his Roman service, he is threatened by a drunk Harvey who says, pointing a gun “thoughtfully” at Harry,
that his seeming dangerousness is not “an act.” To the contrary, he has been
feeling “a real inclination which goes right down into the most honest part
{{pg|465|466}}
of me to pull that trigger and blow somebody’s name right out of their body.”
{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1273}} True, Harvey next tells Harry “you are relatively safe.” However, he also notes that “[i]f Hugh Montague were present, he “would be a deadman.” Moreover, he plants doubt in Harry’s head about Harlot’s loyalty to the
Company and bids Harry good bye with a head butt that, to use Harry’s words, provides him with a “last gift, a headache to take home with the hangover.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1277}} By Rome, Harry has the toughness to take such “tough guy” behavior in stride.

Although Harlot as ''Bildungsroman'' is principally comprised of the events of Harry’s Alpha manuscript, some parts of Omega are instructively projected back into the year unreached by Alpha. For example, as we have seen, Omega’s references to marital relations between Harry and Kittredge speak rather directly to his “sexual development,” and Rosen’s death and possible suicide may bear a little on the relevance of Rosen’s meaning for Harry. Indeed, Omega suggests to us expectations about how Harry’s tale may have ended, about how the Harry engendered by Mailer in our imaginations might have come to fare in his years beyond those denoted by the extant Omega, about indeed the pattern into which the accounted events of Harry might ideally fit. At the end of the extant Omega, Harry at his clandestine Moscow halfway house gathers his resolve to unveil and address whatever project Montague might pursue. Montague’s project bears on Harry’s relation to himself, for Harry’s chosen vocation, nurtured both by father Cal and mentor Montague, is one of patriot and Company man; and Omega intimates that Montague’s purpose may involve work for and against country or Company, or both. Where circumstance and resolve may lead Harry not
only stimulates our imagination about where our imaginatively projected Harry is headed but about what to make of the Harry we already know. Indeed, both the Harry of the extant ''Harlot’s Ghost'' and the Harry of anymore extended saga we might have imagined, is one whose identity centers around issues of masculine identity—physical, sexual, and social. This is a Harry whose identity conflicts a future encounter with Harlot—after all, a father
figure who has been husband to the Mrs. Kittredge Hubbard’s of the final pages of ''Ghost''—would very likely bring to a head. And so Omega highlights main themes in the ''Bildungsroman'' of Harry Hubbard’s education, indeed two ''Bildungsromans''—one on the page and one for our expectation for Harry.

Although I have geared my examples of developmental episodes in ''Harlot''
{{pg|466|467}}
as ''Bildungsroman'' to Harry’s “manly” development, I stress that Harry hardly
becomes a stereotypical Mailerian “tough guy.” Any theme of “toughness” in Mailer’s depiction of Harry’s development is more one of Harry’s mastery of behaviors befitting his dignified adaptation to the rough and tumble world of the U.S. intelligence establishment than it is one of a domineering tough guy. Harry’s development as a man is marked mainly by his armoring himself ''against'' dangers, not by Harry initiating or escalating aggression. To draw on Hemingway, Harry’s “manly development” brings more of the grace under pressure of early Hemingway characters like Nick Adams and Jake
Barnes than of the occasional public belligerence of the late Papa, or of the
middle-aged Mailer. Although Mailer seems to have shifted into an undue sympathy for personal violence in his depictions of certain fictional characters—most notably Croft and Rojack—his portrait of Harry Hubbard is mainly one of a youth’s adaption to a sometimes dangerous world with equanimity. This is so, even though this adaption does draw on the traditional
“manly” virtues. Harry more resembles Nick Adams rising from innocence to a degree of bravery as when in “The Killers,” despite the warning of “the cook,” Nick warns Ole Andreson that two men are coming to execute him,{{efn|The “cook” cautions Nick, when his employer George suggests warning Andreson, “I don’t like it . . . I don’t like any of it” (Hemingway, “The Killers” 286).}} than he does the coldblooded killers themselves or the resolutely long suffering Jack Brennan of “Fifty Grand.”{{efn|Jack suffers his way through a defeat that can hand him “Fifty Grand” for retirement from bets on his opponent but feels “all busted inside” (Hemingway, “Fifty Grand” 326).}} Eventually the warrior, as with Dix at
Playa Girón, he is never as heedless of his own mortality as Manuel in “The
Undefeated,”{{efn|In an attempt to compensate for awkwardly tripping over a cushion thrown honorifically from the stands, Manuel indulges in a last aggravation of his dying kill, hoping it will revive his threat and the crowd’s appreciation. “He stepped close and jammed the sharp peak of the ''muletta'' into
the bull’s damp muzzle” (Hemingway, “The Undefeated” 263).}} nor as coldly self-possessed as the white hunter of “The Short
Happy Life.”{{efn|Hemingway, “The Short Happy Life.” Neither is Hubbard as misogynistic as the hunter Wilson
of “The Short Happy Life” or as the writer-hunter of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” However, he does seem to share something with Wilson and Macomber, who reports just before his demise when he confides in Wilson about that “feeling of happiness before action is going to come” (Hemingway, “The Short Happy Life” 33).}}

In relation to both Hemingway and the ''Bildungsroman'' at once, ''Harlot'' has an interesting precedent in another novel that concerns manliness in the
public service amidst a prolonged geopolitical conflict. I refer to Frederick Marryat’s ''Mr. Midshipman Easy'', with its protagonist’s service in the British navy and the Napoleonic wars. This is not ostensibly as distinguished a precedent as ''Great Expectations'' or ''Lost Illusions''.{{efn|Then again, Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf figure with Hemingway among the celebrants of ''Mr. Midshipman Easy''.}} However ''Mr. Midshipman Easy'' is a fine example of the explicit integration of “manly development” into the ''Bildungsroman''. Indeed, it is also a fine example of the integrations
of such development into the picaresque; that is, something of a chronicle
of naval and Iberian theaters of the early Napoleonic Wars.{{sfn|Fulford|2001|p=ix-xi}} {{efn|Despite ''Harlot’s'' rather abrupt end to Harry’s social Odyssey, the novel explores sufficient social worlds for ''Harlot'' to offer many of the satisfactions of the picaresque as well, indeed the satisfaction of an exploration of many agency missions and of a chronicle of the CIA over more than a history-packed dozen-plus years. On the relevance of ''Mr. Midshipman Easy'', this is the work of one of Hemingway’s favorite authors, one right up there with Turgenev (Plimpton 958).}}
Thus, attention to ''Easy'' may merit our attention as students of Mailer’s relation
to Hemingway as well as to Mailer as author of ''Harlot'' and portrayer of “tough guys.”
{{pg|467|468}}
The retrospective and anticipatory framing of the central, ''Bildungsromanische''
Alpha portion of Harlot in terms does not much resemble anything in Hemingway. It better resembles the framing of Ralph Ellison’s ''Invisible Man''. Ellison’s protagonist is also in hiding and also frames his own biographical narrative. Indeed, he is doing so “in covert preparation for a more overt action.”{{sfn|Ellison|1952|p=13}} Although this has no focus as sharp as Hugh “Harlot” Montague, Ellison’s unnamed protagonist is like Harry at the close of ''Harlot'', one who is in clandestine residence at Moscow’s Hotel Metropole, gathering his resolve to head off, as Harry puts it, “on a mission whose purpose
I could not name but for the inner knowledge that I knew it.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1279}}

Still, Harry, toward the close of the actually existing ''Harlot'', resembles Hemingway protagonists at the ends of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' in looking forward toward momentous resolutions.
However, in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', these resolutions come in the form of those protagonists’ own imminent deaths.
Harry’s final posture in Harlot is more extroverted, as well as more hopeful. Harry looks to a future that may draw the strings of his life together by acting
to affect a mentor of his youth and the success of his vocation in ways
that will affect public as well as personal fates. Harry’s resolve is more clearly
focused than the abstract resolve of Ellison’s invisible man, who has no precise
agenda for action. It differs from the resolve of Hemingway’s Robert
Jordan at the conclusion of ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' because Jordon’s dying
resolution is confined to a final courageous encounter with death, detached
from any larger public purpose than the possible elimination of another Nationalist
or two in Jordon’s final battle fascist forces. It is, with its relative extroversion and public as well as private purpose, at least as “manly.”{{efn|It is also clearer and more public in intent than the resolves that end many an otherwise unresolved Mailerian narrative: O’Shaughnessy on his way to Yucatan at the end of ''The Deer Park'', Rojack off to Vegas at the end of ''An American Dream'', Menenhetet and little Meni off across the centuries at the conclusion of ''Ancient Evenings''. Perhaps it is not clearer or more public minded than Gilmore’s embrace of execution as a move toward prisoner autonomy in the face of legal obstacles to a public contrition via public execution (Hicks). However, it is more outwardly oriented,
more extroverted. Of course, Harry Hubbard, as a perennially youthful and refreshed
American Adam can never be more than a momentary victim of his past or circumstance and must look ever hopefully forward (Whalen-Bridge).}}

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

===Citations===
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Dickens |first=Charles |date=1850 |title=David Copperfield |location=Philadelphia |publisher=T. B. Peterson|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickens |first=Charles |authormask=1 |date=1863 |title=Great Expectations|location=Mobile |publisher=S.H. Goetzel & Co |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Ellison |first=Ralph |date=1952 |title=Invisible Man |location=New York |publisher=Random House|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fulford |first=Tim |date=2001|chapter=Introduction|title=Mr. Midshipman Easy |location=By Captain Frederick Marryat. 1836. New York |publisher=Signet Books|pages=v-xiii|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1940 |title=For Whom the Bell Tolls |location=New York |publisher=Scribner’s|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |authormask=1 |date=1938 |title=The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=New York |publisher=Scribner’s|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |title=The Mailerian Narrative: Structural Dynamics in a Poetics of Mailer’s Fiction |url= |journal=The Mailer Review ||issue= 3.1|date= 2009|pages= 397-413|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |location=New York |publisher=G. P. Putnam’s Sons.|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1991 |title=Harlot’s Ghost. |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman and J. Michael Lennon |date=2007 |title=On God: An Uncommon Conversation|location=New York |publisher=Random House.|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Marryat |first=Captain Frederick|date=2001 |title=Mr.Midshipman Easy |location=New York |publisher=Signet Books|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Moretti |first=Franco |date=1987 |title=The Way of the World: the Bildungsroman in European Culture |location=London |publisher=Verso|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Pritchard |first=William H. |title=Mailer’s Main Event |url= |journal=The Hudson Review ||issue= 45.1|date= 1992|pages= 149-57|ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Simon |first=John |date=September 29, 1991|title=The Company They Keep.” Rev. of ''Harlot’s Ghost'', by Norman Mailer|work=New York Times Book Review |location=late ed., sec 7:1 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Whalen-Bridge |first=John |title=The Myth of the American Adam in Late Mailer |journal=Connotations |issue=5.2-3 |date= 1995–1996|pages= 304-21|ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway

2025-04-06T00:04:41Z

JKilchenmann: fix errors

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''Harlot's Ghost'', ''Bildungsroman'', Masculinity and Hemingway}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 

{{Byline |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |abstract=
''Harlot’s Ghost'' is the ''Bildungsroman'' of the education of Harry Hubbard. It is a novel of protagonist Harry Hubbard’s psychological, moral and social shaping in the course of his journey from youth—adolescence in Harry’s case—to a degree of consolidation of adulthood. ''Harlot'' also is a picaresque of that same education. Harry’s development as a man is marked mainly by his armoring himself ''against'' dangers, not by Harry initiating or escalating aggression. To draw on Hemingway, Harry’s “manly development” brings more of the grace under pressure of early Hemingway characters like Nick Adams and Jack Barnes than of the occasional public belligerence of the late Papa, or of the middle-aged Mailer.|url=. . .}}

{{dc|dc=H}}arlot’s Ghost is the Bildungsroman of the education}} of Harry
Hubbard. In calling Harlot’s Ghost a Bildungsroman, I mean a novel of protagonist Harry Hubbard’s psychological, moral and social shaping in the course of his journey from youth—adolescence in Harry’s case—to a degree of consolidation of adulthood.{{efn|See Moretti.}} ''Harlot'' also is a picaresque of that same education.{{efn|By calling it a picaresque I mean a novel of its protagonists’ exploration of various sectors of the social world, like some cliques and stations of the CIA. For further information, see Stone.}}

Despite a lack of conventional closure, ''Harlot’s'' Harry moves through enough phases of an education toward full manhood for Harlot to constitute a contribution to the literature of the ''Bildungsroman''. Although the ''Bildungsroman'' typically moves toward a final resolution marked by one or another sort of consolidation of adulthood, whether happily triumphant as in
''David Copperfield'', or adaptive to a substantial degree of misfortune as in
''L’education Sentimental'' or ''Invisible Man'', or disastrous as in ''Illusions Perdue'', such final resolution is not all.{{efn|The relevance of the picaresque is merely touched on here, as the topic, once treated seriously, draws us into the copious details of ''Harlot'' as social document and history (but see notes 5 and
30). On the varieties of English and French ''Bildungsroman'', see Moretti.}} Lessons that yield impacts on character development
occur throughout the temporal course of ''Harlot'', as I will illustrate. Thus, the ''prima facie'' case for ''Harlot'' as ''Bildungsroman'' is not negated by the book’s ending with Harry still substantially unformed and the book’s
Omega tale unresolved.

In short, our actually existing, truncated Harlot offers some of the more episodic developmental satisfactions of the ''Bildungsroman'' (as well as the
picaresque). It is more than the incomplete narrative decried by adversarial
critics like John Simon. And not only does ''Harlot'' offer the cornucopia of
vibrant characters and tales suggested by such celebrants as Wilfred Sheed
{{pg|462|463}}
and William H Pritchard.{{efn|See John Simon, Wilfrid Sheed, and William F. Pritchard}} Its tales enthrall in good part because they cohere around phases of Harry’s education and because they gain force as Harry’s development cumulates, even if it does not conclude.{{efn|It also involves, entertains and instructs the reader in some social history as picaresque, a matter to which I’ll briefly return.}}

Space is not available here for an exhaustive accounting of the developmental episodes in the 1300-page ''Harlot'', but discussion of a few examples of such sequences for some of the work’s key developmental threads can substantiate
my argument. I will focus particularly on episodes in the development of Harry Hubbard’s masculine identity—first, his physical courage, second his sexual maturation and, finally, his manliness among men. These are key to the book and to Harry’s development as something like the “tough guy” aspect of writings by and about Mailer.

Harry’s education in physical courage begins with demands from father Cal Hubbard, during a skiing trip, for a manly Harry. When Harry falls on
a ski slope and does not quickly rise, Cal asks, “Will you rise to your feet,
you quitter?” When Harry indicates that he has broken something, Cal relents,
exclaiming “Your father, Carl Hubbard, is a fathead” and “you’re not
the worst kid”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=123-124}}. Harry’s struggle to attain the high
standard of physical courage set by Father Cal is begun.

A second physical challenge of note confronts Harry while rock climbing
“the precipices” with Hugh Tremont “Harlot” Montague. When Hugh leads Harry to a place where “a quick glimpse down . . . proved no easier than standing on the edge of a roof seven stories high that had no railing,”
Harry’s impulse is “to ask Mr. Montague if this was, for certain, the right
place.” Hugh responds, “This climb will test you” and adds that mastering
the test is “[j]ust a matter of learning a new vocabulary”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=147-150}} and a portion, perhaps, of the larger “language of men”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=122}}.
Harry meets the test of the precipices, climbing with increased composure
and confidence toward effective mastery of the new manly “vocabulary.” After the precipices, Harry seldom confronts physical dangers that emanate so much from nature as opposed to other people, but the dangers confronted do often include death. A key encounter with the risk of death involves
Harry’s participation alongside Dix Butler and Cuban anti-Castro forces in the landing on Playa Girón. In Harry’s words, “Adrenaline kept prayer at bay” and “[d]eath was a great temple” before which he “stood at the gate.” Yet Harry plays his role well. Indeed he reports, “I remember letting loose a prodigious whoop”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1139}}. Harry has become a happy warrior.
{{pg|463|464}}
Harry’s sexual development starts late and proceeds slowly and haltingly. There is no talk of High School coitus, no College news of more than some “petting.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=228}} During Company training, the bisexual Rosen and Dix Butler tint the atmosphere around Harry’s sexual development; and early during his Berlin mission Harry has an ambiguous encounter with Dix. He rebuffs an aggressive sexual advance from Dix but images of “Butler’s “knotted buttocks”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=330}} come to him as he approaches climax during his first intercourse, this with a German co-worker named Ingrid. Still, the sex is satisfying: Harry can write that afterwards he “was feeling a good bit better.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=330}} His sex life begins on an essentially heterosexual footing, if not the firmest. Harry’s return from Berlin brings a flowering of romantic and friendly feelings toward Kittredge Gardiner. This blooms most fully in
Harry’s letters to Kittredge from Montevideo station. On a more emphatically
sexual note, the Montevideo mission brings an adultery with Sally Porringer, trysts with many of the ladies of Montevideo’s brothels and fellatio from the Libertad la Lingual, a brothel hermaphrodite distinguished by strong feminine allure and, as it turns out to Harry’s consternation, male genitals.{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=669}} The Miami mission brings Harry intense, well-integrated romantic and sexual experience in the person of Modene Murthy, mistress also
to JFK and mob leader Sam Giancano. Enraptured by Modene’s “sexual lavishness”
{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=796}},Harry comes, he writes, “into the place I had been expecting to enter all my life.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=818}} Beyond the compass of Modene’s thrall, Harry’s
epistolary romance with Kittredge continues. Although sexual fulfillment
with her lies beyond the extant Alpha, it can be read back from the pages of
the extant Omega on Harry and Kittredge—or Harry and Kittredge and mistress Chloe, a waitress who “could enjoy a lonely customer” and who could laugh at her own sexual escapades “with enough good humor to have been watching her own pornographic romp {{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=18-19}}.With Kittredge,

<blockquote>after all our years together, we still flew at each other. Kittredge, indeed, was as fierce as one of those wood-animals with claws and sharp teeth and fine fur that you can never quite tame. At its worst, there were times when I felt like a tomcat in with a raccoon. . . . I’d see God when the lightning flashed and we jolted our souls into one another. Afterward, was tenderness, and the sweetest domestic knowledge of how curious and wonderful we were for one another.{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=19}}</blockquote>
{{pg|464|465}}
In regard to Harry’s education in “manliness among men,” his education
in physical courage is relevant, for the latter typically involves meeting challenges in the company of mentors like Cal and Hugh. However, I stress aspects
of Harry’s learning of his trade that entail dealing in a competent and
dignified manner with his male co-workers at the Company. Here one key challenge appears to be attaining a degree of respect and support from mentors Cal Hubbard and Hugh Montague. Another appears to be averting both the self-destructive sexual passivity of Reed Arnold Rosen and the psychopathic
sexual extroversion of Dix Butler.

The trajectory of social learning and personal development that takes up the most of Mailer’s labor and Harry’s years in ''Harlot’s'' Alpha section involves Harry’s
work relations with William King “Wild Bill” Harvey. Early in Alpha, Harvey is Harry’s Station chief for Berlin Station Mission, and he is the focus of Harry’s activities during the Roman phase of Alpha’s final completed section, its “Afterword.” These work relations with “Wild Bill” provide virtual dramatic bookends to the Alpha’s account of Harry’s Company history, such as Mailer completed it. In the Berlin section of Alpha, Harry’s
drama and development largely consist of battles of wits and will with Harvey
over the secret identity of the insubordinate KU/CLOAKROOM who has made light of a request by Harvey and turns out to be none other than Harry himself.{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=271-278}} The drama is intensified because Harry is assigned
to uncover KU/CLOAKROOM for Harvey, because the cloak room uncovering is tied to the uncovering of the potentially dangerous Soviet agent KU/WILDBOAR and because Harry’s mentors Cal Hubbard and High Montague are antagonists of Harvey, both for their resented class pedigrees and
their opposition to Harvey in Company battles over the question of Kim
Philby—who proves to be the traitor Harvey had intimated.{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=276}} In their give and take with Harvey, Harry and his mentors emerge unscathed, but the contest between Harry and Harvey is rejoined a decade later in Rome.

In the Roman episode, Harry is charged by Company head Dick Helms with cleaning up the “mess” that Helms states that “Harvey is making of Station in Rome.” Harry must enact Helms’ decision to send Harvey “out to pasture.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1268-1269}} When Harry confronts Harvey in Rome, where he has been sent to notify him of the termination of his Roman service, he is threatened by a drunk Harvey who says, pointing a gun “thoughtfully” at Harry,
that his seeming dangerousness is not “an act.” To the contrary, he has been
feeling “a real inclination which goes right down into the most honest part
{{pg|465|466}}
of me to pull that trigger and blow somebody’s name right out of their body.”
{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1268-1273}} True, Harvey next tells Harry “you are relatively safe.” However, he also notes that “[i]f Hugh Montague were present, he “would be a deadman.” Moreover, he plants doubt in Harry’s head about Harlot’s loyalty to the
Company and bids Harry good bye with a head butt that, to use Harry’s words, provides him with a “last gift, a headache to take home with the hangover.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1277}} By Rome, Harry has the toughness to take such “tough guy” behavior in stride.

Although Harlot as ''Bildungsroman'' is principally comprised of the events of Harry’s Alpha manuscript, some parts of Omega are instructively projected back into the year unreached by Alpha. For example, as we have seen, Omega’s references to marital relations between Harry and Kittredge speak rather directly to his “sexual development,” and Rosen’s death and possible suicide may bear a little on the relevance of Rosen’s meaning for Harry. Indeed, Omega suggests to us expectations about how Harry’s tale may have ended, about how the Harry engendered by Mailer in our imaginations might have come to fare in his years beyond those denoted by the extant Omega, about indeed the pattern into which the accounted events of Harry
might ideally fit. At the end of the extant Omega, Harry at his clandestine Moscow halfway house gathers his resolve to unveil and address whatever project Montague might pursue. Montague’s project bears on Harry’s relation to himself, for Harry’s chosen vocation, nurtured both by father Cal
and mentor Montague, is one of patriot and Company man; and Omega intimates that Montague’s purpose may involve work for and against country or Company, or both. Where circumstance and resolve may lead Harry not
only stimulates our imagination about where our imaginatively projected Harry is headed but about what to make of the Harry we already know. Indeed, both the Harry of the extant ''Harlot’s Ghost'' and the Harry of anymore extended saga we might have imagined, is one whose identity centers around issues of masculine identity—physical, sexual, and social. This is a Harry whose identity conflicts a future encounter with Harlot—after all, a father
figure who has been husband to the Mrs. Kittredge Hubbard’s of the final pages of Ghost—would very likely bring to a head. And so Omega highlights main themes in the ''Bildungsroman'' of Harry Hubbard’s education, indeed two ''Bildungsromans''—one on the page and one for our expectation for Harry.

Although I have geared my examples of developmental episodes in ''Harlot''
{{pg|466|467}}
as ''Bildungsroman'' to Harry’s “manly” development, I stress that Harry hardly
becomes a stereotypical Mailerian “tough guy.” Any theme of “toughness” in Mailer’s depiction of Harry’s development is more one of Harry’s mastery of behaviors befitting his dignified adaptation to the rough and tumble world of the U.S. intelligence establishment than it is one of a domineering tough guy. Harry’s development as a man is marked mainly by his armoring himself ''against'' dangers, not by Harry initiating or escalating aggression. To draw on Hemingway, Harry’s “manly development” brings more of the grace under pressure of early Hemingway characters like Nick Adams and Jake
Barnes than of the occasional public belligerence of the late Papa, or of the
middle-aged Mailer. Although Mailer seems to have shifted into an undue sympathy for personal violence in his depictions of certain fictional characters—most notably Croft and Rojack—his portrait of Harry Hubbard is mainly one of a youth’s adaption to a sometimes dangerous world with equanimity. This is so, even though this adaption does draw on the traditional
“manly” virtues. Harry more resembles Nick Adams rising from innocence to a degree of bravery as when in “The Killers,” despite the warning of “the cook,” Nick warns Ole Andreson that two men are coming to execute him,{{efn|The “cook” cautions Nick, when his employer George suggests warning Andreson, “I don’t like it . . . I don’t like any of it” (Hemingway, “The Killers” 286).}} than he does the coldblooded killers themselves or the resolutely long suffering Jack Brennan of “Fifty Grand.”{{efn|Jack suffers his way through a defeat that can hand him “Fifty Grand” for retirement from bets on his opponent but feels “all busted inside” (Hemingway, “Fifty Grand” 326).}} Eventually the warrior, as with Dix at
Playa Girón, he is never as heedless of his own mortality as Manuel in “The
Undefeated,”{{efn|In an attempt to compensate for awkwardly tripping over a cushion thrown honorifically from the stands, Manuel indulges in a last aggravation of his dying kill, hoping it will revive his threat and the crowd’s appreciation. “He stepped close and jammed the sharp peak of the ''muletta'' into
the bull’s damp muzzle” (Hemingway, “The Undefeated” 263).}} nor as coldly self-possessed as the white hunter of “The Short
Happy Life.”{{efn|Hemingway, “The Short Happy Life.” Neither is Hubbard as misogynistic as the hunter Wilson
of “The Short Happy Life” or as the writer-hunter of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” However, he does seem to share something with Wilson and Macomber, who reports just before his demise when he confides in Wilson about that “feeling of happiness before action is going to come” (Hemingway, “The Short Happy Life” 33).}}

In relation to both Hemingway and the Bildungsroman at once, Harlot
has an interesting precedent in another novel that concerns manliness in the
public service amidst a prolonged geopolitical conflict. I refer to Frederick
Marryat’s ''Mr. Midshipman Easy'', with its protagonist’s service in the British
navy and the Napoleonic wars. This is not ostensibly as distinguished a precedent as Great Expectations or ''Lost Illusions''.{{efn|Then again, Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf figure with Hemingway among the celebrants of ''Mr. Midshipman Easy''.}} However Mr. Midshipman
Easy is a fine example of the explicit integration of “manly development”
into the Bildungsroman. Indeed, it is also a fine example of the integrations
of such development into the picaresque; that is, something of a chronicle
of naval and Iberian theaters of the early Napoleonic Wars.{{sfn|Fulford|1836|p=ix-xi}} {{efn|Despite ''Harlot’s'' rather abrupt end to Harry’s social Odyssey, the novel explores sufficient social worlds for ''Harlot'' to offer many of the satisfactions of the picaresque as well, indeed the satisfaction of an exploration of many agency missions and of a chronicle of the CIA over more than a history-packed dozen-plus years. On the relevance of ''Mr. Midshipman Easy'', this is the work of one of Hemingway’s favorite authors, one right up there with Turgenev (Plimpton 958).}}
Thus, attention to ''Easy'' may merit our attention as students of Mailer’s relation
to Hemingway as well as to Mailer as author of ''Harlot'' and portrayer of “tough guys.”
{{pg|467|468}}
The retrospective and anticipatory framing of the central, ''Bildungsromanische''
Alpha portion of Harlot in terms does not much resemble anything in Hemingway. It better resembles the framing of Ralph Ellison’s ''Invisible Man''. Ellison’s protagonist is also in hiding and also frames his own biographical narrative. Indeed, he is doing so “in covert preparation for a more overt action.”{{sfn|Ellison|1952|p=13}} Although this has no focus as sharp as Hugh
“Harlot” Montague, Ellison’s unnamed protagonist is like Harry at the close
of Harlot, one who is in clandestine residence at Moscow’s Hotel Metropole,
gathering his resolve to head off, as Harry puts it, “on a mission whose purpose
I could not name but for the inner knowledge that I knew it.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1279}}

Still, Harry, toward the close of the actually existing ''Harlot'', resembles
Hemingway protagonists at the ends of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and ''For
Whom the Bell Tolls'' in looking forward toward momentous resolutions.
However, in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', these
resolutions come in the form of those protagonists’ own imminent deaths.
Harry’s final posture in Harlot is more extroverted, as well as more hopeful.
Harry looks to a future that may draw the strings of his life together by acting
to affect a mentor of his youth and the success of his vocation in ways
that will affect public as well as personal fates. Harry’s resolve is more clearly
focused than the abstract resolve of Ellison’s invisible man, who has no precise
agenda for action. It differs from the resolve of Hemingway’s Robert
Jordan at the conclusion of ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' because Jordon’s dying
resolution is confined to a final courageous encounter with death, detached
from any larger public purpose than the possible elimination of another Nationalist
or two in Jordon’s final battle fascist forces. It is, with its relative extroversion and public as well as private purpose, at least as “manly.”{{efn|It is also clearer and more public in intent than the resolves that end many an otherwise unresolved Mailerian narrative: O’Shaughnessy on his way to Yucatan at the end of ''The Deer Park'', Rojack off to Vegas at the end of ''An American Dream'', Menenhetet and little Meni off across the centuries at the conclusion of ''Ancient Evenings''. Perhaps it is not clearer or more public minded than Gilmore’s embrace of execution as a move toward prisoner autonomy in the face of legal obstacles to a public contrition via public execution.(Hicks) However, it is more outwardly oriented,
more extroverted. Of course, Harry Hubbard, as a perennially youthful and refreshed
American Adam can never be more than a momentary victim of his past or circumstance and must look ever hopefully forward (Whalen-Bridge).}}

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

===Citations===
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Dickens |first=Charles |date=1850 |title=David Copperfield |location=Philadelphia |publisher=T. B. Peterson|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickens |first=Charles |authormask=1 |date=1863 |title=Great Expectations|location=Mobile |publisher=S.H. Goetzel & Co |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Ellison |first=Ralph |date=1952 |title=Invisible Man |location=New York |publisher=Random House|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fulford |first=Tim |date=1836|chapter=Introduction|title=Mr. Midshipman Easy |location=By Captain Frederick Marryat. New York |publisher=Signet Books|pages=v-xiii|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1940 |title=For Whom the Bell Tolls |location=New York |publisher=Scribner’s|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |authormask=1 |date=1938 |title=The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=New York |publisher=Scribner’s|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |title=The Mailerian Narrative: Structural Dynamics in a Poetics of Mailer’s Fiction |url= |journal=The Mailer Review ||issue= 3.1|date= 2009|pages= 397-413|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |location=New York |publisher=G. P. Putnam’s Sons.|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1991 |title=Harlot’s Ghost. |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Marryat |first=Captain Frederick|date=2001 |title=Mr.Midshipman Easy |location=New York |publisher=Signet Books|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Moretti |first=Franco |date=1987 |title=The Way of the World: the Bildungsroman in European Culture |location=London |publisher=Verso|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Pritchard |first=William H. |title=Mailer’s Main Event |url= |journal=The Hudson Review ||issue= 45.1|date= 1992|pages= 149-57|ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Simon |first=John |date=September 29, 1991|title=The Company They Keep.” Rev. of ''Harlot’s Ghost'', by Norman Mailer|work=New York Times Book Review |location=late ed., sec 7:1 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Whalen-Bridge |first=John |title=The Myth of the American Adam in Late Mailer |journal=Connotations |issue=5.2-3 |date= 1995–1996|pages= 304-21|ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway

2025-04-05T23:52:28Z

JKilchenmann: through end

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''Harlot's Ghost'', ''Bildungsroman'', Masculinity and Hemingway}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 

{{Byline |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |abstract=
''Harlot’s Ghost'' is the ''Bildungsroman'' of the education of Harry Hubbard. It is a novel of protagonist Harry Hubbard’s psychological, moral and social shaping in the course of his journey from youth—adolescence in Harry’s case—to a degree of consolidation of adulthood. ''Harlot'' also is a picaresque of that same education. Harry’s development as a man is marked mainly by his armoring himself ''against'' dangers, not by Harry initiating or escalating aggression. To draw on Hemingway, Harry’s “manly development” brings more of the grace under pressure of early Hemingway characters like Nick Adams and Jack Barnes than of the occasional public belligerence of the late Papa, or of the middle-aged Mailer.|url=. . .}}

{{dc|dc=H}}arlot’s Ghost is the Bildungsroman of the education}} of Harry
Hubbard. In calling Harlot’s Ghost a Bildungsroman, I mean a novel of protagonist Harry Hubbard’s psychological, moral and social shaping in the course of his journey from youth—adolescence in Harry’s case—to a degree of consolidation of adulthood.{{efn|See Moretti.}} ''Harlot'' also is a picaresque of that same education.{{efn|By calling it a picaresque I mean a novel of its protagonists’ exploration of various sectors of the social world, like some cliques and stations of the CIA. For further information, see Stone.}}

Despite a lack of conventional closure, ''Harlot’s'' Harry moves through enough phases of an education toward full manhood for Harlot to constitute a contribution to the literature of the ''Bildungsroman''. Although the ''Bildungsroman'' typically moves toward a final resolution marked by one or another sort of consolidation of adulthood, whether happily triumphant as in
''David Copperfield'', or adaptive to a substantial degree of misfortune as in
''L’education Sentimental'' or ''Invisible Man'', or disastrous as in ''Illusions Perdue'', such final resolution is not all.{{efn|The relevance of the picaresque is merely touched on here, as the topic, once treated seriously, draws us into the copious details of ''Harlot'' as social document and history (but see notes 5 and
30). On the varieties of English and French ''Bildungsroman'', see Moretti.}} Lessons that yield impacts on character development
occur throughout the temporal course of ''Harlot'', as I will illustrate. Thus, the ''prima facie'' case for ''Harlot'' as ''Bildungsroman'' is not negated by the book’s ending with Harry still substantially unformed and the book’s
Omega tale unresolved.

In short, our actually existing, truncated Harlot offers some of the more episodic developmental satisfactions of the ''Bildungsroman'' (as well as the
picaresque). It is more than the incomplete narrative decried by adversarial
critics like John Simon. And not only does ''Harlot'' offer the cornucopia of
vibrant characters and tales suggested by such celebrants as Wilfred Sheed
{{pg|462|463}}
and William H Pritchard.{{efn|See John Simon, Wilfrid Sheed, and William F. Pritchard}} Its tales enthrall in good part because they cohere around phases of Harry’s education and because they gain force as Harry’s development cumulates, even if it does not conclude.{{efn|It also involves, entertains and instructs the reader in some social history as picaresque, a matter to which I’ll briefly return.}}

Space is not available here for an exhaustive accounting of the developmental episodes in the 1300-page ''Harlot'', but discussion of a few examples of such sequences for some of the work’s key developmental threads can substantiate
my argument. I will focus particularly on episodes in the development of Harry Hubbard’s masculine identity—first, his physical courage, second his sexual maturation and, finally, his manliness among men. These are key to the book and to Harry’s development as something like the “tough guy” aspect of writings by and about Mailer.

Harry’s education in physical courage begins with demands from father Cal Hubbard, during a skiing trip, for a manly Harry. When Harry falls on
a ski slope and does not quickly rise, Cal asks, “Will you rise to your feet,
you quitter?” When Harry indicates that he has broken something, Cal relents,
exclaiming “Your father, Carl Hubbard, is a fathead” and “you’re not
the worst kid”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=123-124}}. Harry’s struggle to attain the high
standard of physical courage set by Father Cal is begun.

A second physical challenge of note confronts Harry while rock climbing
“the precipices” with Hugh Tremont “Harlot” Montague. When Hugh leads Harry to a place where “a quick glimpse down . . . proved no easier than standing on the edge of a roof seven stories high that had no railing,”
Harry’s impulse is “to ask Mr. Montague if this was, for certain, the right
place.” Hugh responds, “This climb will test you” and adds that mastering
the test is “[j]ust a matter of learning a new vocabulary”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=147-150}} and a portion, perhaps, of the larger “language of men”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=122}}.
Harry meets the test of the precipices, climbing with increased composure
and confidence toward effective mastery of the new manly “vocabulary.” After the precipices, Harry seldom confronts physical dangers that emanate so much from nature as opposed to other people, but the dangers confronted do often include death. A key encounter with the risk of death involves
Harry’s participation alongside Dix Butler and Cuban anti-Castro forces in the landing on Playa Girón. In Harry’s words, “Adrenaline kept prayer at bay” and “[d]eath was a great temple” before which he “stood at the gate.” Yet Harry plays his role well. Indeed he reports, “I remember letting loose a prodigious whoop”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1139}}. Harry has become a happy warrior.
{{pg|463|464}}
Harry’s sexual development starts late and proceeds slowly and haltingly. There is no talk of High School coitus, no College news of more than some “petting.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=228}} During Company training, the bisexual Rosen and Dix Butler tint the atmosphere around Harry’s sexual development; and early during his Berlin mission Harry has an ambiguous encounter with Dix. He rebuffs an aggressive sexual advance from Dix but images of “Butler’s “knotted buttocks”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=330}} come to him as he approaches climax during his first intercourse, this with a German co-worker named Ingrid. Still, the sex is satisfying: Harry can write that afterwards he “was feeling a good bit better.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=330}} His sex life begins on an essentially heterosexual footing, if not the firmest. Harry’s return from Berlin brings a flowering of romantic and friendly feelings toward Kittredge Gardiner. This blooms most fully in
Harry’s letters to Kittredge from Montevideo station. On a more emphatically
sexual note, the Montevideo mission brings an adultery with Sally Porringer, trysts with many of the ladies of Montevideo’s brothels and fellatio from the Libertad la Lingual, a brothel hermaphrodite distinguished by strong feminine allure and, as it turns out to Harry’s consternation, male genitals.{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=669}} The Miami mission brings Harry intense, well-integrated romantic and sexual experience in the person of Modene Murthy, mistress also
to JFK and mob leader Sam Giancano. Enraptured by Modene’s “sexual lavishness”
{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=796}},Harry comes, he writes, “into the place I had been expecting to enter all my life.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=818}} Beyond the compass of Modene’s thrall, Harry’s
epistolary romance with Kittredge continues. Although sexual fulfillment
with her lies beyond the extant Alpha, it can be read back from the pages of
the extant Omega on Harry and Kittredge—or Harry and Kittredge and mistress Chloe, a waitress who “could enjoy a lonely customer” and who could laugh at her own sexual escapades “with enough good humor to have been watching her own pornographic romp {{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=18-19}}.With Kittredge,

<blockquote>after all our years together, we still flew at each other. Kittredge, indeed, was as fierce as one of those wood-animals with claws and sharp teeth and fine fur that you can never quite tame. At its worst, there were times when I felt like a tomcat in with a raccoon. . . . I’d see God when the lightning flashed and we jolted our souls into one another. Afterward, was tenderness, and the sweetest domestic knowledge of how curious and wonderful we were for one another.{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=19}}</blockquote>
{{pg|464|465}}
In regard to Harry’s education in “manliness among men,” his education
in physical courage is relevant, for the latter typically involves meeting challenges in the company of mentors like Cal and Hugh. However, I stress aspects
of Harry’s learning of his trade that entail dealing in a competent and
dignified manner with his male co-workers at the Company. Here one key challenge appears to be attaining a degree of respect and support from mentors Cal Hubbard and Hugh Montague. Another appears to be averting both the self-destructive sexual passivity of Reed Arnold Rosen and the psychopathic
sexual extroversion of Dix Butler.

The trajectory of social learning and personal development that takes up the most of Mailer’s labor and Harry’s years in ''Harlot’s'' Alpha section involves Harry’s
work relations with William King “Wild Bill” Harvey. Early in Alpha, Harvey is Harry’s Station chief for Berlin Station Mission, and he is the focus of Harry’s activities during the Roman phase of Alpha’s final completed section, its “Afterword.” These work relations with “Wild Bill” provide virtual dramatic bookends to the Alpha’s account of Harry’s Company history, such as Mailer completed it. In the Berlin section of Alpha, Harry’s
drama and development largely consist of battles of wits and will with Harvey
over the secret identity of the insubordinate KU/CLOAKROOM who has made light of a request by Harvey and turns out to be none other than Harry himself.{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=271-278}} The drama is intensified because Harry is assigned
to uncover KU/CLOAKROOM for Harvey, because the cloak room uncovering is tied to the uncovering of the potentially dangerous Soviet agent KU/WILDBOAR and because Harry’s mentors Cal Hubbard and High Montague are antagonists of Harvey, both for their resented class pedigrees and
their opposition to Harvey in Company battles over the question of Kim
Philby—who proves to be the traitor Harvey had intimated.{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=276}} In their give and take with Harvey, Harry and his mentors emerge unscathed, but the contest between Harry and Harvey is rejoined a decade later in Rome.

In the Roman episode, Harry is charged by Company head Dick Helms with cleaning up the “mess” that Helms states that “Harvey is making of Station in Rome.” Harry must enact Helms’ decision to send Harvey “out to pasture.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1268-1269}} When Harry confronts Harvey in Rome, where he has been sent to notify him of the termination of his Roman service, he is threatened by a drunk Harvey who says, pointing a gun “thoughtfully” at Harry,
that his seeming dangerousness is not “an act.” To the contrary, he has been
feeling “a real inclination which goes right down into the most honest part
{{pg|465|466}}
of me to pull that trigger and blow somebody’s name right out of their body.”
{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1268-1273}} True, Harvey next tells Harry “you are relatively safe.” However, he also notes that “[i]f Hugh Montague were present, he “would be a deadman.” Moreover, he plants doubt in Harry’s head about Harlot’s loyalty to the
Company and bids Harry good bye with a head butt that, to use Harry’s words, provides him with a “last gift, a headache to take home with the hangover.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1277}} By Rome, Harry has the toughness to take such “tough guy” behavior in stride.

Although Harlot as ''Bildungsroman'' is principally comprised of the events of Harry’s Alpha manuscript, some parts of Omega are instructively projected back into the year unreached by Alpha. For example, as we have seen, Omega’s references to marital relations between Harry and Kittredge speak rather directly to his “sexual development,” and Rosen’s death and possible suicide may bear a little on the relevance of Rosen’s meaning for Harry. Indeed, Omega suggests to us expectations about how Harry’s tale may have ended, about how the Harry engendered by Mailer in our imaginations might have come to fare in his years beyond those denoted by the extant Omega, about indeed the pattern into which the accounted events of Harry
might ideally fit. At the end of the extant Omega, Harry at his clandestine Moscow halfway house gathers his resolve to unveil and address whatever project Montague might pursue. Montague’s project bears on Harry’s relation to himself, for Harry’s chosen vocation, nurtured both by father Cal
and mentor Montague, is one of patriot and Company man; and Omega intimates that Montague’s purpose may involve work for and against country or Company, or both. Where circumstance and resolve may lead Harry not
only stimulates our imagination about where our imaginatively projected Harry is headed but about what to make of the Harry we already know. Indeed, both the Harry of the extant ''Harlot’s Ghost'' and the Harry of anymore extended saga we might have imagined, is one whose identity centers around issues of masculine identity—physical, sexual, and social. This is a Harry whose identity conflicts a future encounter with Harlot—after all, a father
figure who has been husband to the Mrs. Kittredge Hubbard’s of the final pages of Ghost—would very likely bring to a head. And so Omega highlights main themes in the ''Bildungsroman'' of Harry Hubbard’s education, indeed two ''Bildungsromans''—one on the page and one for our expectation for Harry.

Although I have geared my examples of developmental episodes in ''Harlot''
{{pg|466|467}}
as ''Bildungsroman'' to Harry’s “manly” development, I stress that Harry hardly
becomes a stereotypical Mailerian “tough guy.” Any theme of “toughness” in Mailer’s depiction of Harry’s development is more one of Harry’s mastery of behaviors befitting his dignified adaptation to the rough and tumble world of the U.S. intelligence establishment than it is one of a domineering tough guy. Harry’s development as a man is marked mainly by his armoring himself ''against'' dangers, not by Harry initiating or escalating aggression. To draw on Hemingway, Harry’s “manly development” brings more of the grace under pressure of early Hemingway characters like Nick Adams and Jake
Barnes than of the occasional public belligerence of the late Papa, or of the
middle-aged Mailer. Although Mailer seems to have shifted into an undue sympathy for personal violence in his depictions of certain fictional characters—most notably Croft and Rojack—his portrait of Harry Hubbard is mainly one of a youth’s adaption to a sometimes dangerous world with equanimity. This is so, even though this adaption does draw on the traditional
“manly” virtues. Harry more resembles Nick Adams rising from innocence to a degree of bravery as when in “The Killers,” despite the warning of “the cook,” Nick warns Ole Andreson that two men are coming to execute him,{{efn|The “cook” cautions Nick, when his employer George suggests warning Andreson, “I don’t like it . . . I don’t like any of it” (Hemingway, “The Killers” 286).}} than he does the coldblooded killers themselves or the resolutely long suffering Jack Brennan of “Fifty Grand.”{{efn|Jack suffers his way through a defeat that can hand him “Fifty Grand” for retirement from bets on his opponent but feels “all busted inside” (Hemingway, “Fifty Grand” 326).}} Eventually the warrior, as with Dix at
Playa Girón, he is never as heedless of his own mortality as Manuel in “The
Undefeated,”{{efn|In an attempt to compensate for awkwardly tripping over a cushion thrown honorifically from the stands, Manuel indulges in a last aggravation of his dying kill, hoping it will revive his threat and the crowd’s appreciation. “He stepped close and jammed the sharp peak of the ''muletta'' into
the bull’s damp muzzle” (Hemingway, “The Undefeated” 263).}} nor as coldly self-possessed as the white hunter of “The Short
Happy Life.”{{efn|Hemingway, “The Short Happy Life.” Neither is Hubbard as misogynistic as the hunter Wilson
of “The Short Happy Life” or as the writer-hunter of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” However, he does seem to share something with Wilson and Macomber, who reports just before his demise when he confides in Wilson about that “feeling of happiness before action is going to come” (Hemingway, “The Short Happy Life” 33).}}

In relation to both Hemingway and the Bildungsroman at once, Harlot
has an interesting precedent in another novel that concerns manliness in the
public service amidst a prolonged geopolitical conflict. I refer to Frederick
Marryat’s ''Mr. Midshipman Easy'', with its protagonist’s service in the British
navy and the Napoleonic wars. This is not ostensibly as distinguished a precedent as Great Expectations or ''Lost Illusions''.{{efn|Then again, Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf figure with Hemingway among the celebrants of ''Mr. Midshipman Easy''.}} However Mr. Midshipman
Easy is a fine example of the explicit integration of “manly development”
into the Bildungsroman. Indeed, it is also a fine example of the integrations
of such development into the picaresque; that is, something of a chronicle
of naval and Iberian theaters of the early Napoleonic Wars.{{sfn|Fulford|1836|p=ix-xi}} {{efn|Despite ''Harlot’s'' rather abrupt end to Harry’s social Odyssey, the novel explores sufficient social worlds for ''Harlot'' to offer many of the satisfactions of the picaresque as well, indeed the satisfaction of an exploration of many agency missions and of a chronicle of the CIA over more than a history-packed dozen-plus years. On the relevance of ''Mr. Midshipman Easy'', this is the work of one of Hemingway’s favorite authors, one right up there with Turgenev (Plimpton 958).}}
Thus, attention to ''Easy'' may merit our attention as students of Mailer’s relation
to Hemingway as well as to Mailer as author of ''Harlot'' and portrayer of “tough guys.”
{{pg|467|468}}
The retrospective and anticipatory framing of the central, ''Bildungsromanische''
Alpha portion of Harlot in terms does not much resemble anything in Hemingway. It better resembles the framing of Ralph Ellison’s ''Invisible Man''. Ellison’s protagonist is also in hiding and also frames his own biographical narrative. Indeed, he is doing so “in covert preparation for a more overt action.”{{sfn|Ellison|1952|p=13}} Although this has no focus as sharp as Hugh
“Harlot” Montague, Ellison’s unnamed protagonist is like Harry at the close
of Harlot, one who is in clandestine residence at Moscow’s Hotel Metropole,
gathering his resolve to head off, as Harry puts it, “on a mission whose purpose
I could not name but for the inner knowledge that I knew it.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1279}}

Still, Harry, toward the close of the actually existing ''Harlot'', resembles
Hemingway protagonists at the ends of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and ''For
Whom the Bell Tolls'' in looking forward toward momentous resolutions.
However, in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', these
resolutions come in the form of those protagonists’ own imminent deaths.
Harry’s final posture in Harlot is more extroverted, as well as more hopeful.
Harry looks to a future that may draw the strings of his life together by acting
to affect a mentor of his youth and the success of his vocation in ways
that will affect public as well as personal fates. Harry’s resolve is more clearly
focused than the abstract resolve of Ellison’s invisible man, who has no precise
agenda for action. It differs from the resolve of Hemingway’s Robert
Jordan at the conclusion of ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' because Jordon’s dying
resolution is confined to a final courageous encounter with death, detached
from any larger public purpose than the possible elimination of another Nationalist
or two in Jordon’s final battle fascist forces. It is, with its relative extroversion and public as well as private purpose, at least as “manly.”{{efn|It is also clearer and more public in intent than the resolves that end many an otherwise unresolved Mailerian narrative: O’Shaughnessy on his way to Yucatan at the end of ''The Deer Park'', Rojack off to Vegas at the end of ''An American Dream'', Menenhetet and little Meni off across the centuries at the conclusion of ''Ancient Evenings''. Perhaps it is not clearer or more public minded than Gilmore’s embrace of execution as a move toward prisoner autonomy in the face of legal obstacles to a public contrition via public execution.(Hicks) However, it is more outwardly oriented,
more extroverted. Of course, Harry Hubbard, as a perennially youthful and refreshed
American Adam can never be more than a momentary victim of his past or circumstance and must look ever hopefully forward (Whalen-Bridge).}}

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

===Citations===
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Dickens |first=Charles |date=1850 |title=David Copperfield |location=Philadelphia |publisher=T. B. Peterson|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickens |first=Charles |authormask=1 |date=1863 |title=Great Expectations|location=Mobile |publisher=S.H. Goetzel & Co |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Ellison |first=Ralph |date=1952 |title=Invisible Man |location=New York |publisher=Random House|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fulford |first=Tim |date=1836|chapter=Introduction|title=Mr. Midshipman Easy |location=By Captain Frederick Marryat. New York |publisher=Signet Books|pages=v-xiii|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1940 |title=ForWhom the Bell Tolls |location=New York |publisher=Scribner’s|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |authormask=1 |date=1938 |title=The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=New York |publisher=Scribner’s|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |title=The Mailerian Narrative: Structural Dynamics in a Poetics of Mailer’s Fiction |url= |journal=The Mailer Review ||issue= 3.1|date= 2009|pages= 397-413|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |location=New York |publisher=G. P. Putnam’s Sons.|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1991 |title=Harlot’s Ghost. |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Marryat |first=Captain Frederick|date=2001 |title=Mr.Midshipman Easy |location=New York |publisher=Signet Books|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Moretti |first=Franco |date=1987 |title=The Way of the World: the Bildungsroman in European Culture |location=London |publisher=Verso|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Pritchard |first=William H. |title=Mailer’s Main Event |url= |journal=The Hudson Review ||issue= 45.1|date= 1992|pages= 149-57|ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Simon |first=John |date=September 29, 1991 |title=The Company They Keep.” Rev. of ''Harlot’s Ghost'', by Norman Mailer |work=New York Times Book Review |location=late ed., sec 7:1 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Whalen-Bridge |first=John |date=1996 |title=The Myth of the American Adam in Late Mailer |journal=Connotations |issue=5.2-3 |date= 1995-1996|pages= 304-21|ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway

2025-04-05T01:56:57Z

JKilchenmann: first two pages plus works cited

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway

2025-04-01T01:02:09Z

JKilchenmann: add byline

User talk:Grlucas

2025-03-30T23:04:09Z

JKilchenmann: /* Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" */

User talk:Grlucas

2025-03-30T23:03:07Z

JKilchenmann: /* Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" */ new section

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of “Totalitarianism”

2025-03-30T22:54:06Z

JKilchenmann: fix typographical errors

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
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{{Working}} 
{{Byline|last=Mantzaris|first=Alexandros|abstract= An examination of Mailer's seemingly paradoxical position of "Left Conservatism" that may have its basis in certain mechanisms contained within the problematic concept of "totalitarianism."}}
{{dc|dc=N}}ORMAN MAILER'S SEEMINGLY PARADOXICAL POSITION of "Left Conservatism" may have its basis in certain mechanisms contained within the problematic
concept of "totalitarianism." I suggest that there are two aspects to the broader problematic of totalitarianism. The first aspect has to do with what we could refer to as the historical phenomenon of totalitarianism. This phenomenon
is represented by certain political regimes and/or types of sociopolitical organizations called totalitarian, to which are attributed a number
of shared characteristics such as rule by a single party, an official ideology, and a monopoly of mass communications. From Mailer's slightly different
perspective, such totalitarian regimes are thought of as suppressing the past, suppressing myth, and imposing a cowardly conformity on their subjects.
Here, in short, we find the view of "a system" exhibiting certain characteristics. There is also, however, another facet to the totalitarian problematic having to do with the discourse of totalitarianism itself. From this slightly diverging angle one would observe that the discourse of totalitarianism is one whose very logic confuses political "sides" and therefore destabilizes "standard" political antagonisms. What we have here is a convergence of political
opposites, the plasticity of political/ideological oppositions, and a profound ideological ambivalence.

{{pg|337|338}}

Not everyone would readily accept the central thesis of totalitarianism's theorists, namely that the former USSR and Nazi Germany can be put in the same category. And, naturally, even fewer would accept that American democratic capitalism can itself be implicated in such a problematic category—yet, of course, that is what people like Mailer never tired of arguing.

Now, when Mailer critics discuss totalitarianism they usually refer to what I called the "phenomenon" of totalitarianism—that is, to a "system" with certain characteristics. Although there is much to be said in this area, I believe it is equally productive to approach totalitarianism as a discourse exhibiting certain paradoxical properties. In what sense is it helpful, then, to think of totalitarianism not just as a system but in the way I am suggesting—as a discourse perpetuating the political confusion that produces it in the first place? First of all, the view of totalitarianism as political confusion allows us to confirm that Mailer's Left Conservatism does not surface for the first time in ''The Armies of the Night'', although it is there the term first appears, nor does it properly belong to Mailer's 1960s work only. Left Conservatism, in other words, is not a later stage in Mailer's ideological
development. It is there from the start, in the uneasy relationship of the author of ''The Naked and the Dead'' to that book's most fascinating characters, Cummings and Croft, both of whom are fascists.

Critics have discussed this tension, starting with ''The Naked and the Dead'' as well as its development in Mailer's later works, in terms that are primarily
moral, philosophical, aesthetic. Joseph Wenke, for example, has argued in his highly interesting study:

<blockquote>[I]t is clear that until Mailer was able to write "The White Negro," totalitarianism was a particularly intimidating and intimate enemy of his art. In addition to representing an external political threat, it presented itself to Mailer as an immediate ''aesthetic'' problem that insinuated itself into the very creation of his first three novels.{{sfn|Wenke|1987|p=8}}(emphasis mine)
</blockquote>

The problem Wenke refers to is, precisely, the profound appeal that characters such as Croft and Cummings held for Mailer even as he was placing them on the side of the "heavies." And, in general, I think it is fair to say that this tension has been mostly discussed in terms similar to Wenke's. Indeed I sometimes have the sense that the political field has to be preserved intact in
{{pg|338|339}}
such critical efforts, as a sort of stable ground from which Mailer's course can then be observed and appraised—so that, for example, in his opening to the
violent (a)morality of Croft, Mailer can be said to be moving "to the Right." This approach is somewhat problematic for, in my view, the problem or paradox here is first of all political in nature. Moral and other considerations follow. That is, it seems to me wrong to try and retain the political as a stable reference point, which can then help us explain aesthetic problems and/or moral ambiguities, because the origin of the ambiguity lies with politics and ideology.

The argument, then, is that when one is working within the framework of the discourse on totalitarianism, one is bound to activate a host of paradoxical
political/ideological effects (or, perhaps, side-effects), which are conducive to the development of ambivalent and problematic stances such as Left Conservatism. There are effects we could discuss. To avoid too protracted an analysis, however, I have isolated two, of which I would like to say a little more in this essay. So, to recapitulate, totalitarianism is a discourse which ultimately functions to undermine standard political oppositions and which, therefore, causes great political and ideological confusion. When working within the framework of this discourse one is bound to become implicated in a number of paradoxes, such as (1) the force one sets in opposition to totalitarianism (that is to a totalitarian "system") often turns out to be itself totalitarian or potentially totalitarian; (2) within the context of a specific political/ideological antagonism, ''opposition'' to may finally be indistinguishable
from ''support'' for whatever it is one is ostensibly opposing. Or, perhaps even more paradoxically, one's political ends may be better served by supporting one's political opponent: the best way of effectively opposing one's opponents may finally be to support them.

With totalitarianism ''qua'' political confusion as our guide, then, we can attempt to tackle some of the salient curiosities in the development of Mailer's ideology, which seem to me to have been often met with a sort of embarrassed silence. One such very interesting curiosity was already noted by Diana Trilling in her seminal, early essay on Mailer's work:

<blockquote>[H]ad Mailer been of their period [i.e., that of D.H. Lawrence and W.B.Yeats] instead of ours, he would have similarly avoided the predicament of presenting us with a hero not easily distinguishable from his named political enemy. He would have been</blockquote>

{{pg|339|340}}

<blockquote>able to evade the political consequences of consigning the future of civilization to a personal authority morally identical with the dark reaction from which it is supposed to rescue us. Or, to put
the matter in even cruder terms, he would not have exposed himself to our ridicule for offering us a God who is a fascist. {{sfn|Trilling|1971|p=127}}</blockquote>

I have not read many critics trying to follow the lead offered by Trilling here and to explain, if Mailer's God is indeed "a fascist," how we might be able to justify such a rather unexpected reversal? Yet there are places in Mailer's work where this ''political'' exchange with fascism is more than obvious. The following example I take from "The White Negro," where we are told:

<blockquote>[I]t is possible, since the hipster lives with his hatred, that many of them are the material for an élite of storm troopers ready to follow the first truly magnetic leader whose view of mass murder is phrased in a language which reaches their emotions.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=355}} </blockquote>

The first thing to note is that the very terms used by Mailer ("storm troopers," "magnetic leader," "mass murder") take us beyond the field of morality and even aesthetics and points us clearly in the direction of organized politics. And I think that the way, finally, to explain such ironies is precisely with reference to the first paradox I spoke about. Namely, the idea that when one works within the totalitarian discourse, the force one posits as a counterweight to the dreaded totalitarian system will often turn out to be itself totalitarian
or potentially totalitarian.

The work of Georges Sorel (1847–1922), a French theorist of anarcho-syndicalism, is important for the proper understanding of our second paradox. ''Réflexions sur la Violence'', his best-known work to which I will refer, was published in 1908. For the sake of brevity I would not like to go into the details of what I hold to be Sorel's own "Left Conservatism." Instead I have chosen a few quotations, which will give an idea of the basis for the comparison to Mailer. The first comes from an essay on Sorel, written by Isaiah Berlin:

<blockquote>Sorel remains, as he was in his lifetime, unclassified; claimed and repudiated both by the right and by the left. . . . He appeared to</blockquote>

{{pg|340|341}}

<blockquote>
have no fixed position. His critics often accused him of pursuing an erratic course.{{sfn|Berlin|1979|p=296, 297}}
</blockquote>

I think that both the lack of political "fixity" but also, all the more so in fact, the idea of an interstitial position between "the right and the left" clearly points us in the direction of Left Conservatism. The second extract comes from the English author and painter Wyndham Lewis, according to whom

<blockquote>
Georges Sorel is the key to all contemporary political thought. Sorel is, or was, a highly unstable and equivocal figure. He seems composed of a crowd of warring personalities, sometimes one being in the ascendent [sic], sometimes another, and which in any case he has not been able, or has not cared, to control. {{sfn|Lewis|1989|p=119}} </blockquote>

When I first read the above what instantly came to my mind was Mailer's description of his own personality in ''The Armies of the Night'', where we read:

<blockquote>
[T]he architecture of [Mailer's] personality bore resemblance to some provincial cathedral which warring orders of the church might have designed separately over several centuries, the particular cathedral falling into the hands of one architect, then his enemy.{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=28}} </blockquote>

Clearly, the two descriptions are nearly identical. Sorel's "warring personalities" find their near-perfect equivalent in the "warring orders" of the church
of Mailer's personality. And I hope it is clear how the volatility of both personalities might be relevant to constructs such as Left Conservatism. Beyond the obvious resemblance suggested by the above extracts, it is possible to argue that Mailer often appears to share with Sorel a marked hostility towards what we perhaps could call social democracy but might be better off defining more carefully as social compromise, social peace and what Mailer has called politics as property.{{efn|Mailer discusses politics as property in Part Two, Chapter Six, of ''Miami and the Siege of Chicago''.}}

In her discussion of "In the Red Light,"{{efn|Mailer's essay is included in ''Cannibals and Christians.''}} Jean Radford notes that while characterizing the support for Goldwater in rather negative terms, "Mailer is able to admit his own excitement at the thought of Goldwater's victory." {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=69}} She attributes this, in part, to what she calls Mailer's "own ver-

{{pg|341|342}}

sion of '''politique du pire'"'' (and with this idea of a ''politique du pire'' we enter the heart of our second paradox). "Johnson" she writes "will only blur the reality of America's conflicts whereas Goldwater will polarize America and out of that polarization some hope for the revolution might come." {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=69-70}} What is noteworthy here is the preference for an energetic, violent opposition, the prospect of which is better embodied, for Mailer, in the Goldwater candidacy. A variation on this motif is the idea from the ''Presidential Papers''{{efn|See the "Prefatory Paper" entitled "Heroes and Leaders."}} that for the physical body as well as the body politic, an "acute" disease is preferable to a "faceless" one. According to Sorel, as he explains his own notion of ''politique du pire'', the success of a Marxian "catastrophic" revolution—his ideal—requires that the capitalist system be functioning properly up to the moment of revolt. In turn, this proper function demands an openly predatory middle class brutally and unapologetically exploiting a proletariat, which in response becomes progressively more militant. Thus, Sorel writes that the revolutionary doctrine

<blockquote>
will evidently be inapplicable if the middle class and the proletariat do not oppose each other implacably, with all the forces at their disposal; the more ardently capitalist the middle class is, the more the proletariat is full of a warlike spirit and confident of its revolutionary strength, the more certain will be the success of the proletarian movement.{{sfn|Sorel|1941|p=86}} </blockquote>

One of the more interesting elements in Sorel's theory is that capitalism's progress towards its self-dissolution appears as a sort of "unconscious" historical process:

<blockquote>
It might . . . be said that capitalism plays a part analogous to that attributed by [Eduard von] Hartmann to the Unconscious in nature, since it prepares the coming of social reforms which it did not intend to produce.{{sfn|Sorel|1941|p=85}}</blockquote>

Now, I don't think that the "Unconscious" Sorel has in mind here is quite the same as the Freudian unconscious. In fact, I might as well admit that I may be "lost in translation" since Sorel obviously uses a French translation of a German term which T. E. Hulme, the British translator of ''Reflection'', renders as "Unconscious." In any case, I think that for the Mailer critic this idea

{{pg|342|343}}

of an unconscious, natural process that is somehow undermined by social peace and compromise is a very interesting one indeed. So for Sorel any adulteration
of the implacable antagonism between the middle and working classes acts as a disruption of an unconscious development:

<blockquote>
If . . . the middle class, led astray by the ''chatter'' of the preachers of ethics and sociology . . . seek to correct the ''abuses'' of economics, and wish to break with the barbarism of their predecessors, then one part of the forces which were to further the development of capitalism is employed in hindering it, an arbitrary and irrational element is introduced, and the future of the world becomes completely indeterminate.{{sfn|Sorel|1941|p=87}} </blockquote>

Sorel refers to the state resulting from such "irrationality" as "decadent" and "degenerate," and thus we have another clear parallel with Mailer's idea of "the plague," as in both cases we observe an attenuation of fundamental and essential conflicts.

My own extrapolation from Sorel's idea is as follows. Someone acting in such a context and with such an understanding of how things work, he offers: would they not possibly come to believe that (please remember our second paradox) the best strategy of attaining their goals might be propping up the enemy? And is exactly this not an important part of Mailer's strategy in the whole Goldwater affair and beyond? I am referring to all those ideas running through his 1960s work, about restoring a true Conservatism to its lost potency, so that a vital and drastic confrontation with the Left can be ensured.
What is, perhaps, the best example of the paradoxical positions resulting from such an equally paradoxical attitude can be found in Mailer's speech at the debate with William Buckley, Jr. There, what we might call a "freedom-loving" brand of Conservatism is pitted against a "Totalitarian" one and the Cold War itself is denounced as a sort of senseless distraction from another war that would be "welcome": "the war which has meaning, that great and mortal debate between rebel and conservative where each would argue the other is an agent of the Devil." {{sfn|Mailer|1976|p=187-8}}

Sorel's own solution for reinforcing the essential antagonism between the middle and working classes is the employment of proletarian violence. The social peacemakers' advances, we are told, must be met with "black ingratitude" and blows. The paradox here is that such violence will prevent more

{{pg|343|344}}

virulent and abhorrent violence on a grander scale. For a revolution erupting in the midst of capitalist decadence would, according to Sorel, lead either to a regression to barbarism and/or anarchy, or to "the dictatorship of the
proletariat." The latter represents Sorel's worst nightmare, since by this term he understands a revolution led by his unconscionable opponents, the "parliamentary"
Socialists, and that revolution would be destined to repeat the worst excesses of the French Revolution.

Thus we are brought to the final resemblance between Mailer and Sorel, the idea that a form of limited violence can work to prevent what may be properly called "totalitarian" violence, which is organized violence on a massive scale employing the resources of the State. In fact, Sorel goes so far as to propose that, to avoid misunderstandings, we call all violence of this second type "force" and retain the term "violence" for all oppositional (notably, of course, proletarian) violent acts:

<blockquote>
Sometimes the terms ''force'' and ''violence'' are used in speaking of acts of authority, sometimes in speaking of acts of revolt . . . I think it would be better to adopt a terminology which would give rise to no ambiguity, and that the term ''violence'' should be employed only for acts of revolt; we should say, therefore, that the object of force is to impose a certain social order in which the minority governs, while violence tends to the destruction of that order. The middle class have used force since the beginning of modern times, while the proletariat now reacts against the middle class and against the State by violence.{{sfn|Sorel|1941|p=195}}
</blockquote>

This distinction between "force" and "violence" is one Mailer essentially shared with Sorel.

Let us, briefly, recapitulate our main points. Totalitarianism can be approached not only as "a system" but also as a discourse whose logic confuses political sides. A thinker operating within the framework of this discourse is bound, by dint of its logic, to get entangled within a certain political paradoxology,
which is conducive to the formulation of highly idiosyncratic positions such as Mailer's "Left Conservatism." Indeed our central preoccupation throughout has been with the question, "How is a Left Conservative produced?" In response to this question we proposed a principle and highlighted what might initially appear as a certain conceptual "mech-

{{pg|344|345}}

anism." The principle is that opposition to totalitarianism will often turn out to be itself, ''de facto'', totalitarian or potentially totalitarian. Between the two opposed "totalitarianisms," then, the distinction between Left and Right will tend to be attenuated if not erased. The "mechanism" we termed, with the help of Jean Radford's old but still very interesting study on Mailer, the ''politique du pire''.

The ''politique du pire'', being a policy (and hence a mechanism), could be initially approached in tactical or strategic terms as the idea that the tactical aggravation of oppression, exploitation, conflict (but therefore also the preservation in good shape of one's opponent) will bring a strategic goal of revolution even closer. However, on closer inspection it turns out that, in the case of both Mailer and Sorel, whatever tactical or strategic deliberations might there be, the "mechanism" also actually conceals a principle. In Mailer's characteristic terms, acute, inflammatory diseases are healthier than lingering, silent ones. The metaphor points to a rather complex economy of violence. We dealt with one of its facets, the opposition of subjective to objective violence. Placated once, subjective, visible, symptomatic violence feeds, through accumulation, into objective or better still, in our case, "totalitarian"
violence. However, the two principles here interlock. The bearer of liberated subjective violence, the hipster, is himself potentially amenable
to the call of a "magnetic leader" with visions of "mass murder." We are still in the cycle of "totalitarianism."

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite journal |last=Berlin |first=Isaiah |title=Georges Sorel|date=1979 |journal=Against the Current |location=London |publisher=Hogarth Press|pages=296-332. Print. |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lewis |first=Wyndham |date=1989 |title=The Art of Being Ruled. |location=1926. Santa Rosa |publisher=Black Sparrow Press. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title=The Armies of the Night. |location=New York |publisher=Signet Books. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1969 |title=In the Red Light.|journal=Cannibals and Christians.|location= London |publisher=Sphere Books
|pages=20-65. Print. |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1969 |title=Miami and the Siege of Chicago. |location=Harmondsworth |publisher=Penguin. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1976 |title=The Presidential Papers |location=London |publisher=Panther. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.|location= Advertisements for Myself. New York |publisher=G.P. Putnam's Sons
|pages=337-358. Print. |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Radford |first=Jean |date=1975 |title=Norman Mailer: A Critical Study |location=London |publisher=Macmillan. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Sorel |first=Georges |date=1941 |title=Reflections On Violence. |location=Trans. T.E. Hulme. New York |publisher=Peter Smith. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Trilling |first=Diana |title=The Moral Radicalism of Norman Mailer. |journal=Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work
|location=Ed. Robert Lucid. Boston |publisher=Little, Brown & Co.|date=1971 |pages=108-36. Print|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Wenke |first=Joseph |date=1987 |title=Mailer's America |location=Hanover |publisher=University Press of New England. Print.|ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}
{{Review}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer's Left Conservatism and the Problematic of "Totalitarianism"}}

[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of “Totalitarianism”

2025-03-30T22:04:40Z

JKilchenmann: assorted cleanup of quotation marks and adding category

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 
{{Byline|last=Mantzaris|first=Alexandros|abstract= An examination of Mailer’s seemingly paradoxical position of "Left Conservatism" that may have its basis in certain mechanisms contained within the problematic concept of "totalitarianism."}}
{{dc|dc=N}}ORMAN MAILER'S SEEMINGLY PARADOXICAL POSITION of "Left Conservatism" may have its basis in certain mechanisms contained within the problematic
concept of "totalitarianism." I suggest that there are two aspects to the broader problematic of totalitarianism. The first aspect has to do with what we could refer to as the historical phenomenon of totalitarianism. This phenomenon
is represented by certain political regimes and/or types of sociopolitical organizations called totalitarian, to which are attributed a number
of shared characteristics such as rule by a single party, an official ideology, and a monopoly of mass communications. From Mailer's slightly different
perspective, such totalitarian regimes are thought of as suppressing the past, suppressing myth, and imposing a cowardly conformity on their subjects.
Here, in short, we find the view of "a system" exhibiting certain characteristics. There is also, however, another facet to the totalitarian problematic having to do with the discourse of totalitarianism itself. From this slightly diverging angle one would observe that the discourse of totalitarianism is one whose very logic confuses political "sides" and therefore destabilizes "standard" political antagonisms. What we have here is a convergence of political
opposites, the plasticity of political/ideological oppositions, and a profound ideological ambivalence.

{{pg|337|338}}

Not everyone would readily accept the central thesis of totalitarianism's theorists, namely that the former USSR and Nazi Germany can be put in the same category. And, naturally, even fewer would accept that American democratic capitalism can itself be implicated in such a problematic category—yet, of course, that is what people like Mailer never tired of arguing.

Now, when Mailer critics discuss totalitarianism they usually refer to what I called the "phenomenon" of totalitarianism—that is, to a "system" with
certain characteristics. Although there is much to be said in this area, I believe it is equally productive to approach totalitarianism as a discourse exhibiting
certain paradoxical properties. In what sense is it helpful, then, to think of totalitarianism not just as a system but in the way I am suggesting—as a discourse perpetuating the political confusion that produces it in the first place? First of all, the view of totalitarianism as political confusion allows us to confirm that Mailer’s Left conservatism does not surface for the first time in ''The Armies of the Night'', although it is there the term first appears, nor does it properly belong to Mailer’s 1960s work only. Left Conservatism, in other words, is not a later stage in Mailer’s ideological
development. It is there from the start, in the uneasy relationship of the author of ''The Naked and the Dead'' to that book's most fascinating characters, Cummings and Croft, both of whom are fascists.

Critics have discussed this tension, starting with ''The Naked and the Dead'' as well as its development in Mailer's later works, in terms that are primarily
moral, philosophical, aesthetic. Joseph Wenke, for example, has argued in his highly interesting study:

<blockquote>[I]t is clear that until Mailer was able to write "The White Negro," totalitarianism was a particularly intimidating and intimate enemy of his art. In addition to representing an external political threat, it presented itself to Mailer as an immediate aesthetic problem that insinuated itself into the very creation of his first three novels.{{sfn|Wenke|1987|p=8}}(emphasis mine)
</blockquote>

The problem Wenke refers to is, precisely, the profound appeal that characters such as Croft and Cummings held for Mailer even as he was placing them on the side of the "heavies." And, in general, I think it is fair to say that this tension has been mostly discussed in terms similar to Wenke’s. Indeed I sometimes have the sense that the political field has to be preserved intact in
{{pg|338|339}}
such critical efforts, as a sort of stable ground from which Mailer’s course can then be observed and appraised—so that, for example, in his opening to the
violent (a)morality of Croft, Mailer can be said to be moving "to the Right." This approach is somewhat problematic for, in my view, the problem or paradox here is first of all political in nature. Moral and other considerations follow. That is, it seems to me wrong to try and retain the political as a stable reference point, which can then help us explain aesthetic problems and/or moral ambiguities, because the origin of the ambiguity lies with politics and ideology.

The argument, then, is that when one is working within the framework of the discourse on totalitarianism, one is bound to activate a host of paradoxical
political/ideological effects (or, perhaps, side-effects), which are conducive to the development of ambivalent and problematic stances such as Left Conservatism. There are effects we could discuss. To avoid too protracted an analysis, however, I have isolated two, of which I would like to say a little more in this essay. So, to recapitulate, totalitarianism is a discourse which ultimately functions to undermine standard political oppositions and which, therefore, causes great political and ideological confusion. When working within the framework of this discourse one is bound to become implicated in a number of paradoxes, such as (1) the force one sets in opposition to totalitarianism(that is to a totalitarian "system") often turns out to be itself totalitarian or potentially totalitarian; (2) within the context of a specific political/ideological antagonism, ''opposition'' to may finally be indistinguishable
from ''support'' for whatever it is one is ostensibly opposing. Or, perhaps even more paradoxically, one’s political ends may be better served by supporting one's political opponent: the best way of effectively opposing one’s opponents may finally be to support them.

With totalitarianism ''qua'' political confusion as our guide, then, we can attempt to tackle some of the salient curiosities in the development of Mailer’s ideology, which seem to me to have been often met with a sort of embarrassed silence. One such very interesting curiosity was already noted by Diana Trilling in her seminal, early essay on Mailer’s work:

<blockquote>[H]ad Mailer been of their period [i.e., that of D.H. Lawrence and W.B.Yeats] instead of ours, he would have similarly avoided the predicament of presenting us with a hero not easily distinguishable from his named political enemy. He would have been</blockquote>

{{pg|339|340}}

<blockquote>able to evade the political consequences of consigning the future of civilization to a personal authority morally identical with the dark reaction from which it is supposed to rescue us. Or, to put
the matter in even cruder terms, he would not have exposed himself to our ridicule for offering us a God who is a fascist. {{sfn|Trilling|1971|p=127}}</blockquote>

I have not read many critics trying to follow the lead offered by Trilling here and to explain, if Mailer's God is indeed "a fascist," how we might be able to justify such a rather unexpected reversal? Yet there are places in Mailer's work where this ''political'' exchange with fascism is more than obvious. The following example I take from "The White Negro," where we are told:

<blockquote>[I]t is possible, since the hipster lives with his hatred, that many of them are the material for an élite of storm troopers ready to follow the first truly magnetic leader whose view of mass murder is phrased in a language which reaches their emotions.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=355}} </blockquote>

The first thing to note is that the very terms used by Mailer ("storm troopers," "magnetic leader," "mass murder") take us beyond the field of morality and even aesthetics and points us clearly in the direction of organized politics. And I think that the way, finally, to explain such ironies is precisely with reference to the first paradox I spoke about. Namely, the idea that when one works within the totalitarian discourse, the force one posits as a counterweight to the dreaded totalitarian system will often turn out to be itself totalitarian
or potentially totalitarian.

The work of Georges Sorel (1847–1922), a French theorist of anarcho-syndicalism, is important for the proper understanding of our second paradox. ''Réflexions sur la Violence'', his best-known work to which I will refer, was published in 1908. For the sake of brevity I would not like to go into the details of what I hold to be Sorel’s own "Left Conservatism." Instead I have chosen a few quotations, which will give an idea of the basis for the comparison to Mailer. The first comes from an essay on Sorel, written by Isaiah Berlin:

<blockquote>Sorel remains, as he was in his lifetime, unclassified; claimed and repudiated both by the right and by the left. . . . He appeared to</blockquote>

{{pg|340|341}}

<blockquote>
have no fixed position. His critics often accused him of pursuing an erratic course.{{sfn|Berlin|1979|p=296, 297}}
</blockquote>

I think that both the lack of political "fixity" but also, all the more so in fact, the idea of an interstitial position between "the right and the left" clearly points us in the direction of Left Conservatism. The second extract comes from the English author and painter Wyndham Lewis, according to whom

<blockquote>
Georges Sorel is the key to all contemporary political thought. Sorel is, or was, a highly unstable and equivocal figure. He seems composed of a crowd of warring personalities, sometimes one being in the ascendent [sic], sometimes another, and which in any case he has not been able, or has not cared, to control. {{sfn|Lewis|1989|p=119}} </blockquote>

When I first read the above what instantly came to my mind was Mailer’s description of his own personality in ''The Armies of the Night'', where we read:

<blockquote>
[T]he architecture of [Mailer’s] personality bore resemblance to some provincial cathedral which warring orders of the church might have designed separately over several centuries, the particular cathedral falling into the hands of one architect, then his enemy.{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=28}} </blockquote>

Clearly, the two descriptions are nearly identical. Sorel’s "warring personalities" find their near-perfect equivalent in the "warring orders" of the church
of Mailer’s personality. And I hope it is clear how the volatility of both personalities might be relevant to constructs such as Left Conservatism. Beyond the obvious resemblance suggested by the above extracts, it is possible to argue that Mailer often appears to share with Sorel a marked hostility towards what we perhaps could call social democracy but might be better off defining more carefully as social compromise, social peace and what Mailer has called politics as property.{{efn|Mailer discusses politics as property in Part Two, Chapter Six, of ''Miami and the Siege of Chicago''.}}

In her discussion of "In the Red Light,"{{efn|Mailer’s essay is included in ''Cannibals and Christians.''.}} Jean Radford notes that while characterizing the support for Goldwater in rather negative terms, "Mailer is able to admit his own excitement at the thought of Goldwater’s victory." {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=69}} She attributes this, in part, to what she calls Mailer’s "own ver-

{{pg|341|342}}

sion of '''politique du pire'"'' (and with this idea of a ''politique du pire'' we enter the heart of our second paradox). "Johnson" she writes "will only blur the reality of America’s conflicts whereas Goldwater will polarize America and out of that polarization some hope for the revolution might come." {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=69-70}} What is noteworthy here is the preference for an energetic, violent opposition, the prospect of which is better embodied, for Mailer, in the Goldwater candidacy. A variation on this motif is the idea from the ''Presidential Papers''{{efn|See the "Prefatory Paper" entitled "Heroes and Leaders."}} that for the physical body as well as the body politic, an "acute" disease is preferable to a "faceless" one. According to Sorel, as he explains his own notion of ''politique du pire'', the success of a Marxian "catastrophic" revolution—his ideal—requires that the capitalist system be functioning properly up to the moment of revolt. In turn, this proper function demands an openly predatory middle class brutally and unapologetically exploiting a proletariat, which in response becomes progressively more militant. Thus, Sorel writes that the revolutionary doctrine

<blockquote>
will evidently be inapplicable if the middle class and the proletariat do not oppose each other implacably, with all the forces at their disposal; the more ardently capitalist the middle class is, the more the proletariat is full of a warlike spirit and confident of its revolutionary strength, the more certain will be the success of the proletarian movement.{{sfn|Sorel|1941|p=86}} </blockquote>

One of the more interesting elements in Sorel’s theory is that capitalism’s progress towards its self-dissolution appears as a sort of "unconscious" historical process:

<blockquote>
It might . . . be said that capitalism plays a part analogous to that attributed by [Eduard von] Hartmann to the Unconscious in nature, since it prepares the coming of social reforms which it did not intend to produce.{{sfn|Sorel|1941|p=85}}</blockquote>

Now, I don’t think that the "Unconscious" Sorel has in mind here is quite the same as the Freudian unconscious. In fact, I might as well admit that I may be "lost in translation" since Sorel obviously uses a French translation of a German term which T. E. Hulme, the British translator of ''Reflection'', renders as "Unconscious." In any case, I think that for the Mailer critic this idea

{{pg|342|343}}

of an unconscious, natural process that is somehow undermined by social peace and compromise is a very interesting one indeed. So for Sorel any adulteration
of the implacable antagonism between the middle and working classes acts as a disruption of an unconscious development:

<blockquote>
If . . . the middle class, led astray by the ''chatter'' of the preachers of ethics and sociology . . . seek to correct the abuses of economics, and wish to break with the barbarism of their predecessors, then one part of the forces which were to further the development of capitalism is employed in hindering it, an arbitrary and
irrational element is introduced, and the future of the world becomes completely indeterminate.{{sfn|Sorel|1941|p=87}} </blockquote>

Sorel refers to the state resulting fromsuch "irrationality" as "decadent" and "degenerate," and thus we have another clear parallel with Mailer’s idea of "the plague," as in both cases we observe an attenuation of fundamental and essential conflicts.

My own extrapolation from Sorel's idea is as follows. Someone acting in such a context and with such an understanding of how things work, he offers: would they not possibly come to believe that (please remember our second paradox) the best strategy of attaining their goals might be propping up the enemy? And is exactly this not an important part of Mailer’s strategy in the whole Goldwater affair and beyond? I am referring to all those ideas running through his 1960s work, about restoring a true Conservatism to its lost potency, so that a vital and drastic confrontation with the Left can be ensured.
What is, perhaps, the best example of the paradoxical positions resulting from such an equally paradoxical attitude can be found in Mailer’s speech at the debate with William Buckley, Jr. There, what we might call a "freedom-loving" brand of Conservatism is pitted against a "Totalitarian" one and the Cold War itself is denounced as a sort of senseless distraction from another war that would be "welcome": "the war which has meaning, that great and mortal debate between rebel and conservative where each would argue the other is an agent of the Devil." {{sfn|Mailer|1976|p=187-8}}

Sorel's own solution for reinforcing the essential antagonism between the middle and working classes is the employment of proletarian violence. The social peacemakers' advances, we are told, must be met with "black ingratitude" and blows. The paradox here is that such violence will prevent more

{{pg|343|344}}

virulent and abhorrent violence on a grander scale. For a revolution erupting in the midst of capitalist decadence would, according to Sorel, lead either to a regression to barbarism and/or anarchy, or to "the dictatorship of the
proletariat." The latter represents Sorel's worst nightmare, since by this term he understands a revolution led by his unconscionable opponents, the "parliamentary"
Socialists, and that revolution would be destined to repeat the worst excesses of the French Revolution.

Thus we are brought to the final resemblance between Mailer and Sorel, the idea that a form of limited violence can work to prevent what may be properly called "totalitarian" violence, which is organized violence on a massive scale employing the resources of the State. In fact, Sorel goes so far as to propose that, to avoid misunderstandings, we call all violence of this second type "force" and retain the term "violence" for all oppositional (notably, of course, proletarian) violent acts:

<blockquote>
Sometimes the terms ''force'' and ''violence'' are used in speaking of acts of authority, sometimes in speaking of acts of revolt . . . I think it would be better to adopt a terminology which would give rise to no ambiguity, and that the term violence should be employed only for acts of revolt; we should say, therefore, that the object of force is to impose a certain social order in which the minority governs, while violence tends to the destruction of that order. The middle class have used force since the beginning of modern times, while the proletariat now reacts against the middle class and against the State by violence.{{sfn|Sorel|1941|p=195}}
</blockquote>

This distinction between "force" and "violence" is one Mailer essentially shared with Sorel.

Let us, briefly, recapitulate our main points. Totalitarianism can be approached not only as "a system" but also as a discourse whose logic confuses political sides. A thinker operating within the framework of this discourse is bound, by dint of its logic, to get entangled within a certain political paradoxology,
which is conducive to the formulation of highly idiosyncratic positions such as Mailer’s "Left Conservatism." Indeed our central preoccupation throughout has been with the question, "How is a Left Conservative produced?" In response to this question we proposed a principle and highlighted what might initially appear as a certain conceptual "mech-

{{pg|344|345}}

anism." The principle is that opposition to totalitarianism will often turn out to be itself, ''de facto'', totalitarian or potentially totalitarian. Between the two opposed "totalitarianisms," then, the distinction between Left and Right will tend to be attenuated if not erased. The "mechanism" we termed, with the help of Jean Radford’s old but still very interesting study on Mailer, the ''politique du pire''.

The ''politique du pire'', being a policy (and hence a mechanism), could be initially approached in tactical or strategic terms as the idea that the tactical aggravation of oppression, exploitation, conflict (but therefore also the preservation in good shape of one’s opponent) will bring a strategic goal of revolution even closer. However, on closer inspection it turns out that, in the case of both Mailer and Sorel, whatever tactical or strategic deliberations might there be, the "mechanism" also actually conceals a principle. In Mailer’s characteristic terms, acute, inflammatory diseases are healthier than lingering, silent ones. The metaphor points to a rather complex economy of violence. We dealt with one of its facets, the opposition of subjective to objective violence. Placated once, subjective, visible, symptomatic violence feeds, through accumulation, into objective or better still, in our case, "totalitarian"
violence. However, the two principles here interlock. The bearer of liberated subjective violence, the hipster, is himself potentially amenable
to the call of a "magnetic leader" with visions of "mass murder." We are still in the cycle of "totalitarianism."

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite journal |last=Berlin |first=Isaiah |title=Georges Sorel|date=1979 |journal=Against the Current |location=London |publisher=Hogarth Press|pages=296-332. Print. |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lewis |first=Wyndham |date=1989 |title=The Art of Being Ruled. |location=1926. Santa Rosa |publisher=Black Sparrow Press. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title=The Armies of the Night. |location=New York |publisher=Signet Books. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1969 |title=In the Red Light.|journal=Cannibals and Christians.|location= London |publisher=Sphere Books
|pages=20-65. Print. |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1969 |title=Miami and the Siege of Chicago. |location=Harmondsworth |publisher=Penguin. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1976 |title=The Presidential Papers |location=London |publisher=Panther. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.|location= Advertisements for Myself. New York |publisher=G.P. Putnam's Sons
|pages=337-358. Print. |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Radford |first=Jean |date=1975 |title=Norman Mailer: A Critical Study |location=London |publisher=Macmillan. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Sorel |first=Georges |date=1941 |title=Reflections On Violence. |location=Trans. T.E. Hulme. New York |publisher=Peter Smith. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Trilling |first=Diana |title=The Moral Radicalism of Norman Mailer. |journal=Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work
|location=Ed. Robert Lucid. Boston |publisher=Little, Brown & Co.|date=1971 |pages=108-36. Print|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Wenke |first=Joseph |date=1987 |title=Mailer's America |location=Hanover |publisher=University Press of New England. Print.|ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}
{{Review}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer's Left Conservatism and the Problematic of "Totalitarianism"}}

[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of “Totalitarianism”

2025-03-30T21:36:06Z

JKilchenmann: change citations to eliminate error?

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 
{{Byline|last=Mantzaris|first=Alexandros|abstract= An examination of Mailer’s seemingly paradoxical position of "Left Conservatism" that may have its basis in certain mechanisms contained within the problematic concept of "totalitarianism."}}
NORMAN MAILER'S SEEMINGLY PARADOXICAL POSITION of "Left Conservatism" may have its basis in certain mechanisms contained within the problematic
concept of "totalitarianism." I suggest that there are two aspects to the broader problematic of totalitarianism. The first aspect has to do with what we could refer to as the historical phenomenon of totalitarianism. This phenomenon
is represented by certain political regimes and/or types of sociopolitical organizations called totalitarian, to which are attributed a number
of shared characteristics such as rule by a single party, an official ideology, and a monopoly of mass communications. From Mailer's slightly different
perspective, such totalitarian regimes are thought of as suppressing the past, suppressing myth, and imposing a cowardly conformity on their subjects.
Here, in short, we find the view of "a system" exhibiting certain characteristics. There is also, however, another facet to the totalitarian problematic having to do with the discourse of totalitarianism itself. From this slightly diverging angle one would observe that the discourse of totalitarianism is one whose very logic confuses political "sides" and therefore destabilizes "standard" political antagonisms. What we have here is a convergence of political
opposites, the plasticity of political/ideological oppositions, and a profound ideological ambivalence.

{{pg|337|338}}

Not everyone would readily accept the central thesis of totalitarianism's theorists, namely that the former USSR and Nazi Germany can be put in the same category. And, naturally, even fewer would accept that American democratic capitalism can itself be implicated in such a problematic category—yet, of course, that is what people like Mailer never tired of arguing.

Now, when Mailer critics discuss totalitarianism they usually refer to what I called the "phenomenon" of totalitarianism—that is, to a "system" with
certain characteristics. Although there is much to be said in this area, I believe it is equally productive to approach totalitarianism as a discourse exhibiting
certain paradoxical properties. In what sense is it helpful, then, to
think of totalitarianism not just as a system but in the way I am suggesting—as a discourse perpetuating the political confusion that produces it in the first place? First of all, the view of totalitarianism as political confusion allows us to confirm that Mailer’s Left conservatism does not surface for the first time in ''The Armies of the Night'', although it is there the term first appears, nor does it properly belong to Mailer’s 1960s work only. Left Conservatism, in other words, is not a later stage in Mailer’s ideological
development. It is there from the start, in the uneasy relationship of the author
of ''The Naked and the Dead'' to that book's most fascinating characters,
Cummings and Croft, both of whom are fascists.

Critics have discussed this tension, starting with ''The Naked and the Dead''
as well as its development in Mailer's later works, in terms that are primarily
moral, philosophical, aesthetic. Joseph Wenke, for example, has argued
in his highly interesting study:

<blockquote>[I]t is clear that until Mailer was able to write "The White Negro," totalitarianism was a particularly intimidating and intimate enemy of his art. In addition to representing an external political threat, it presented itself to Mailer as an immediate aesthetic problem that insinuated itself into the very creation of his first three novels.{{sfn|Wenke|1987|p=8}}(emphasis mine)
</blockquote>

The problem Wenke refers to is, precisely, the profound appeal that characters such as Croft and Cummings held for Mailer even as he was placing
them on the side of the "heavies." And, in general, I think it is fair to say that this tension has been mostly discussed in terms similar to Wenke’s. Indeed I sometimes have the sense that the political field has to be preserved intact in
{{pg|338|339}}
such critical efforts, as a sort of stable ground from which Mailer’s course can then be observed and appraised—so that, for example, in his opening to the
violent (a)morality of Croft, Mailer can be said to be moving "to the Right." This approach is somewhat problematic for, in my view, the problem or paradox here is first of all political in nature. Moral and other considerations follow. That is, it seems to me wrong to try and retain the political as a stable reference point, which can then help us explain aesthetic problems and/or moral ambiguities, because the origin of the ambiguity lies with politics and ideology.

The argument, then, is that when one is working within the framework of the discourse on totalitarianism, one is bound to activate a host of paradoxical
political/ideological effects (or, perhaps, side-effects),which are conducive to the development of ambivalent and problematic stances such as Left Conservatism. There are effects we could discuss. To avoid too protracted an analysis, however, I have isolated two, of which I would like to say
a little more in this essay. So, to recapitulate, totalitarianism is a discourse which ultimately functions to undermine standard political oppositions and which, therefore, causes great political and ideological confusion. When working within the framework of this discourse one is bound to become implicated in a number of paradoxes, such as (1) the force one sets in opposition to totalitarianism(that is to a totalitarian "system") often turns out to be itself totalitarian or potentially totalitarian; (2) within the context of a
specific political/ideological antagonism, ''opposition'' to may finally be indistinguishable
from ''support'' for whatever it is one is ostensibly opposing. Or, perhaps even more paradoxically, one’s political ends may be better served by supporting one's political opponent: the best way of effectively opposing one’s opponents may finally be to support them.

With totalitarianism ''qua'' political confusion as our guide, then, we can attempt
to tackle some of the salient curiosities in the development of Mailer’s ideology, which seem to me to have been often met with a sort of embarrassed
silence. One such very interesting curiosity was already noted by
Diana Trilling in her seminal, early essay on Mailer’s work:

<blockquote>[H]ad Mailer been of their period [i.e., that of D.H. Lawrence and W.B.Yeats] instead of ours, he would have similarly avoided the predicament of presenting us with a hero not easily distinguishable from his named political enemy. He would have been</blockquote>

{{pg|339|340}}

<blockquote>able to evade the political consequences of consigning the future of civilization to a personal authority morally identical with the dark reaction from which it is supposed to rescue us. Or, to put
the matter in even cruder terms, he would not have exposed
himself to our ridicule for offering us a God who is a fascist.
{{sfn|Trilling|1971|p=127}}
</blockquote>

I have not read many critics trying to follow the lead offered by Trilling here
and to explain, if Mailer's God is indeed "a fascist," how we might be able to justify such a rather unexpected reversal? Yet there are places in Mailer's work
where this ''political'' exchange with fascism is more than obvious. The following example I take from "The White Negro," where we are told:

<blockquote>[I]t is possible, since the hipster lives with his hatred, that many of them are the material for an élite of storm troopers ready to follow the first truly magnetic leader whose view of mass murder is phrased in a language which reaches their emotions.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=355}}
</blockquote>

The first thing to note is that the very terms used by Mailer ("storm troopers," "magnetic leader," "mass murder") take us beyond the field of morality and even aesthetics and points us clearly in the direction of organized politics.
And I think that the way, finally, to explain such ironies is precisely with
reference to the first paradox I spoke about. Namely, the idea that when one works within the totalitarian discourse, the force one posits as a counterweight to the dreaded totalitarian system will often turn out to be itself totalitarian
or potentially totalitarian.

The work of Georges Sorel (1847–1922), a French theorist of anarcho-syndicalism, is important for the proper understanding of our second paradox.
''Réflexions sur la Violence'', his best-known work to which I will refer, was published in 1908. For the sake of brevity I would not like to go into the details of what I hold to be Sorel’s own “Left Conservatism.” Instead I have chosen a few quotations, which will give an idea of the basis for the comparison to Mailer. The first comes from an essay on Sorel, written by Isaiah Berlin:

<blockquote>Sorel remains, as he was in his lifetime, unclassified; claimed and
repudiated both by the right and by the left. . . . He appeared to</blockquote>

{{pg|340|341}}

<blockquote>
have no fixed position. His critics often accused him of pursuing an erratic course.{{sfn|Berlin|1979|p=296, 297}}
</blockquote>

I think that both the lack of political "fixity" but also, all the more so in fact, the idea of an interstitial position between "the right and the left" clearly points us in the direction of Left Conservatism. The second extract comes from the English author and painter Wyndham Lewis, according to whom

<blockquote>
Georges Sorel is the key to all contemporary political thought.
Sorel is, or was, a highly unstable and equivocal figure. He seems composed of a crowd of warring personalities, sometimes one being in the ascendent [sic], sometimes another, and which in any case he has not been able, or has not cared, to control. {{sfn|Lewis|1989|p=119}}
</blockquote>

When I first read the above what instantly came to my mind was Mailer’s
description of his own personality in ''The Armies of the Night'', where we read:

<blockquote>
[T]he architecture of [Mailer’s] personality bore resemblance to
some provincial cathedral which warring orders of the church might have designed separately over several centuries, the particular cathedral falling into the hands of one architect, then his
enemy.{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=28}}
</blockquote>

Clearly, the two descriptions are nearly identical. Sorel’s "warring personalities"
find their near-perfect equivalent in the "warring orders" of the church
of Mailer’s personality. And I hope it is clear how the volatility of both personalities might
be relevant to constructs such as Left Conservatism. Beyond the obvious resemblance suggested by the above extracts, it is possible to argue that Mailer often appears to share with Sorel a marked hostility towards what we perhaps could call social democracy but might be better off defining more carefully as social compromise, social peace and what Mailer has called politics as property.{{efn|Mailer discusses politics as property in Part Two, Chapter Six, of ''Miami and the Siege of Chicago''.}}

In her discussion of "In the Red Light,"{{efn|Mailer’s essay is included in ''Cannibals and Christians.''.}} Jean Radford notes that while
characterizing the support for Goldwater in rather negative terms, “Mailer
is able to admit his own excitement at the thought of Goldwater’s victory.”
{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=69}} She attributes this, in part, to what she calls Mailer’s “own ver-

{{pg|341|342}}

sion of '''politique du pire'"'' (and with this idea of a ''politique du pire'' we enter the heart of our second paradox). "Johnson" she writes "will only blur the reality
of America’s conflicts whereas Goldwater will polarize America and out
of that polarization some hope for the revolution might come." {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=69-70}} What is noteworthy here is the preference for an energetic, violent
opposition, the prospect of which is better embodied, for Mailer, in the Goldwater candidacy. A variation on this motif is the idea from the ''Presidential Papers''{{efn|See the "Prefatory Paper" entitled "Heroes and Leaders."}} that for the physical body as well as the body politic, an “acute” disease is preferable to a “faceless” one. According to Sorel, as he explains
his own notion of ''politique du pire'', the success of a Marxian “catastrophic”
revolution—his ideal—requires that the capitalist system be
functioning properly up to the moment of revolt. In turn, this proper function
demands an openly predatory middle class brutally and unapologetically
exploiting a proletariat, which in response becomes progressively more
militant. Thus, Sorel writes that the revolutionary doctrine

<blockquote>
will evidently be inapplicable if the middle class and the proletariat
do not oppose each other implacably, with all the forces at their disposal; the more ardently capitalist the middle class is, the more the proletariat is full of a warlike spirit and confident of its revolutionary strength, the more certain will be the success of the proletarian movement.{{sfn|Sorel|1941|p=86}}
</blockquote>

One of the more interesting elements in Sorel’s theory is that capitalism’s
progress towards its self-dissolution appears as a sort of "unconscious" historical process:

<blockquote>
It might . . . be said that capitalism plays a part analogous to that
attributed by [Eduard von] Hartmann to the Unconscious in nature,
since it prepares the coming of social reforms which it did not intend to produce.{{sfn|Sorel|1941|p=85}}
</blockquote>

Now, I don’t think that the “Unconscious” Sorel has in mind here is quite the same as the Freudian unconscious. In fact, I might as well admit that I may be “lost in translation” since Sorel obviously uses a French translation of a
German term which T. E. Hulme, the British translator of ''Reflection'', renders as “Unconscious.” In any case, I think that for the Mailer critic this idea

{{pg|342|343}}

of an unconscious, natural process that is somehow undermined by social
peace and compromise is a very interesting one indeed. So for Sorel any adulteration
of the implacable antagonism between the middle and working
classes acts as a disruption of an unconscious development:

<blockquote>
If . . . the middle class, led astray by the ''chatter'' of the preachers of ethics and sociology . . . seek to correct the abuses of economics, and wish to break with the barbarism of their predecessors,
then one part of the forces which were to further the development
of capitalismis employed in hindering it, an arbitrary and
irrational element is introduced, and the future of the world becomes
completely indeterminate.{{sfn|Sorel|1941|p=87}}
</blockquote>

Sorel refers to the state resulting fromsuch "irrationality" as "decadent" and
"degenerate," and thus we have another clear parallel with Mailer’s idea of "the plague," as in both cases we observe an attenuation of fundamental and
essential conflicts.

My own extrapolation from Sorel's idea is as follows. Someone acting in
such a context and with such an understanding of how things work, he offers:
would they not possibly come to believe that (please remember our second paradox) the best strategy of attaining their goals might be propping up the enemy? And is exactly this not an important part of Mailer’s strategy in the whole Goldwater affair and beyond? I am referring to all those ideas running through his 1960s work, about restoring a true Conservatism to its
lost potency, so that a vital and drastic confrontation with the Left can be ensured.
What is, perhaps, the best example of the paradoxical positions resulting
from such an equally paradoxical attitude can be found in Mailer’s
speech at the debate with William Buckley, Jr. There, what we might call a "freedom-loving" brand of Conservatism is pitted against a “Totalitarian”
one and the Cold War itself is denounced as a sort of senseless distraction
from another war that would be "welcome": "the war which has meaning,
that great and mortal debate between rebel and conservative where each
would argue the other is an agent of the Devil."
{{sfn|Mailer|1976|p=187-8}}

Sorel's own solution for reinforcing the essential antagonism between the
middle and working classes is the employment of proletarian violence. The
social peacemakers' advances, we are told, must be met with "black ingratitude"
and blows. The paradox here is that such violence will prevent more

{{pg|343|344}}

virulent and abhorrent violence on a grander scale. For a revolution erupting in the midst of capitalist decadence would, according to Sorel, lead either to a regression to barbarism and/or anarchy, or to "the dictatorship of the
proletariat." The latter represents Sorel's worst nightmare, since by this term he understands a revolution led by his unconscionable opponents, the "parliamentary"
Socialists, and that revolution would be destined to repeat the
worst excesses of the French Revolution.

Thus we are brought to the final resemblance between Mailer and Sorel, the idea that a form of limited violence can work to prevent what may be
properly called "totalitarian" violence, which is organized violence on a massive
scale employing the resources of the State. In fact, Sorel goes so far as to propose that, to avoid misunderstandings, we call all violence of this second type "force" and retain the term "violence" for all oppositional (notably, of
course, proletarian) violent acts:

<blockquote>
Sometimes the terms ''force'' and ''violence'' are used in speaking of
acts of authority, sometimes in speaking of acts of revolt . . . I
think it would be better to adopt a terminology which would
give rise to no ambiguity, and that the term violence should be employed only for acts of revolt; we should say, therefore, that the object of force is to impose a certain social order in which the
minority governs, while violence tends to the destruction of that
order. The middle class have used force since the beginning of modern times, while the proletariat now reacts against the middle
class and against the State by violence.{{sfn|Sorel|1941|p=195}}
</blockquote>

This distinction between "force" and "violence" is one Mailer essentially
shared with Sorel.

Let us, briefly, recapitulate our main points. Totalitarianism can be approached
not only as "a system" but also as a discourse whose logic confuses political sides. A thinker operating within the framework of this discourse is bound, by dint of its logic, to get entangled within a certain political paradoxology,
which is conducive to the formulation of highly idiosyncratic positions
such as Mailer’s "Left Conservatism." Indeed our central preoccupation throughout has been with the question, “How is a Left Conservative
produced?” In response to this question we proposed a principle and highlighted what might initially appear as a certain conceptual "mech-

{{pg|344|345}}

anism." The principle is that opposition to totalitarianism will often turn out to be itself, ''de facto'', totalitarian or potentially totalitarian. Between the
two opposed "totalitarianisms," then, the distinction between Left and Right
will tend to be attenuated if not erased. The "mechanism" we termed, with the help of Jean Radford’s old but still very interesting study on Mailer, the
''politique du pire''.

The ''politique du pire'', being a policy (and hence a mechanism), could be
initially approached in tactical or strategic terms as the idea that the tactical aggravation of oppression, exploitation, conflict (but therefore also the preservation in good shape of one’s opponent) will bring a strategic goal of
revolution even closer. However, on closer inspection it turns out that, in the case of both Mailer and Sorel, whatever tactical or strategic deliberations
might there be, the "mechanism" also actually conceals a principle. In
Mailer’s characteristic terms, acute, inflammatory diseases are healthier than lingering, silent ones. The metaphor points to a rather complex economy of
violence. We dealt with one of its facets, the opposition of subjective to objective violence. Placated once, subjective, visible, symptomatic violence feeds, through accumulation, into objective or better still, in our case, totalitarian"
violence. However, the two principles here interlock. The bearer of liberated subjective violence, the hipster, is himself potentially amenable
to the call of a "magnetic leader" with visions of "mass murder." We are still in the cycle of "totalitarianism."

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite journal |last=Berlin |first=Isaiah |title=Georges Sorel|date=1979 |journal=Against the Current |location=London |publisher=Hogarth Press|pages=296-332. Print. |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lewis |first=Wyndham |date=1989 |title=The Art of Being Ruled. |location=1926. Santa Rosa |publisher=Black Sparrow Press. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title=The Armies of the Night. |location=New York |publisher=Signet Books. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1969 |title=In the Red Light.|journal=Cannibals and Christians.|location= London |publisher=Sphere Books
|pages=20-65. Print. |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1969 |title=Miami and the Siege of Chicago. |location=Harmondsworth |publisher=Penguin. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1976 |title=The Presidential Papers |location=London |publisher=Panther. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.|location= Advertisements for Myself. New York |publisher=G.P. Putnam's Sons
|pages=337-358. Print. |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Radford |first=Jean |date=1975 |title=Norman Mailer: A Critical Study |location=London |publisher=Macmillan. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Sorel |first=Georges |date=1941 |title=Reflections On Violence. |location=Trans. T.E. Hulme. New York |publisher=Peter Smith. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Trilling |first=Diana |title=The Moral Radicalism of Norman Mailer. |journal=Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work
|location=Ed. Robert Lucid. Boston |publisher=Little, Brown & Co.|date=1971 |pages=108-36. Print|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Wenke |first=Joseph |date=1987 |title=Mailer's America |location=Hanover |publisher=University Press of New England. Print.|ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of “Totalitarianism”

2025-03-30T21:34:37Z

JKilchenmann: last page

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 
{{Byline|last=Mantzaris|first=Alexandros|abstract= An examination of Mailer’s seemingly paradoxical position of "Left Conservatism" that may have its basis in certain mechanisms contained within the problematic concept of "totalitarianism."}}
NORMAN MAILER'S SEEMINGLY PARADOXICAL POSITION of "Left Conservatism" may have its basis in certain mechanisms contained within the problematic
concept of "totalitarianism." I suggest that there are two aspects to the broader problematic of totalitarianism. The first aspect has to do with what we could refer to as the historical phenomenon of totalitarianism. This phenomenon
is represented by certain political regimes and/or types of sociopolitical organizations called totalitarian, to which are attributed a number
of shared characteristics such as rule by a single party, an official ideology, and a monopoly of mass communications. From Mailer's slightly different
perspective, such totalitarian regimes are thought of as suppressing the past, suppressing myth, and imposing a cowardly conformity on their subjects.
Here, in short, we find the view of "a system" exhibiting certain characteristics. There is also, however, another facet to the totalitarian problematic having to do with the discourse of totalitarianism itself. From this slightly diverging angle one would observe that the discourse of totalitarianism is one whose very logic confuses political "sides" and therefore destabilizes "standard" political antagonisms. What we have here is a convergence of political
opposites, the plasticity of political/ideological oppositions, and a profound ideological ambivalence.

{{pg|337|338}}

Not everyone would readily accept the central thesis of totalitarianism's theorists, namely that the former USSR and Nazi Germany can be put in the same category. And, naturally, even fewer would accept that American democratic capitalism can itself be implicated in such a problematic category—yet, of course, that is what people like Mailer never tired of arguing.

Now, when Mailer critics discuss totalitarianism they usually refer to what I called the "phenomenon" of totalitarianism—that is, to a "system" with
certain characteristics. Although there is much to be said in this area, I believe it is equally productive to approach totalitarianism as a discourse exhibiting
certain paradoxical properties. In what sense is it helpful, then, to
think of totalitarianism not just as a system but in the way I am suggesting—as a discourse perpetuating the political confusion that produces it in the first place? First of all, the view of totalitarianism as political confusion allows us to confirm that Mailer’s Left conservatism does not surface for the first time in ''The Armies of the Night'', although it is there the term first appears, nor does it properly belong to Mailer’s 1960s work only. Left Conservatism, in other words, is not a later stage in Mailer’s ideological
development. It is there from the start, in the uneasy relationship of the author
of ''The Naked and the Dead'' to that book's most fascinating characters,
Cummings and Croft, both of whom are fascists.

Critics have discussed this tension, starting with ''The Naked and the Dead''
as well as its development in Mailer's later works, in terms that are primarily
moral, philosophical, aesthetic. Joseph Wenke, for example, has argued
in his highly interesting study:

<blockquote>[I]t is clear that until Mailer was able to write "The White Negro," totalitarianism was a particularly intimidating and intimate enemy of his art. In addition to representing an external political threat, it presented itself to Mailer as an immediate aesthetic problem that insinuated itself into the very creation of his first three novels.{{sfn|Wenke|1987|p=8}}(emphasis mine)
</blockquote>

The problem Wenke refers to is, precisely, the profound appeal that characters such as Croft and Cummings held for Mailer even as he was placing
them on the side of the "heavies." And, in general, I think it is fair to say that this tension has been mostly discussed in terms similar to Wenke’s. Indeed I sometimes have the sense that the political field has to be preserved intact in
{{pg|338|339}}
such critical efforts, as a sort of stable ground from which Mailer’s course can then be observed and appraised—so that, for example, in his opening to the
violent (a)morality of Croft, Mailer can be said to be moving "to the Right." This approach is somewhat problematic for, in my view, the problem or paradox here is first of all political in nature. Moral and other considerations follow. That is, it seems to me wrong to try and retain the political as a stable reference point, which can then help us explain aesthetic problems and/or moral ambiguities, because the origin of the ambiguity lies with politics and ideology.

The argument, then, is that when one is working within the framework of the discourse on totalitarianism, one is bound to activate a host of paradoxical
political/ideological effects (or, perhaps, side-effects),which are conducive to the development of ambivalent and problematic stances such as Left Conservatism. There are effects we could discuss. To avoid too protracted an analysis, however, I have isolated two, of which I would like to say
a little more in this essay. So, to recapitulate, totalitarianism is a discourse which ultimately functions to undermine standard political oppositions and which, therefore, causes great political and ideological confusion. When working within the framework of this discourse one is bound to become implicated in a number of paradoxes, such as (1) the force one sets in opposition to totalitarianism(that is to a totalitarian "system") often turns out to be itself totalitarian or potentially totalitarian; (2) within the context of a
specific political/ideological antagonism, ''opposition'' to may finally be indistinguishable
from ''support'' for whatever it is one is ostensibly opposing. Or, perhaps even more paradoxically, one’s political ends may be better served by supporting one's political opponent: the best way of effectively opposing one’s opponents may finally be to support them.

With totalitarianism ''qua'' political confusion as our guide, then, we can attempt
to tackle some of the salient curiosities in the development of Mailer’s ideology, which seem to me to have been often met with a sort of embarrassed
silence. One such very interesting curiosity was already noted by
Diana Trilling in her seminal, early essay on Mailer’s work:

<blockquote>[H]ad Mailer been of their period [i.e., that of D.H. Lawrence and W.B.Yeats] instead of ours, he would have similarly avoided the predicament of presenting us with a hero not easily distinguishable from his named political enemy. He would have been</blockquote>

{{pg|339|340}}

<blockquote>able to evade the political consequences of consigning the future of civilization to a personal authority morally identical with the dark reaction from which it is supposed to rescue us. Or, to put
the matter in even cruder terms, he would not have exposed
himself to our ridicule for offering us a God who is a fascist.
{{sfn|Trilling|1971|p=127}}
</blockquote>

I have not read many critics trying to follow the lead offered by Trilling here
and to explain, if Mailer's God is indeed "a fascist," how we might be able to justify such a rather unexpected reversal? Yet there are places in Mailer's work
where this ''political'' exchange with fascism is more than obvious. The following example I take from "The White Negro," where we are told:

<blockquote>[I]t is possible, since the hipster lives with his hatred, that many of them are the material for an élite of storm troopers ready to follow the first truly magnetic leader whose view of mass murder is phrased in a language which reaches their emotions.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=355}}
</blockquote>

The first thing to note is that the very terms used by Mailer ("storm troopers," "magnetic leader," "mass murder") take us beyond the field of morality and even aesthetics and points us clearly in the direction of organized politics.
And I think that the way, finally, to explain such ironies is precisely with
reference to the first paradox I spoke about. Namely, the idea that when one works within the totalitarian discourse, the force one posits as a counterweight to the dreaded totalitarian system will often turn out to be itself totalitarian
or potentially totalitarian.

The work of Georges Sorel (1847–1922), a French theorist of anarcho-syndicalism, is important for the proper understanding of our second paradox.
''Réflexions sur la Violence'', his best-known work to which I will refer, was published in 1908. For the sake of brevity I would not like to go into the details of what I hold to be Sorel’s own “Left Conservatism.” Instead I have chosen a few quotations, which will give an idea of the basis for the comparison to Mailer. The first comes from an essay on Sorel, written by Isaiah Berlin:

<blockquote>Sorel remains, as he was in his lifetime, unclassified; claimed and
repudiated both by the right and by the left. . . . He appeared to</blockquote>

{{pg|340|341}}

<blockquote>
have no fixed position. His critics often accused him of pursuing an erratic course.{{sfn|Berlin|1979|p=296, 297}}
</blockquote>

I think that both the lack of political "fixity" but also, all the more so in fact, the idea of an interstitial position between "the right and the left" clearly points us in the direction of Left Conservatism. The second extract comes from the English author and painter Wyndham Lewis, according to whom

<blockquote>
Georges Sorel is the key to all contemporary political thought.
Sorel is, or was, a highly unstable and equivocal figure. He seems composed of a crowd of warring personalities, sometimes one being in the ascendent [sic], sometimes another, and which in any case he has not been able, or has not cared, to control. {{sfn|Lewis|1989|p=119}}
</blockquote>

When I first read the above what instantly came to my mind was Mailer’s
description of his own personality in ''The Armies of the Night'', where we read:

<blockquote>
[T]he architecture of [Mailer’s] personality bore resemblance to
some provincial cathedral which warring orders of the church might have designed separately over several centuries, the particular cathedral falling into the hands of one architect, then his
enemy.{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=28}}
</blockquote>

Clearly, the two descriptions are nearly identical. Sorel’s "warring personalities"
find their near-perfect equivalent in the "warring orders" of the church
of Mailer’s personality. And I hope it is clear how the volatility of both personalities might
be relevant to constructs such as Left Conservatism. Beyond the obvious resemblance suggested by the above extracts, it is possible to argue that Mailer often appears to share with Sorel a marked hostility towards what we perhaps could call social democracy but might be better off defining more carefully as social compromise, social peace and what Mailer has called politics as property.{{efn|Mailer discusses politics as property in Part Two, Chapter Six, of ''Miami and the Siege of Chicago''.}}

In her discussion of "In the Red Light,"{{efn|Mailer’s essay is included in ''Cannibals and Christians.''.}} Jean Radford notes that while
characterizing the support for Goldwater in rather negative terms, “Mailer
is able to admit his own excitement at the thought of Goldwater’s victory.”
{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=69}} She attributes this, in part, to what she calls Mailer’s “own ver-

{{pg|341|342}}

sion of '''politique du pire'"'' (and with this idea of a ''politique du pire'' we enter the heart of our second paradox). "Johnson" she writes "will only blur the reality
of America’s conflicts whereas Goldwater will polarize America and out
of that polarization some hope for the revolution might come." {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=69-70}} What is noteworthy here is the preference for an energetic, violent
opposition, the prospect of which is better embodied, for Mailer, in the Goldwater candidacy. A variation on this motif is the idea from the ''Presidential Papers''{{efn|See the "Prefatory Paper" entitled "Heroes and Leaders."}} that for the physical body as well as the body politic, an “acute” disease is preferable to a “faceless” one. According to Sorel, as he explains
his own notion of ''politique du pire'', the success of a Marxian “catastrophic”
revolution—his ideal—requires that the capitalist system be
functioning properly up to the moment of revolt. In turn, this proper function
demands an openly predatory middle class brutally and unapologetically
exploiting a proletariat, which in response becomes progressively more
militant. Thus, Sorel writes that the revolutionary doctrine

<blockquote>
will evidently be inapplicable if the middle class and the proletariat
do not oppose each other implacably, with all the forces at their disposal; the more ardently capitalist the middle class is, the more the proletariat is full of a warlike spirit and confident of its revolutionary strength, the more certain will be the success of the proletarian movement.{{sfn|Sorel|1941|p=86}}
</blockquote>

One of the more interesting elements in Sorel’s theory is that capitalism’s
progress towards its self-dissolution appears as a sort of "unconscious" historical process:

<blockquote>
It might . . . be said that capitalism plays a part analogous to that
attributed by [Eduard von] Hartmann to the Unconscious in nature,
since it prepares the coming of social reforms which it did not intend to produce.{{sfn|Sorel|1941|p=85}}
</blockquote>

Now, I don’t think that the “Unconscious” Sorel has in mind here is quite the same as the Freudian unconscious. In fact, I might as well admit that I may be “lost in translation” since Sorel obviously uses a French translation of a
German term which T. E. Hulme, the British translator of ''Reflection'', renders as “Unconscious.” In any case, I think that for the Mailer critic this idea

{{pg|342|343}}

of an unconscious, natural process that is somehow undermined by social
peace and compromise is a very interesting one indeed. So for Sorel any adulteration
of the implacable antagonism between the middle and working
classes acts as a disruption of an unconscious development:

<blockquote>
If . . . the middle class, led astray by the ''chatter'' of the preachers of ethics and sociology . . . seek to correct the abuses of economics, and wish to break with the barbarism of their predecessors,
then one part of the forces which were to further the development
of capitalismis employed in hindering it, an arbitrary and
irrational element is introduced, and the future of the world becomes
completely indeterminate.{{sfn|Sorel|1941|p=87}}
</blockquote>

Sorel refers to the state resulting fromsuch "irrationality" as "decadent" and
"degenerate," and thus we have another clear parallel with Mailer’s idea of "the plague," as in both cases we observe an attenuation of fundamental and
essential conflicts.

My own extrapolation from Sorel's idea is as follows. Someone acting in
such a context and with such an understanding of how things work, he offers:
would they not possibly come to believe that (please remember our second paradox) the best strategy of attaining their goals might be propping up the enemy? And is exactly this not an important part of Mailer’s strategy in the whole Goldwater affair and beyond? I am referring to all those ideas running through his 1960s work, about restoring a true Conservatism to its
lost potency, so that a vital and drastic confrontation with the Left can be ensured.
What is, perhaps, the best example of the paradoxical positions resulting
from such an equally paradoxical attitude can be found in Mailer’s
speech at the debate with William Buckley, Jr. There, what we might call a "freedom-loving" brand of Conservatism is pitted against a “Totalitarian”
one and the Cold War itself is denounced as a sort of senseless distraction
from another war that would be "welcome": "the war which has meaning,
that great and mortal debate between rebel and conservative where each
would argue the other is an agent of the Devil."
{{sfn|Mailer|1976|p=187-8}}

Sorel's own solution for reinforcing the essential antagonism between the
middle and working classes is the employment of proletarian violence. The
social peacemakers' advances, we are told, must be met with "black ingratitude"
and blows. The paradox here is that such violence will prevent more

{{pg|343|344}}

virulent and abhorrent violence on a grander scale. For a revolution erupting in the midst of capitalist decadence would, according to Sorel, lead either to a regression to barbarism and/or anarchy, or to "the dictatorship of the
proletariat." The latter represents Sorel's worst nightmare, since by this term he understands a revolution led by his unconscionable opponents, the "parliamentary"
Socialists, and that revolution would be destined to repeat the
worst excesses of the French Revolution.

Thus we are brought to the final resemblance between Mailer and Sorel, the idea that a form of limited violence can work to prevent what may be
properly called "totalitarian" violence, which is organized violence on a massive
scale employing the resources of the State. In fact, Sorel goes so far as to propose that, to avoid misunderstandings, we call all violence of this second type "force" and retain the term "violence" for all oppositional (notably, of
course, proletarian) violent acts:

<blockquote>
Sometimes the terms ''force'' and ''violence'' are used in speaking of
acts of authority, sometimes in speaking of acts of revolt . . . I
think it would be better to adopt a terminology which would
give rise to no ambiguity, and that the term violence should be employed only for acts of revolt; we should say, therefore, that the object of force is to impose a certain social order in which the
minority governs, while violence tends to the destruction of that
order. The middle class have used force since the beginning of modern times, while the proletariat now reacts against the middle
class and against the State by violence.{{sfn|Sorel|1941|p=195}}
</blockquote>

This distinction between "force" and "violence" is one Mailer essentially
shared with Sorel.

Let us, briefly, recapitulate our main points. Totalitarianism can be approached
not only as "a system" but also as a discourse whose logic confuses political sides. A thinker operating within the framework of this discourse is bound, by dint of its logic, to get entangled within a certain political paradoxology,
which is conducive to the formulation of highly idiosyncratic positions
such as Mailer’s "Left Conservatism." Indeed our central preoccupation throughout has been with the question, “How is a Left Conservative
produced?” In response to this question we proposed a principle and highlighted what might initially appear as a certain conceptual "mech-

{{pg|344|345}}

anism." The principle is that opposition to totalitarianism will often turn out to be itself, ''de facto'', totalitarian or potentially totalitarian. Between the
two opposed "totalitarianisms," then, the distinction between Left and Right
will tend to be attenuated if not erased. The "mechanism" we termed, with the help of Jean Radford’s old but still very interesting study on Mailer, the
''politique du pire''.

The ''politique du pire'', being a policy (and hence a mechanism), could be
initially approached in tactical or strategic terms as the idea that the tactical aggravation of oppression, exploitation, conflict (but therefore also the preservation in good shape of one’s opponent) will bring a strategic goal of
revolution even closer. However, on closer inspection it turns out that, in the case of both Mailer and Sorel, whatever tactical or strategic deliberations
might there be, the "mechanism" also actually conceals a principle. In
Mailer’s characteristic terms, acute, inflammatory diseases are healthier than lingering, silent ones. The metaphor points to a rather complex economy of
violence. We dealt with one of its facets, the opposition of subjective to objective violence. Placated once, subjective, visible, symptomatic violence feeds, through accumulation, into objective or better still, in our case, totalitarian"
violence. However, the two principles here interlock. The bearer of liberated subjective violence, the hipster, is himself potentially amenable
to the call of a "magnetic leader" with visions of "mass murder." We are still in the cycle of "totalitarianism."

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite journal |last=Berlin |first=Isaiah |title=Georges Sorel|date=1979 |journal=Against the Current |location=London |publisher=Hogarth Press|pages=296-332. Print. |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lewis |first=Wyndham |date=1989 |title=The Art of Being Ruled. |location=1926. Santa Rosa |publisher=Black Sparrow Press. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title=The Armies of the Night. |location=New York |publisher=Signet Books. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=---------- |date=1969 |title=In the Red Light.|journal=Cannibals and Christians.|location= London |publisher=Sphere Books
|pages=20-65. Print. |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=---------- |date=1969 |title=Miami and the Siege of Chicago. |location=Harmondsworth |publisher=Penguin. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=----------|date=1976 |title=The Presidential Papers |location=London |publisher=Panther. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=---------- |date=1959 |title=The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.|location= Advertisements for Myself. New York |publisher=G.P. Putnam's Sons
|pages=337-358. Print. |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Radford |first=Jean |date=1975 |title=Norman Mailer: A Critical Study |location=London |publisher=Macmillan. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Sorel |first=Georges |date=1941 |title=Reflections On Violence. |location=Trans. T.E. Hulme. New York |publisher=Peter Smith. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Trilling |first=Diana |title=The Moral Radicalism of Norman Mailer. |journal=Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work
|location=Ed. Robert Lucid. Boston |publisher=Little, Brown & Co.|date=1971 |pages=108-36. Print|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Wenke |first=Joseph |date=1987 |title=Mailer's America |location=Hanover |publisher=University Press of New England. Print.|ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of “Totalitarianism”

2025-03-30T21:13:32Z

JKilchenmann: through the end of 342

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 
{{Byline|last=Mantzaris|first=Alexandros|abstract= An examination of Mailer’s seemingly paradoxical position of "Left Conservatism" that may have its basis in certain mechanisms contained within the problematic concept of "totalitarianism."}}
NORMAN MAILER'S SEEMINGLY PARADOXICAL POSITION of "Left Conservatism" may have its basis in certain mechanisms contained within the problematic
concept of "totalitarianism." I suggest that there are two aspects to the broader problematic of totalitarianism. The first aspect has to do with what we could refer to as the historical phenomenon of totalitarianism. This phenomenon
is represented by certain political regimes and/or types of sociopolitical organizations called totalitarian, to which are attributed a number
of shared characteristics such as rule by a single party, an official ideology, and a monopoly of mass communications. From Mailer's slightly different
perspective, such totalitarian regimes are thought of as suppressing the past, suppressing myth, and imposing a cowardly conformity on their subjects.
Here, in short, we find the view of "a system" exhibiting certain characteristics. There is also, however, another facet to the totalitarian problematic having to do with the discourse of totalitarianism itself. From this slightly diverging angle one would observe that the discourse of totalitarianism is one whose very logic confuses political "sides" and therefore destabilizes "standard" political antagonisms. What we have here is a convergence of political
opposites, the plasticity of political/ideological oppositions, and a profound ideological ambivalence.

{{pg|337|338}}

Not everyone would readily accept the central thesis of totalitarianism's theorists, namely that the former USSR and Nazi Germany can be put in the same category. And, naturally, even fewer would accept that American democratic capitalism can itself be implicated in such a problematic category—yet, of course, that is what people like Mailer never tired of arguing.

Now, when Mailer critics discuss totalitarianism they usually refer to what I called the "phenomenon" of totalitarianism—that is, to a "system" with
certain characteristics. Although there is much to be said in this area, I believe it is equally productive to approach totalitarianism as a discourse exhibiting
certain paradoxical properties. In what sense is it helpful, then, to
think of totalitarianism not just as a system but in the way I am suggesting—as a discourse perpetuating the political confusion that produces it in the first place? First of all, the view of totalitarianism as political confusion allows us to confirm that Mailer’s Left conservatism does not surface for the first time in ''The Armies of the Night'', although it is there the term first appears, nor does it properly belong to Mailer’s 1960s work only. Left Conservatism, in other words, is not a later stage in Mailer’s ideological
development. It is there from the start, in the uneasy relationship of the author
of ''The Naked and the Dead'' to that book's most fascinating characters,
Cummings and Croft, both of whom are fascists.

Critics have discussed this tension, starting with ''The Naked and the Dead''
as well as its development in Mailer's later works, in terms that are primarily
moral, philosophical, aesthetic. Joseph Wenke, for example, has argued
in his highly interesting study:

<blockquote>[I]t is clear that until Mailer was able to write "The White Negro," totalitarianism was a particularly intimidating and intimate enemy of his art. In addition to representing an external political threat, it presented itself to Mailer as an immediate aesthetic problem that insinuated itself into the very creation of his first three novels.{{sfn|Wenke|1987|p=8}}(emphasis mine)
</blockquote>

The problem Wenke refers to is, precisely, the profound appeal that characters such as Croft and Cummings held for Mailer even as he was placing
them on the side of the "heavies." And, in general, I think it is fair to say that this tension has been mostly discussed in terms similar to Wenke’s. Indeed I sometimes have the sense that the political field has to be preserved intact in
{{pg|338|339}}
such critical efforts, as a sort of stable ground from which Mailer’s course can then be observed and appraised—so that, for example, in his opening to the
violent (a)morality of Croft, Mailer can be said to be moving "to the Right." This approach is somewhat problematic for, in my view, the problem or paradox here is first of all political in nature. Moral and other considerations follow. That is, it seems to me wrong to try and retain the political as a stable reference point, which can then help us explain aesthetic problems and/or moral ambiguities, because the origin of the ambiguity lies with politics and ideology.

The argument, then, is that when one is working within the framework of the discourse on totalitarianism, one is bound to activate a host of paradoxical
political/ideological effects (or, perhaps, side-effects),which are conducive to the development of ambivalent and problematic stances such as Left Conservatism. There are effects we could discuss. To avoid too protracted an analysis, however, I have isolated two, of which I would like to say
a little more in this essay. So, to recapitulate, totalitarianism is a discourse which ultimately functions to undermine standard political oppositions and which, therefore, causes great political and ideological confusion. When working within the framework of this discourse one is bound to become implicated in a number of paradoxes, such as (1) the force one sets in opposition to totalitarianism(that is to a totalitarian "system") often turns out to be itself totalitarian or potentially totalitarian; (2) within the context of a
specific political/ideological antagonism, ''opposition'' to may finally be indistinguishable
from ''support'' for whatever it is one is ostensibly opposing. Or, perhaps even more paradoxically, one’s political ends may be better served by supporting one's political opponent: the best way of effectively opposing one’s opponents may finally be to support them.

With totalitarianism ''qua'' political confusion as our guide, then, we can attempt
to tackle some of the salient curiosities in the development of Mailer’s ideology, which seem to me to have been often met with a sort of embarrassed
silence. One such very interesting curiosity was already noted by
Diana Trilling in her seminal, early essay on Mailer’s work:

<blockquote>[H]ad Mailer been of their period [i.e., that of D.H. Lawrence and W.B.Yeats] instead of ours, he would have similarly avoided the predicament of presenting us with a hero not easily distinguishable from his named political enemy. He would have been</blockquote>

{{pg|339|340}}

<blockquote>able to evade the political consequences of consigning the future of civilization to a personal authority morally identical with the dark reaction from which it is supposed to rescue us. Or, to put
the matter in even cruder terms, he would not have exposed
himself to our ridicule for offering us a God who is a fascist.
{{sfn|Trilling|1987|p=127}}
</blockquote>

I have not read many critics trying to follow the lead offered by Trilling here
and to explain, if Mailer's God is indeed "a fascist," how we might be able to justify such a rather unexpected reversal? Yet there are places in Mailer's work
where this ''political'' exchange with fascism is more than obvious. The following example I take from "The White Negro," where we are told:

<blockquote>[I]t is possible, since the hipster lives with his hatred, that many of them are the material for an élite of storm troopers ready to follow the first truly magnetic leader whose view of mass murder is phrased in a language which reaches their emotions.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=355}}
</blockquote>

The first thing to note is that the very terms used by Mailer ("storm troopers," "magnetic leader," "mass murder") take us beyond the field of morality and even aesthetics and points us clearly in the direction of organized politics.
And I think that the way, finally, to explain such ironies is precisely with
reference to the first paradox I spoke about. Namely, the idea that when one works within the totalitarian discourse, the force one posits as a counterweight to the dreaded totalitarian system will often turn out to be itself totalitarian
or potentially totalitarian.

The work of Georges Sorel (1847–1922), a French theorist of anarcho-syndicalism, is important for the proper understanding of our second paradox.
''Réflexions sur la Violence'', his best-known work to which I will refer, was published in 1908. For the sake of brevity I would not like to go into the details of what I hold to be Sorel’s own “Left Conservatism.” Instead I have chosen a few quotations, which will give an idea of the basis for the comparison to Mailer. The first comes from an essay on Sorel, written by Isaiah Berlin:

<blockquote>Sorel remains, as he was in his lifetime, unclassified; claimed and
repudiated both by the right and by the left. . . . He appeared to</blockquote>

{{pg|340|341}}

<blockquote>
have no fixed position. His critics often accused him of pursuing an erratic course.{{sfn|Berlin|1979|p=296, 297}}
</blockquote>

I think that both the lack of political "fixity" but also, all the more so in fact, the idea of an interstitial position between "the right and the left" clearly points us in the direction of Left Conservatism. The second extract comes from the English author and painter Wyndham Lewis, according to whom

<blockquote>
Georges Sorel is the key to all contemporary political thought.
Sorel is, or was, a highly unstable and equivocal figure. He seems composed of a crowd of warring personalities, sometimes one being in the ascendent [sic], sometimes another, and which in any case he has not been able, or has not cared, to control. {{sfn|Lewis|1989|p=119}}
</blockquote>

When I first read the above what instantly came to my mind was Mailer’s
description of his own personality in ''The Armies of the Night'', where we read:

<blockquote>
[T]he architecture of [Mailer’s] personality bore resemblance to
some provincial cathedral which warring orders of the church might have designed separately over several centuries, the particular cathedral falling into the hands of one architect, then his
enemy.{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=28}}
</blockquote>

Clearly, the two descriptions are nearly identical. Sorel’s "warring personalities"
find their near-perfect equivalent in the "warring orders" of the church
of Mailer’s personality. And I hope it is clear how the volatility of both personalities might
be relevant to constructs such as Left Conservatism. Beyond the obvious resemblance suggested by the above extracts, it is possible to argue that Mailer often appears to share with Sorel a marked hostility towards what we perhaps could call social democracy but might be better off defining more carefully as social compromise, social peace and what Mailer has called politics as property.{{efn|Mailer discusses politics as property in Part Two, Chapter Six, of ''Miami and the Siege of Chicago''.}}

In her discussion of "In the Red Light,"{{efn|Mailer’s essay is included in ''Cannibals and Christians.''.}} Jean Radford notes that while
characterizing the support for Goldwater in rather negative terms, “Mailer
is able to admit his own excitement at the thought of Goldwater’s victory.”
{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=69}} She attributes this, in part, to what she calls Mailer’s “own ver-

{{pg|341|342}}

sion of '''politique du pire'"'' (and with this idea of a ''politique du pire'' we enter the heart of our second paradox). "Johnson" she writes "will only blur the reality
of America’s conflicts whereas Goldwater will polarize America and out
of that polarization some hope for the revolution might come." {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=69-70}} What is noteworthy here is the preference for an energetic, violent
opposition, the prospect of which is better embodied, for Mailer, in the Goldwater candidacy. A variation on this motif is the idea from the ''Presidential Papers''{{efn|See the "Prefatory Paper" entitled "Heroes and Leaders."}} that for the physical body as well as the body politic, an “acute” disease is preferable to a “faceless” one. According to Sorel, as he explains
his own notion of ''politique du pire'', the success of a Marxian “catastrophic”
revolution—his ideal—requires that the capitalist system be
functioning properly up to the moment of revolt. In turn, this proper function
demands an openly predatory middle class brutally and unapologetically
exploiting a proletariat, which in response becomes progressively more
militant. Thus, Sorel writes that the revolutionary doctrine

<blockquote>
will evidently be inapplicable if the middle class and the proletariat
do not oppose each other implacably, with all the forces at their disposal; the more ardently capitalist the middle class is, the more the proletariat is full of a warlike spirit and confident of its revolutionary strength, the more certain will be the success of the proletarian movement.{{sfn|Sorel|1941|p=86}}
</blockquote>

One of the more interesting elements in Sorel’s theory is that capitalism’s
progress towards its self-dissolution appears as a sort of "unconscious" historical process:

<blockquote>
It might . . . be said that capitalism plays a part analogous to that
attributed by [Eduard von] Hartmann to the Unconscious in nature,
since it prepares the coming of social reforms which it did not intend to produce.{{sfn|Sorel|1941|p=85}}
</blockquote>

Now, I don’t think that the “Unconscious” Sorel has in mind here is quite the same as the Freudian unconscious. In fact, I might as well admit that I may be “lost in translation” since Sorel obviously uses a French translation of a
German term which T. E. Hulme, the British translator of ''Reflection'', renders as “Unconscious.” In any case, I think that for the Mailer critic this idea

{{pg|342|343}}

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite journal |last=Berlin |first=Isaiah |title=Georges Sorel|date=1979 |journal=Against the Current |location=London |publisher=Hogarth Press|pages=296-332. Print. |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lewis |first=Wyndham |date=1989 |title=The Art of Being Ruled. |location=1926. Santa Rosa |publisher=Black Sparrow Press. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title=The Armies of the Night. |location=New York |publisher=Signet Books. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=---------- |date=1969 |title=In the Red Light.|journal=Cannibals and Christians.|location= London |publisher=Sphere Books
|pages=20-65. Print. |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=---------- |date=1969 |title=Miami and the Siege of Chicago. |location=Harmondsworth |publisher=Penguin. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=----------|date=1976 |title=The Presidential Papers |location=London |publisher=Panther. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=---------- |date=1959 |title=The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.|location= Advertisements for Myself. New York |publisher=G.P. Putnam's Sons
|pages=337-358. Print. |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Radford |first=Jean |date=1975 |title=Norman Mailer: A Critical Study |location=London |publisher=Macmillan. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Sorel |first=Georges |date=1941 |title=Reflections On Violence. |location=Trans. T.E. Hulme. New York |publisher=Peter Smith. Print.|ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Trilling |first=Diana |title=The Moral Radicalism of Norman Mailer. |journal=Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work
|location=Ed. Robert Lucid. Boston |publisher=Little, Brown & Co.|date=1971 |pages=108-36. Print|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Wenke |first=Joseph |date=1987 |title=Mailer's America |location=Hanover |publisher=University Press of New England. Print.|ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of “Totalitarianism”

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JKilchenmann: through block quotes on page 341

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of “Totalitarianism”

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JKilchenmann: first three pages

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of “Totalitarianism”

2025-03-24T14:35:07Z

JKilchenmann: Added byline with author and abstract.

User:JKilchenmann

2025-03-10T11:55:06Z

JKilchenmann: Created page with "Category:Student Editors Category:Spring 2025"

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