Project Mailer - User contributions [en]

The Mailer Review/Volunteer/Remediating Articles

2025-05-01T10:22:36Z

Jules Carry: /* Body */ Added a bit more clarity.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Large|A Guide for Volunteer Digital Editors}}
{{shortcut|PM:RA}}
{{Byline|align=right|last=Lucas|first=Gerald R.|abstract=A digital editor’s guide for remediating print articles to digital for ''{{MR}}''. |url=http://prmlr.us/remediate}}
{{TOC right}}
Welcome, volunteer, or Assistant Digital Editor. We’re glad you decided to lend your expertise and time in helping to grow our Digital Humanities project. This guide is written specifically for volunteer digital editors who want to help in moving, or “remediating,” our print version of ''{{MR}}'' to the digital version here on Project Mailer. Please read this document in for specific directions on remediating your article to be used on the screen.

We use the word “[[w:Mediation (Marxist theory and media studies)#Remediation|remediating]]” here to emphasize that reading on paper is a different activity than reading on the screen. In fact, we might say that we don’t really ''read'' articles on the screen at all: we ''use'' them. So, how do we ''remediate'' a document from a medium that emphasizes a sit-back, passive activity to one that promotes a lean-forward, active one? Documents meant to be used on the screen should have different qualities than paper documents. This guide breaks down the qualities we should consider when creating a digital document on this site. We try to cover most items, but being a digital editor often requires us to make it up as we go along.

When we remediate, we should always keep this question in mind: '''what is the most logical way to make this document fit the expectations of those who will be using it?''' Let’s try to detail our current approach.{{efn|Like with any other digital document, there are no strict rules for what makes the best digital document. We are still in an incunabular stage when it comes to the digital. So think of these as guidelines on how we might approach our work here. There may be a better way. If so, we may change our approach. But for now, this is how we do it.}}

I will try to include everything you need on this document, but I will often link to Wikipedia for more detailed explanations of certain concepts and procedures. I hope that you will not need these additional resources, but they are there for further clarification if necessary. I recommend opening links in tabs, so you don’t get lost, and you can keep certain tabs open for reference.

{{notice|All questions and discussion of this article should be posted on the [[Talk:The Mailer Review/Volunteer/Remediating Articles|talk page]]. I am always here to help, too. You can get my attention when posting to any talk page by using <code><nowiki>{{reply to|Grlucas}}</nowiki></code> at the beginning of your question. You may also ask me questions on [[User talk:Grlucas|my talk page]].}}

== Get Started ==
The first order of business is to request an account and get your first article for editing. These are both accomplished by sending an email to '''{{nospam|editor|projectmailer.net}}'''; they both could be done in the same email.

If you’re brand new to MediaWiki, the software that runs this web site, you should take a couple of tutorials to familiarize yourself with some of the basics. Begin with Wikipedia’s [[w:Help:Introduction|Help:Introduction]] which will take you through a series of tutorials designed to familiarize you with the essentials.{{efn|This will suggest you make a Wikipedia account to continue, if you do not already have one. This step is optional, but recommended.}} Take the tutorials on the '''source editor''' (not the visual) which uses wiki markup, as that is the only available editor on PM.

=== Get Your Account ===
First off, you need to request an account (see below under Get Your Article). If you have a particular user name in mind, let me know. Mine is '''Grlucas''', but yours can be anything you’d like. I will create an account for you with a temporary password using the email address you sent the request with. You will need to confirm your account, log in, and change your password. Then, you’re ready to edit. You might take a few minutes to created your user page by clicking your user name in the upper right, and adding a brief professional biography. If you are a student, this will likely be a requirement at some point.

=== Get Your Article ===
Begin your journey by requesting an article from the editor; you can request an account with the same email. Send an email to '''{{nospam|editor|projectmailer.net}}''' and ask for the next article, or request a red link article (meaning it needs to be added) from any [[{{ROOTPAGENAME}}|volume available]], being sure to give the volume number.{{efn|If you are editing as part of a class assignment, you likely will be assigned an article. Please see your syllabus for alternate directions.}} I will send you the article as a PDF from the above email address (be sure you whitelist it or check your spam folder if you do not receive it), including an abstract (if it has one) and writer biography.{{efn|PDF is how I get the final digital form of the journal, which is made for print, so it always contains digital errors. Part of our job is to be sure we catch and correct these errors.}}

== Before Editing ==
[[File:Mr-editor.jpg|thumb|400px|'''Fig 1'''. The editor.]]
An obvious way to approach this task would be to look at an example article to see how another digital editor remediated it, like [[Andrew M. Gordon]]’s “[[Mailer’s Use of Wilhelm Reich]],” or really any of the other available texts. If you go to the article (open it it in a new tab by pressing {{Key press|CMD|click}} on a Mac and {{Key press|CTL|click}} on a PC), you can click the “Edit” tab to get to the editor and review all of the wiki coding that presents the usable text (see '''Fig 1''').

The rest of this document breaks down each of the common elements that every article will use. You should keep your example article open in a tab so you can refer to it, if necessary.

Finally, go to the [[{{ROOTPAGENAME}}|volume]] your article is in, and click on the title’s red link. This will bring up the editor for the new article. Now you may begin adding the article’s content. See [[mediawikiwiki:Help:Starting a new page|Help:Starting a new page]] for more details.

=== Subpages ===
We have recently switched to using [[w:Wikipedia:Subpages|subpages]] for articles, so they fall into a hierarchical structure under the appropriate volumes. This should not really be an issue in your editing, but I just wanted to mention it in case you saw older articles that did not follow the same naming scheme. All articles assigned to volunteer editors will use the subpage structure.

=== Preview and Save ===
As you make changes, get into the habit of pushing the “Show preview” button at the bottom of your editor. You should '''not''' save every little edit, as this taxes the system: '''every single saved edit''' is stored in the article’s history, so we want to keep these to a minimum. Once you have added a significant amount—maybe a couple of paragraphs or so—you can hit the blue “Save changes” button if the preview looks good. Before you save, make a note in the “Summary” box explaining your additions or edits. This can be helpful to other editors if they have to fix or find something. Uncheck the “This is a minor edit” (checked by default) if you did more than fix a typo or change a couple of smaller items.

== Title ==
If you clicked on the red link to begin creating the article, the title has been chosen for you. However, we want to tweak the display title, so we have to use a code called <code><nowiki>{{DISPLAYTITLE}}</nowiki></code>. With this element, you can insert necessary text formatting, like [[w:MOS:ITALIC|italics]]:

<code><nowiki>{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}</nowiki></code>

The <code><nowiki></nowiki></code> tag shrinks the root page names to highlight the title of the page. The code above will work for most article titles. However, if the title contains italicized elements, like the title of a novel, you must replace <code><nowiki>{{SUBPAGENAME}}</nowiki></code> with the actual title, so you can include the italics. For example:

<code><nowiki>{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''An American Dream'': The Singular Nightmare}}</nowiki></code>

Putting two apostrophes (<code><nowiki>''</nowiki></code>) on both sides of <code><nowiki>An American Dream</nowiki></code> will italicize the novel’s name in the published document (see [[mediawikiwiki:Help:Formatting|Help:Formatting]]); check out the [[The Mailer Review/Volume 1, 2007/An American Dream: The Singular Nightmare|published article]]. Once you’ve entered your title, click the “Show preview” button under the editor window to see the results.{{efn|Get into the habit of clicking this button with every bit that you add to the article. It allows you to quickly see if you’ve made a mistake, so you can fix it before saving.}} Note that the title must otherwise be exactly the same, or the system will ignore the code and spit out an error. If it does, just review your code carefully and fix what’s needed.

== Working Banner ==
While you’re working on your article, you should let users know by adding the {{tl|Working}} banner. On the next line after <code><nowiki>{{DISPLAYTITLE}}</nowiki></code>, add <code><nowiki>{{Working}}</nowiki></code> to insert this banner; no need to add anything else, as the template fills in the pertinent information, like the article’s name.

{{Working}}

When you make your final edit, let me know by posting a message to my [[User talk:Grlucas|talk page]], and I will remove the banner to signify the completion of the remediation process.

== Header ==
Next, you need to insert the proper header for the volume, in the form of <code><nowiki>{{MRxx}}</nowiki></code> where “xx” is the two-number volume. For example, volume 12 would be <code><nowiki>{{MR12}}</nowiki></code> and volume 2 would be <code><nowiki>{{MR02}}</nowiki></code>.

Anything surrounded with double brackets calls a [[w:Help:A quick guide to templates|template]] to be [[w:Wikipedia:Transclusion|transcluded]]. Basically, templates are bits of code or boilerplate that can be used on multiple pages. This saves us from having to repeat the same information on multiple pages.

This header should appear on the top of all ''Review'' content, just under the display title. The header will also insert the correct volume category in at the bottom of the page (See '''Fig. 2''').

== Byline ==
[[File:Mr-cat.jpg|thumb|400px|'''Fig 2'''. Byline inserts the correct category.]]
The byline template <code>{{tl|byline}}</code> should come next. It will include the writer’s or editor’s name, an abstract (if applicable), a note(s) (if applicable), and a short url. Here’s an example of the <code>byline</code> code:

<code><nowiki>{{Byline|last=Dickstein|first=Morris|url=https://prmlr.us/mr07dick|abstract=Mailer has been . . . uniform edition.|note=This paper served . . . me to participate.}}</nowiki></code>

For an explanation of all the variables, see <code>{{tl|byline}}</code>. You needn’t worry about the “abstract,” “note,” or “url” variables; I’ll fill those in later, if necessary.

Once you’ve entered the code, check it by previewing. The author’s name should be in blue, showing that the link leads to his or her biography. If it’s red, check your spelling. I have entered all authors and editors, so this should be working correctly. Next, scroll to the bottom of the document. You should see the correct category listed (see '''Fig 2'''); we’ll discuss more categories below. This will either be “Written by First Last” or “Edited by First Last.” This link, too, should be blue.

=== Book Reviews ===
Editors remediating '''book reviews''' should use the {{tl|BookReview}} template instead of the more general {{tl|Byline}} template, as it is specifically designed to capture and display essential bibliographic details about the book under review. Unlike {{tl|Byline}}, which only identifies the author of the review, {{tl|BookReview}} provides a standardized format for citing the book’s title, author, publisher, publication date, format, and price, along with the reviewer’s name and links to purchase the book or read the full review. This helps ensure consistency across entries and improves usability for readers seeking publication information at a glance. See {{tl|BookReview}} for instructions on this template’s use.

=== Author Bio ===
As I mentioned above, the <code>{{tl|byline}}</code> connects with the author’s bio. As of this writing, all bios should be posted, so there is no need to do anything further.

{{Quote box|width=100%|align=center|title=Using Your Sandbox for Remediation|
The rest of the steps below could (should?) happen in your sandbox. This is a space where you can remediate (make edits and errors) without publishing to the main space. This way, you avoid unwanted attention until you are ready to transfer your article to it proper place. You can access your personal sandbox by clicking “Sandbox” on the top-right of this (and every) page. Put <code><nowiki>{{user sandbox|plain=yes}}</nowiki></code> at the top of your sandbox. This will put a banner on the top of your page notifying other users they are looking at your draft space.

I recommend this approach. Incomplete articles in the main space are fine; articles with errors should ''never'' appear there. A solid approach would be to edit (clean up typos, add references, tweak formatting, etc.) in your sandbox, then transfer each paragraph to the main space. After each paragraph, preview your article to see that you did not inadvertently introduce any errors. After a few paragraphs, save your work. With this approach, you can save a lot of time and potential headaches. For example, if you transfer an entire article from your sandbox, you might get a reference error. Tracking this down becomes much more difficult. If transfer by paragraph, then errors become much easier to identify and fix.
}}

== Body ==
[[File:Mr-orig.jpg|thumb|400px|'''Fig 3'''. Original PDF. Copy the paragraph.]] [[File:Mr-errors.jpg|thumb|400px|'''Fig 4'''. Errors indicated.]] [[File:Mr-corrected.jpg|thumb|400px|'''Fig 5'''. Errors Fixed.]]
Here is where you remediate from PDF (essentially the printed page) to the wiki. Adding the body of the article will take the most effort and attention to detail, as many typos are introduced into the digital text as part of the PDF creation process. I recommend proceeding paragraph by paragraph, as pasting the whole essay into the article and then trying to edit it will just be overwhelming. Take this a step at a time to maximize your attention to perfection.

Open the PDF, highlight and copy a paragraph, paste the paragraph into the editing window, and proofread for errors (see '''Figs. 3–5'''; click the images to enlarge). Common errors include hyphenated words (these will be broken words with a hypen and space), numbers, lack of necessary text decoration like italics, missing spaces, and superfluous print information like page numbers. All of these must be corrected. Use the original PDF as your guide. All text needs to be verbatim and look as much like the original document as possible. Do not change the wording any of the original text.

Once the paragraph is finished, hit return twice (skip a line between paragraphs) and start the next one. Repeat this process until the end of the document.

{{notice|Most articles that cite sources will do so using MLA style, so parenthetical citations will appear in the text. These must be remediated to the format we use for the web version. See [[#Sourcing|Sourcing]] below for instructions on using shortened footnotes. For instructions on inserting explanatory endnotes, see [[#End Notes|Endnotes]].}}

=== Block Quotations ===
Many articles use block quotation when quoting longer passages of primary texts. Just paste in the quotation like you would a paragraph, then surround it with the <code><nowiki><blockqoute> . . . </blockquote></nowiki></code> tags, for example:

<code><nowiki><blockquote>To the savage, dread was the natural result of any invasion of the supernatural: if man wished to steal the secrets of the gods, it was only to be supposed that the gods would defend themselves and destroy whichever man came too close. By this logic, civilization is the successful if imperfect theft of some cluster of these secrets, and the price we have paid is to accelerate our private sense of some enormous if not quite definable disaster which awaits us.{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=159}}</blockquote></nowiki></code>

Note this quotation contains a citation—as all quotations should; see [[#Sourcing|Sourcing]] below for an explanation.

=== Images ===
Most articles will not contain images. However, for those that do, see [[The Mailer Review/Volunteer/Advanced Editing|Advanced Editing]].

=== Page Numbers ===
In order to aid researchers who still rely on the conventions of print culture, we will insert page numbers on our articles as they appear in the print version. For this use the <code>{{tl|pg}}</code> template, like:

<code><nowiki>{{pg|first page #|next page #}}</nowiki></code>

For example, indicating a page break after page 203 would look like:

<code><nowiki>{{pg|203|204}}</nowiki></code>

This code can be inserted directly in a paragraph. See [[The Mailer Review/Volume 1, 2007/An American Dream: The Singular Nightmare|this article]] for an example.

== Endnotes ==
This section houses an author’s explanatory endnotes or footnotes, like the “Notes” section at the bottom of this page. Notes may be inserted in the body of the text, using <code>{{tl|efn}}</code>, for example:

<code><nowiki>. . .opportunity with a "lady's magazine",{{efn|In ''Double Life'', Lennon explains that Pearl Kazin, an editor at ''Harper's Bazaar'' had invited Mailer to write something for the magazine, to which Mailer replied: "I'm still too young and too arrogant to care to write the kind of high-grade horseshit you print in ''Harper's Bazaar''" (142–43).}} Mailer conceived . . .</nowiki></code>

This note will be indicated by a superscript, small letter, like [a] —except it will be a hyperlink. Now, you must have place for these notes to be listed near the end of the document, just above the Citations section:

<code><nowiki>=== Notes ===</nowiki> 
<nowiki>{{notelist}}</nowiki></code>

See [[The Mailer Review/Volume 9, 2015/“Up to the Nostrils in Anguish”: Mailer and Bellow on Masculine Anxiety and Violent Catharsis|this article]] for another, more complex example. For a more thorough discussion of this function, see [[w:Template:Efn|Template:Efn]] on Wikipedia.

This code is only used for notes, not citations. For citations, read on.

== Sourcing ==
There are two approaches to sourcing, depending on the complexity of the author’s citations. If the article has just a handful of sources that are cited sparingly, you might just include them in the body of the article and just use a “Citations” section at the end of the document. If there are '''many sources''' that are '''cited multiple times''', you should have a “Citations” section and a “Works Cited” section and use the '''shortened footnotes''' approach. Most articles will use the latter approach.

Please note: some articles, particularly creative pieces, transcripts, and some essays will not cite any secondary sources. If this is the case, then this section on sourcing may be skipped.

=== Works Cited ===
A list of works cited should be the last section in the document. It is sorted alphabetically by author’s last name and uses [[w:Wikipedia:Citation templates|citation templates]]. This is easier for two reasons: (1) you only need to list the reference '''once''' in the article, and (2) it cleans up your body text of much of the confusing code. This section is created like this:

<code><nowiki>===Works Cited===</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>{{Refbegin}}</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>* {{cite book |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |location= |publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>* {{cite journal |last= |first= |title= |url= |journal= |volume= |issue= |date= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>* {{cite magazine |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>* {{cite news |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>* {{cite web |url= |title= |last= |first= |date= |website= |publisher= |access-date= |quote= |ref=harv }}</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>{{Refend}}</nowiki></code> 

This might look a bit confusing, but I’ll go through it. The first line adds a new section to the article. All references should appear between <code><nowiki>{{Refbegin}}</nowiki></code> and <code><nowiki>{{Refend}}</nowiki></code> in a bulleted list (notice each reference is on its own line and begins with <code><nowiki>*</nowiki></code>.

These codes are for the main types of references you will likely need (these links go to expanded instructions on Wikipedia): [[w:Template:Cite book|book]], [[w:Template:Cite journal|journal]], [[w:Template:Cite magazine|magazine]], [[w:Template:Cite news|news]], and [[w:Template:Cite web|web]].{{efn|All citation codes and explanation for the variables may be found on “[[w:Wikipedia:Citation templates|Citation Templates]].”}} Notice many of the codes contain similar elements, but one in particular '''must be used''' for our shortened footnotes technique to work: <code><nowiki>ref=harv</nowiki></code> — I usually put this at the end. This code for the [[w:Template:Harvard citation|Harvard citation]] and points a shortened footnote to the detailed bibliographic entry.

Feel free to copy and paste these codes from above into your article. Just fill in the details.

=== In-text Citations ===
For in-text citations, what will usually appear as MLA-style parenthetical, we use [[w:Template:Sfn|shortened footnotes]] <code><nowiki>{{sfn}}</nowiki></code>. First, add a section where your citations will appear, just above your works cited section:

<code><nowiki>===Citations===</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>{{Reflist}}</nowiki></code>

Here’s an example of the shortened footnote at work in the body of the article:

<code><nowiki>. . . first published in ''New Short Novels 2'', 1956.{{sfn|Lennon|2018|p=25}}</nowiki></code>

This is a Wikipedia template. “Sfn” calls the template in the code; the author’s last name follows the first pipe (this must correspond with the name that follows <code><nowiki>|last=</nowiki></code> in the detailed citation in your works cited list); the year of the publication follows the next (exactly the same as <code><nowiki>|date=</nowiki></code> in the citation); and the page number(s) are put last. This will insert a footnote in the text; when a user clicks it, she is taken to the citation and if she clicks the citation, she is taken to the longer works cited entry. Rendered on the page, it will look like:

. . . first published in ''New Short Novels 2'', 1956.{{sfn|Lennon|2018|p=25}}

Notice its placement of the footnote code: '''right up against the period with no space in between'''. Footnote indications should always come ''after'' punctuation; never before. Try it on the example article I linked above. Simple and elegant.

See the [[w:Template:Sfn|Template:Sfn]] on Wikipedia for more options and explanation.

== Footer ==
Add the ''Review'' footer with the code <code>{{tl|Review}}</code> on a line by itself. This will insert the volume navigation information box.

== Sort ==
Since all of the ''Review'' articles are located on subpages, we have to tell the system how to sort them. This is done using the <code><nowiki>{{DEFAULTSORT:xx}}</nowiki></code> code. Copy the code into the bottom of the article just above the categories (see below) and replace <code><nowiki>xx</nowiki></code> with the name of the article ''excluding'' journal name, volume information, and any beginning articles. For example, if the full article was named <code><nowiki>The Mailer Review/Volume 10, 2016/The Curious Story of Norman Mailer’s Engagement with Short Fiction</nowiki></code>, you would just use <code><nowiki>The Curious Story of Norman Mailer’s Engagement with Short Fiction</nowiki></code> and put the <code><nowiki>The</nowiki></code> on the end, like: <code><nowiki>{{DEFAULTSORT:Curious Story of Norman Mailer’s Engagement with Short Fiction, The}}</nowiki></code>. This instructs the system to sort this article under C in category indexes.

For more information, see [[w:Template:DEFAULTSORT|Template:DEFAULTSORT]] on Wikipedia.

== Categories ==
Article categories are classified as follows. Choose the most appropriate for the article you’re remediating:

* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Articles (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
** <code><nowiki>[[Category:Classic Interpretations (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Biographies (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Interviews (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Book Reviews (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Bibliographies (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Tributes (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Creative Works (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
** <code><nowiki>[[Category:Short Stories (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
** <code><nowiki>[[Category:Poetry (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
** <code><nowiki>[[Category:Plays (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
** <code><nowiki>[[Category:Excerpts (MR)]]</nowiki></code>

Most of the time, you will only select '''one''' category for your article. The indented categories are subcategories of the those above them. For more information on categories, see [[w:Help:Category|Help:Category]] and [[w:Wikipedia:Categorization|Wikipedia:Categorization]] on Wikipedia.

== Finish Up ==
When you complete your remediation, post a message to my [[User talk:Grlucas|talk page]] for final review. Be sure to include a link to the article. When I have checked it, I will remove the {{tl|Working}} banner and remain forever grateful for your assistance in making Project Mailer better.

== Notes ==
{{notelist}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Remediating Articles}}
[[Category:For Editors]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/From Here to Eternity and The Naked and the Dead: Premiere to Eternity?

2025-04-29T11:41:14Z

Jules Carry: Fixed title.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''From Here to Eternity'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'': Premiere to Eternity?}}
{{MR05}}
{{byline|last=Hicks|first=Alexander |abstract=A review of ''From Here To Eternity'' and ''The Naked and The Dead''. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr05hic}}
{{quote|The novelist deals with personality, with characters wearing their ''personae'' or social masks. He needs the framework of a stable society, and many of our best novelists have been conventional to the verge of fussiness. The romancer deals with individuality, with characters ''in vacuo'' idealized by revery, and, however conservative he may be, something nihilistic and untamable will likely break out of his pages.{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}} }}

{{quote|The epic requires as its object the occurrence of an action which must achieve expression in the whole breadth of its circumstance and relations as a rich event connected with the total world of a nation and epoch.{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}} }}

{{dc|dc=J|ames Jones was a born novelist}}. Norman Mailer was a born writer. This distinction holds, I believe, across the two authors’ life work. I illustrate this distinction here for only the authors’ first published novels, ''The Naked and the Dead'' and ''From Here to Eternity''. However, I believe these illustrations help assess not only the quality of these two books and each author’s career.{{pg|318|319}}
==Two Types of Fiction==
===''From Here to Eternity''===
In the classical taxonomic terms of Northrop Frye, From Here to Eternity is very much what Frye means by a ‘novel.’ Its characters do indeed wear “their personae or social masks.”{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}} Robert E. Lee Prewitt is very much a Private First Class, Milton Anthony Warden a Sergeant, and Ms. Karen Holmes a housewife. (They are vivid and memorable, yet seldom capitalize much on eccentrics as Mark such well-remembered Dickens characters as ''David Copperfield’s'' Mr. Macawber or ''Martin Chuzzlewit’s'' Seth Pecksniff.) The book’s stable societal framework is the U.S. Army just preceding World War II. Right at ''Eternity’s'' outset, we are given the novelistic focus on a character in a social context:<blockquote>When he finished packing, he walked out onto the third-floor porch of the barracks, brushing the dust from his hands. He was a very neat and deceptively slim young man in summer khakis that were still fresh early in the morning.

He leaned his elbows on the porch edge and stood looking down through the screen at the familiar scene of the barracks square laid out below, with the tiers of porches dark in the face of the three-story concrete barracks fronting the square. He felt a half-familiar affection for this vantage point that he was leaving.

Below him, under the blows of the February Hawaiian sun, the quadrangle gasped defenselessly like an exhausted fighter. Through the heat haze and the thin mid-morning film of the parched red dust, a muted orchestra of sounds emerged: the clankings of steel-wheeled carts bouncing over brick, the slappings of oiled leather sling straps, the shuffling beat of scorched shoe soles, and the hoarse expletives of irritated noncoms.

Somewhere along the line, he thought, these things have become your heritage. You are multiplied by each sound that you hear. And you cannot deny them, without denying with them the purpose of your own existence. Yet now, he told himself, you are denying them, by renouncing the place that they have given you.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=3}}</blockquote>{{pg|319|320}}
By the end of Chapter Two, we know of the principal protagonist, Prewitt, whose place in the Company he is leaving, and we know something about the Kentucky mountains from which he hails. Within a few more chapters, Prewitt is deeply engaged in his new world of Company G: the stern but fatherly Warden, the jokester’s friend Pfc. Maggio, company commander Holmes, and the numerous sharply drawn men who will “soljer” and chat and play cards with Prewitt and try to force him to box for the Company or almost make him wish he had, including Anderson, Bloom, Chaote, Kowalski, Leva, Mazzioli, Preem, and Stark.

The dialogue is masterful. Physical and social action clearly is evoked by concrete description and adept use of the empathetic first-person indirect, a vivid and seamlessly shifting point of view on the action and its social circumstance. If there is a mode of writing other than Frye’s “novel” that is aptly evoked by ''Eternity'', it is Frye’s “drama” in which the author hides from the audience and their direct experience.{{sfn|Frye|1957|p=239}} Characters jump off the page, as in this early exchange between Prewitt and Maggio:
<blockquote>“If I had knew,” he said to Prewitt, whose bunk was two beds from his own in Chief Choate’s squad, “if I had only knew what this man’s Army had been like. Of all the people in this outfit, they give that vacant Pfc to Bloom. Because he is a punchie.”

”What did you expect, Angelo?” Prew grinned.

“He aint even a good soljer, mind you,” Maggio said bitterly. “He’s ony just a punchie. I’m only out of ree-croot drill a month and I’m a better soljer than Bloom is.”

“Soljerin aint what does it.”

“But it ought a be. You wait, man. If I ever get out of this Army, you just wait. Draft or no draft, they’ll never get me back.”

“Balls,” Prew grinned. “You got all the makins of a thirty year
man. I can see it on you a block away.”

“Dont say that,” Maggio said, violently. “I mean it. I like you,
but I dont like even you that much. Thirty year man! Not me, buddy. If I’m goin to be a valet, yard man, and general handyman for some fuckin officer, I’m goin to get paid for it, see?”

“You’ll re-enlist,” Prew said.</blockquote>{{pg|320|321}}<blockquote>“I’ll re-enlist,” Maggio said chanting the old bugle call parody, “in a pig’s asshole. If anybody should of had that rating, man, you should of had it. You’re the best soljer in this outfit for my dough. By a hunert million miles.”{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=127}}</blockquote>

Dramatic conflict arises with great naturalness and force from the well-etched milieu:

<blockquote>Andy was dealing when the saloon doors opened and Pfc Bloom came in, pushing the door back so hard it banged against the wall and the swung back and forth squeaking loudly. Pfc Bloom advanced on the men around the blanket with a heavy, meaty confidence grinning and shaking his flat kinky head, so big the tremendous shoulders seemed to fill the door.
“Quiet, jerk,” Maggio said. “You want the CQ up here and break up the game?”

“To hell with the CQ,” Bloom said, in his customary loud vice. “And you too, you little Wop.”

A transformation went over Maggio. He stood up and walked around the blanket, up to the huge Bloom who towered over him.

“Listen,” he said in a contorted voice. “I’m particular who calls me Wop. I aint big and tough, and I aint one of Dynamite’s third rate punchies. But I’m still Maggio to you. I wont mess with you. I work you over, I’ll do it with a chair or a knife.” He stared up at Bloom, his thin face twisted, his eyes blazing.

“Oh yeah?” Bloom said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Maggio said sarcastically. Bloom took a step to- ward him and he leaned his head forward pugnaciously on the thin bony shoulders, and there was the sudden attentive silence that always precedes a fight.

“Lay off, Bloom,” Prew said, surprised at the clear loudness of his voice in the silence. “Come on and sit down, Angelo. Five up to you.”

“I call,” Maggio said without looking around. “Take off, you bum,” he said over his shoulder as he walked away. Bloom laughed after him self-confidently and nastily.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=137}}</blockquote>{{pg|321|322}}Though the book does not appear to aspire to any allegorical significance beyond easily generalizable but hardly unusual outsider-insider, self-society, subordinate-superordinate tensions central to its dramatic construction, its typical “dramatic-novelistic” mode of expression incisively and elaborately illustrates insights into the relation of the individual to society within the specifically military hierarchal orders. ''Eternity'' rises eloquently to nice ironies of social aspiration and class, war, and peace, as in the book’s final pages on the status distortions of Lerene’s recollections of Prewitt’s patriotism and war. Take Karen Holmes and her son on the latter as they leave Honolulu Harbor:

<blockquote>From this far out, if you did not already know it was there you couldnt have seen it.

Behind her, the five boys had swelled to seven and had given up being shuffleboards and taken to shooting at each other with cocked thumbs and explosive “Bohww!”s from behind corners and stanchions.

She took the six flower leis off over her head and dropped them over the side. This was as good a place to drop them over as any. Diamond head, Koko Head, Makapuu Head. Perhaps Koko Head was the best place, really. The six leis fell together and the wind blew them back against the side of the ship and out of sight and she did not see them light on the water.

“Mother,” her son said from behind her. “I’m hungry. When do we eat on this old boat?”

“Pretty soon now,” she said.

“Mother, do you think the war will last long enough so I can graduate from the Point and be in it? Jerry Wilcox said it wouldnt.”

“No,” she said, “I dont think it’ll last that long.”

“Well, gee whiz, mother,” her son said, “I want to be in it.”

“Well, cheer up,” Karen said, “and dont let it worry you. You
may miss this one, but you’ll be just the right age for the next one.”

“You really think so, mother?” her son said anxiously.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=858}}</blockquote>

The dramatic arch of the multi-stranded narrative is strong and clear. Prewitt’s refusal to box for the company, Maggio’s mounting resistance to{{pg|322|323}} abuse of military power and class structures, and Warden’s bold consummation of his desire for Karen Holmes provide parallel disequilibria that trigger a narrative of beleaguered and in Prewitt and Maggio’s cases, doomed quests for “soljer” autonomy within a hierarchical social order. These three central narratives cascade outward, rippling across the others: Maggio’s rebellion is intensified by Prewitt’s ‘treatment’ by Holmes and the Company Boxers, and Maggio’s destruction in the Stockade deepens Prewitt’s rebelliousness. Ironic parallels between the Prewitt-Lorene affair and the Warden-Holmes affair cap the book’s conclusion aboard the liner on which Karen Holmes and ''Alma ‘Lorene’ Burke'' leave Honolulu shortly following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor and war provide a second parallel wave of disequilibria that concentrate the book’s action, speeding it to the conclusion: the AWOL Prewitt is shot by a Wartime sentry while seeking to return to his company, and the call of war cancels Warden’s committed involvement with Karen Holmes.

If there are jarring notes in ''Eternity'', they are stylistic. They are mainly comprised of faulty diction and idiosyncratic rhetoric that tends to arise when the writing veers off into an authorial voice distanced from specific characters and found within sociologically detailed dramatic situations. I address instances of the “bad” writing that has tended to conspire against the book’s chances for immortality, especially after eventually falling under the shadow of extensively negative reviews reviling Jones’s style that ''Some Came Running'' cast.

===''The Naked and the Dead''===
In the terms set out by Frye on the novel and romance, Mailer is as much an author of romances as of novels. Many characteristic portions of Mailer’s fiction express the subjectivity of the “psychological archetype” and “[radiate] a glow of subjective intensity.”{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}} This tendency in Mailer’s writing is perhaps most intensely expressed in the first-person narration of ''An American Dream’s'' Steve Rojack and The Executioner’s Song’s polyphony of consciousnesses. (Song is perhaps more a socially wide-ranging chronicle of snatches of consciousness rather than action scenes.) Although ''Naked'' is hardly a romance, by the ascent of Mt. Anaka, Croft becomes a “psychological archetype” who “radiates a glow of subjective intensity.”{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}} Indeed, with Croft, “something nihilistic and untamable” seems, in Frye’s words, “to keep break-{{pg|323|324}}ing out of [Mailer’s] pages” as would occur in much subsequent writing by Mailer.{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}} However, a novelistic romancer, even as a fiction writer, will not suffice in Mailer. His work resonates not only as novel and romance but also as confession (close to the tenor of O’Shaughnessy’s tale) and anatomy or “Mannipean satire” (with Mailer himself in ''The Armies of the Night'' and with the Presidential contenders of Mailer’s presidential campaign chronicles).

Still, not even evocation of the full range of Frye’s four fictive modes will suffice to categorize much of Mailer’s work. In particular, The Naked and the Dead evokes Moretti’s reference to the appearance of literary “one-off cases, oddities, anomalies” in his discussion of that variant of the high modernist fiction he terms “the modern epic” in his 1996 ''The Modern Epic''. If the original epic can be boiled down rather conventionally into a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation, the “modern epic” is a variation of the epic in which the heroic is downplayed and the expression of the “total world of a nation and epoch” extends to the “supranational” sphere, in which we encounter a somewhat incongruous ungainly mix of modes of expression—not only the very novelistic accounts of exchanges among the tale’s principals but the confessional ardor of Ishmael’s voice when he accounts his high spirits, the cataloging of seamen’s conversation during watches, the lessons in cytology, the pseudo-Shakespearean soliloquies of Ahab along on the forecastle.{{sfn|Meyer|2005|p=2128}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996|pp=11-14}} With the Ahab-like ardor of Croft ascending Mt. Anaka, the social and linguistic cataloging of social types and vernaculars in Time Machine and Chow Line segments, and the epic qualities of the book’s framing and charting, and detailed depiction of the Anopopei campaign and its combat actions; and the fundamental novelistic interactions among the principals, each with members of his immediate sphere—Cummings, Hearn, and Croft, each with his circle of underlings—''The Naked and the Dead'' fits the template of the “modern epic” quite well.

Although ''Naked'' has no individual hero—Croft is arguably an antihero— the action of the Army on Anopopei might be considered heroic. For example, the book begins with a statement about the invading force—the memorable “Nobody could sleep . . . all over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to{{pg|324|325}} be dead”—and it ends with a description of the “mop up” or “successful” campaign.{{sfn|Meyer|2005}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996}}

Further, ''Naked''’s use of its Time Machine segments reaches out toward the “expression” of the “total world of a nation and epoch.”{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}} These devices democratically apply the model of Dos Passos’s elite biographic profiles of great Americans in the ''U.S.A.'' to the description of the American “every man.”

In place of ''U.S.A.''’s Jack Reed and TR, aviators like the Wright Brothers, lovers like Rudolph Valentino, financiers like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan, we get Hispanic Texans like Julio Martinez; Texan and Virgin- ian rednecks Sam Croft and Woodrow Wilson; Montana miner and hobo Red Velsen; working-class Bostonian Irishman Will Gallagher and working-class Jewish Brooklynite Joey Goldstein; small-town Northeastern/Midwestern middle-class William Brown; Northeastern/Midwestern, upper-class, Harvard-educated left intellectual Robert Hearn; and Northeastern/Midwestern, upper-class, West Point-educated Far Right intellectual General Cummings.

Indeed, ''Naked''’s use of its Time Machine segments extends the ''U.S.A.''’s encyclopedia of American social types and speech during the second and third decades of the twentieth century to the third and early fourth decades of the century, for the Time Machine profiles deal with the biographies that highlight the preponderantly 1930s and early 1940s adolescence and youth of ''Naked''’s cast on its principal 1944-ish stage.

''Naked''’s allegorical structure also contributes to the book’s “expression” of a “total world of a nation and epoch.”{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}} As an allegory, The Naked and the Dead is dystopian. It is, in part, a dystopia of fascistic foreboding expressed both in terms of General Cumming’s highbrow aspirations of a domestically authoritarian and internationally imperialistic United States and in terms of Sergeant Croft’s thuggish service for Cummings (i.e., his role in the elimination of the annoying Lieutenant Hearn for Cummings).

However, it articulates a more nuanced vision than the sometimes noted dystopian X-ray of fascist undercurrent at War and a possible fascistic post-war. It also voices the vision of the unexpected military victory that the hum-drum and luck Major Dalleson led right under General Cummings’s nose—a triumph of competence and good luck that is a harbinger less of fascist totalitarianism than of managerialism and centrist liberalism fringed by Cold War hysteria of the Truman and Eisenhower eras. Mailer closes off not with some extension of Cummings’s subtly maneuvered elimination of the intellectually annoying and faintly insubordinate Liberal Lieutenant Hearn.

{{pg|325|326}}
Instead, he leaves us with Major Dalleson captivated by the USO poster and PR charm of the emerging, somewhat demilitarized managerial age, thinking with more innocence than is imaginable for Cummings, “He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co-ordinate grid system laid over it.”{{sfn|Moretti|1996}}

==Style, Construction, and Assessment==
===''From Here to Eternity''===
Jones has been criticized for bad writing. The main site of this criticism and defenses against it is in writing on ''Some Came Running''. However, as we shall see, these criticisms had precursors in responses to ''From Here to Eternity''.{{sfn|Garret|1984|p=100}} Writing on ''Some Came Running'', Edmund Fuller wrote, “[I]f you like bad grammar...shoddy and befuddled philosophy, ''Some Came Running'' is your book,” and Time that “Choctaw rather than English would appear to be [Jones’s] first language.”{{sfn|Carter|1998|p=38}} And, J. Donald Adams attributed Jones with having a “fatuous pride in being illiterate.”{{sfn|Carter|1998|p=38}}

On ''Eternity’s'' literary quality, Burgess{{sfn|Burgess|1984}} wrote the following in ''The Caine Mutiny'' section of his 99 Novels: “[Mutiny] stands somewhere between Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' . . . and James Jones’s ''From Here to Eternity''. It has some literary distinction, far more than Jones’s, much less than Mailer’s.”{{sfn|Carter|1998|p=56}}

Similarly, I recall a 1960s episode of ''The David Susskind Show'' in which Gore Vidal dismissed Jones’s book for bad writing after praising Fred Zin-Neumann’s film ''Eternity''. Although I am both a Jones and a Bloom fan, I was not surprised when I realized that Jones was entirely unmentioned in the extensive critical works of the stylistically finicky Harold Bloom.

Defenders of Jones’s style cast light on its positive and negative criticism. For example, Tom Carson writes, “[A]t its crowded, vernacular best [the prose] does just what he wanted to do, involve you in the events, and put you inside the characters’ heads with striking veracity and conviction.”{{sfn|Carson|1984|p=19}} George Garret writes that “Jones, as he wrote ''Running'', was involved in an experiment with language, a kind of discovery . . . he calls it working with ‘colloquial forms’ by which he means not merely the free and easy use of the living, spoken American language on dialogue or first-person narration but an attempt to carry it into the narrative itself, into third-person narration.”{{sfn|Carson|1984|p=116}} These defenses focus on that aspect of Jones’s writing that his critics seem to stress as his weakest attribute: his writing style.{{pg|326|327}}
One concentration of stylistic criticism seems to focus on Jones’s attempts to put readers “inside the characters’ heads.”{{sfn|Carson|1984|p=19}} This mainly consists of the use of the first-person indirect and free indirect, in which movement between a third-person mimicry of a character’s consciousness approaching stream of consciousness and authorial comment on characters’ consciousness or simple third person occurs, for Jones seldom lapses into the first person in ‘third person’ fictions like ''Eternity'' and ''Running''. This second paragraph of the book’s first page, already quoted above, illustrates the sort of writing:

<blockquote>Through the heat haze and the thin mid-morning film of the parched red dust came up a muted orchestra of sounds: the clankings of steel wheeled carts bouncing over the brick, the slapping of oiled leather slingstraps.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=3}}</blockquote>

So does the third paragraph of ''Eternity’s'' opening:

<blockquote>Somewhere along the line, he thought, these things have become your heritage. You are multiplied by each sound that you hear. And you cannot deny them without denying with them the purpose of your own existence. Yet now, he told himself, you are denying them by denying the place they have given you.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=3}}</blockquote>

A second concentration of stylistic criticism refers to instances of straightforward third-person narration, a voice mainly confined to the tellingly italsized introductory pages to “Book Four: The Stockade.”

Examples of the first sort of faulted writing mainly occur when Jones gages in extended attempts at first-person indirect and free indirect, and his language grows either too arcane to ring true as a plausible voice of the character overheard or too oddly vernacular to work as a shift into authorial voice. Even writing in a tone ostensibly close to a character, Jones may move into an oddly eccentric rhetoric that manages to violate the standards of verisimilitude in the mimicry of a character’s use of language required of the first-person indirect or the standards of good authorial rhetoric, or both standards at once. An example of a double violation arises in the early pages of “Book Four: The Stockade” where Jones describes Prewitt’s thoughts or feelings regarding “a great conflict of fear” that “lay rises flapping from the depth {{pg|327|328}}like a giant manta ray, looming larger and bigger, looming huge, up out of the green depths that you can look down into through a water glass and see the anchor cable dwindling in a long arch down into invisibility, up from far below that even, flapping the two wing fins of choice and ego caught square in the middle.”{{sfn|Jones|1951|pp=410-411}} This refers to fears that Prewitt thinks his unthinking candor precipitates in the minds of others (in this case fears of homosexuality in the mind of Maggio).

Examples of the second sort of blemished writing arise in “Book Four: The Stockade” when we shift into an authorial voice far from that dramatic mode in which the book’s style approximates a dramatic mode in which the audience experiences content directly. In the straight-out italics with which “The Stockade” opens, Jones writes, “''He was held in confinement at the Stockade as a general prisoner while he waited trial''.”{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=405}} Clearly, “awaited” is the appropriate word. Later, still writing in a straight-forward third-person narrator (or omniscient narrator) voice, Jones describes the “many officers, officers’ wives and officers’ children” near Honolulu’s “tennis courts, golf course, and bridle paths as all are looking very tanned and sportive.”{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=409}} Clearly, “sporty” is the appropriate word.

In defense of Jones’s prose, Garret refers to innovations with “colloquial forms” by Faulkner and O’Hara, and Carter extends this line of defense with a few brief evocations (e.g., of Bellow and Updike).{{sfn|Garret|1984|p=116}}{{sfn|Carter|1998|p=39}} However, I do not find these lines of defense persuasive. Where I see no lapse in an author’s use of the first-person and free indirect (e.g., for O’Hara, Faulkner, and Bellow), the defense does not seem worth extended comment in the time and space available. (I think that Faulkner, O’Hara, and Bellow employ idiomatic English more adeptly in using the free indirect).

I see such a lapse when Updike lapses into language too literary (e.g., too metaphorically ornate) to credibly reflect a character’s consciousness, which, compared to the stylistically masterful Updike, seems inappropriate, despite Updike’s lapses. Although I see some dubious use of idiomatic language in straightforward third-person narration divorced from the first-person indirect and free indirect in the work of William Faulkner, the comparison again seems generally inappropriate (i.e., too much a matter of an idiosyncratic syntax), as well as rather too complex for this effort.

The digression of the pros and cons of Jones’s possible stylistic shortcomings, where they turn up in Jones’s writing, seems less relevant to the assessment {{pg|328|329}}of that writing—''Eternity'', in particular—and seems less important than my defense of Jones. This focuses on how infrequently they turn up and how peripheral they are when they do turn up—most especially in ''From Here to Eternity''. In brief, the instances of poor writing that Jones’s stylistic critics have targeted tend to address occasional divergences from Jones’s best and most characteristic writing. This is a “transparent” mode of writing focused on dialogue backed by incisive descriptions of action and setting backed up by preponderantly adept excursions into the first-person indirect and divorced—mostly divorced—from overt authorial voice.

That mode of writing resembles Frye’s dramatic mode in which the author is hidden from the audience, and the audience “experiences content directly.”{{sfn|Frye|1957|p=229}}

This mode provides almost all of the words of ''From Here to Eternity'' and ''Whistle''. It provides enough of Some Came Running to constitute nearly all of Jones’s 1958 Signet abridgment of Running. It perhaps does not apply well to ''The Thin Red Line'' because, in that novel, Jones is far more involved in using the free indirect, in which he shifts between dialogue and physical description. The first-person-son-indirect variant of stream of consciousness jumps so frequently and swiftly from consciousness to consciousness to virtually create a collective consciousness of ''Thin Red Line’s'' GIs.

''From Here to Eternity'' can only receive glancing blows from the criticisms of Jones’s writing for that book because these are largely irrelevant to most of the book’s writing. The same can be said for ''The Thin Red Line'' and ''Whistle''. ''Some Came Running'' may be another story. (For convenience, I ignore all of Jones’s books, but only the four that were mentioned.) On the one hand, the power of its underlying narrative, documentary scope and cogency, and rich characterization seems to compare to that of ''From Here to Eternity''. (Here we have aspects of Jones’s creativity perhaps even more effectively expressed by Minnelli’s 1958 film than by Zinnemann’s excellent 1953 one.) Moreover, Jones scholars have claimed with great zeal thematic and spiritual merits for the voluminous stretches of writing in ''Running'' that do not conform to the model of transparent writing and drama-like novelistic presentation described here for ''Running''. Alas, with ''Running'', critics of Jones’s style have a large target. Perhaps champions of Jones might devise defenses for his literary style—say via elaboration of Garret’s claim that what looks awkward about the style of ''Running'' has an unappreciated idiomatic grace. However, such a defense seems to me no more than sketched.{{pg|329|330}}
===''The Naked and the Dead''===
Some critics found the structure of ''The Naked and the Dead'' baggy.{{efn|{{harvtxt|Dickstein|2005|p=25}} refers to Jones’s ''The Thin Red Line'' as “a tighter, more disciplined rejoinder to ''The Naked and the Dead'' and charges Mailer with filling in his characters’ backgrounds “cumsily.”}} In particular, they have charged that its narrative is encumbered and diffused by the Time Machine profiles of principal characters and by a late usurpation of the protagonist’s role by Sergeant Croft. Here, I dispute these criticisms partly because they are put in a new, more accurate light that is more favorable to ''Naked'' when this is considered an instance of Moretti’s “modern epic.” Regarding the sometimes imputed ungainliness of the Time Machine segments, critics have overlooked the function of the Time Machine segments—not as a plot element in a well-structured novelistic narrative, but as a kind of post-Crash extension of the 1910-1930 sociological and linguistic profile of the U.S.A. provided by the social disparate cast of Dos Passos’s ''U.S.A.'' In doing this, they fail to judge ''Naked'' as a “modern epic” with stress on “a summation of a social and cultural totality” and as no simple traditional war novel.{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}}

Further, critics have tended to overlook the sheer propulsive vigor of ''Naked''’s narrative, which belies technical claims against this narrative’s construction.

Regarding the coherence of ''Naked'', this is quite remarkable considering the book’s social reach as a social chronicle, political allegory, and combat narrative. Suppose some of the book’s coherence rests on traditional nov- elastic foundations. In that case, some derive from the book’s ambitious modernist (i.e., modernist epic) reach for the expression of a capacious social world. The central cumulating dramas of the book’s Anopopei narrative are key to this coherence. To my mind, four interlocking “dramatic substructures” to the Anopopei narrative cohere into one visionary drama. One drama consists of the ''top-down fascistic reach'' of Cummings’s creation of the patrol as an attempted solution to his failures to either effectively assert the dominance of his authoritarian intellectual vision about the left-liberal Hearn or to advance his high career aspirations via his direction of the battle for Anopopei.

The second consists of the ''bottom-up fascistic reach'' of Croft’s attempted assertion of his will to power over Hearn by maneuvering his death and over his squad by pitting it against the symbolic and practical challenge of Mt Anaka. The third consists of the ''heroically solidaristic al-truism'' (and ''resistance'') entailed by Goldstein and Ridges’ attempted assertion of soldier solidarity and group survival in the face of Croft’s assertion of his will to power. The fourth and final drama consists of the ''managerial ascendance'' of Dalleson’s competently assisted usurpation of immediate pragmatic {{pg|330|331}}military success on Anopopei due to a nicely Tolstoyan combination of managerial competence and sheer chance.

''Naked''’s narrative elements cumulate well. The Cummings narrative ends powerfully with the death of Hearn and the trumping of Cummings’s Mt. Anaka strategy by Dalleson’s sea strategy. The Croft story ends with powerful irony with the failure of the Mt. Anaka expedition, especially in the wake of the boldness of the Hearn offing and the strength shown by Croft in the initial attempt at the crossing. The heroic tale of Goldstein and Ridges serves as a nice dramatic and thematic counterpoint to the high and low fascist authoritarianism of Cummings and Croft and the softer, friendlier managerial authoritarianism of Dalleson. The Dalleson tale resolves itself and all the others with the resolution of fascistic and humanistic strains of narrative in the triumph of a managerial competence marked by some mediocrity and much good luck. The range of narrative strands—and their wrap-up with the Dalleson strand—offset the somewhat disproportionate force of the Croft strand, at least as we finish reading, if not necessarily in longer-term memory.

If ''Naked'' allegory helps provide a strong focus, so does the integrative cumulative force of the book’s narrative. This is not merely some incoherent—or coherent—near apotheosis of Croft’s vivid psychopathy but a symmetrical dystopia of fascist foreboding high (as with Cummings) and low (as with Croft). Moreover, it is not merely the often noted dystopian vision of fascist undercurrent at War and possible fascist post-war as well that is conceived of as a harbinger of the dangers and restraints of an age of Eisenhower, managerialism, and centrist liberalism, surface success, and contentment and underlying antagonisms as one can imagine.

The social-documentary scope of ''Naked''’s Time Machines segments and the reach and focus of its allegory fits Moretti’s model of the “modern epic” with its aspirations toward the expression of the “whole breadth” of “the total world of a nation and epoch.”{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=3}}

This modernistic epic character of ''Naked'' vitiates much of the force of arguments against ''Naked'' as a loosely constructed attempt at a traditional novel. Within the context of a ‘modern epic’, ''Naked''’s Time Machines segments and allegorical anatomy function as social visions with literary standing in their own right. That they take little or nothing from the effectiveness of ''Naked''’s more conventional narrative and novelistic pleasures only enhances ''Naked'' as a multifaceted modern epic as much as the novelistic character of{{pg|331|332}} ''Eternity'' is consistent with the type of writing that Jones does best (and does almost exclusively in his first fiction). ''Naked''’s range of literary performances is consistent with the book’s genre, variegated skills, and modes of Mailer’s writing.

This is not to say that the conceptualization of ''Naked'' as a modern epic provides any defense of criticisms of ''Naked''’s use of language in a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph literary style. Much of Mailer’s style shows the limitations of its reliance on a simple combination of dialogue, transparent physical description of the speakers and their settings, and the use of first-person indirect (after the models of James T. Farrell’s ''Studs Lonegan'' and Tolstoy’s ''War and Peace'' and ''Anna Karenina'').{{efn|The atmosphere of ''The Naked and the Dead'', the overspirit, is Tolstoyan; the rococo comes out of Dos Passos; the fundamental slogging style from Farrell, and the occasional overrich descriptions from Wolfe,” said Mailer to interviewer Peter {{harvtxt|Manso|1985}}.}}

However, I would argue that this style is very serviceable for expressing the characters and character interactions at the center of much of the book. The characters are memorable, with several—at least Hearn, Cummings, and Croft— drawn with depth and dynamism. For example, we see Hearn’s intellectual confidence with Cummings and insecurity with “the men” of his platoon; we see Cummings both as aloof intellectual and commander, as schemer maneuvering Hearn into the dangerous patrol, and as the deflated figure who must acknowledge Dalleson’s credit as victor of the Anopopei campaign; and we see Croft as not just a hard and capable commander of men but as one in the throes of a mythic conflict with Mt. Anaka that resonates with Ahab’s quest for ''Moby Dick''.

More generally, lesser characters like Martinez and Goldstein show development, and the dialogue and accounts of soldiering ring forcefully true. Indeed, the physical action of men in battle with the Japanese and with na- ture is often eloquent. For example, the opening rises to the level of tolstoy in his epic descriptive mode on Napoleon’s Russian campaign. Here it is: “Nobody could sleep. When the morning came, assault craft would be low- ered and a first wave of troops would ride through the surf and charge ashore on the beach of Anapopei. All over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to be dead.”{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=3}} The description of a storm hitting base camp is especially memorable:

<blockquote>The wind tore through the bivouac area like a great scythe, slashing the palm fronds from the coconut trees, blasting the rain before it. As they looked, they saw a tent jerk upward from its</blockquote>{{pg|332|333}} <blockquote>mooring, steam away in the wind, flapping like a terrified bird...
A tremendous gust of wind bellied under the tent blew it out like a balloon, and then the ridgepole snapped, tearing a rent in the poncho. The tent fell upon the four men like a wet sheet . . . . “Where are you?” he shouted, and then the folds of the tent filled out again like a sail, ripped loose altogether, and went eddying and twisting through the air . . . . All the tents were down in the bivouac area, and here and there a soldier would go skittering through the mud, staggering from the force of the wind with the odd jerking motions of a man walking in a motion picture when the film is unwinding too rapidly.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|pp=86-88}}</blockquote>

The descriptions of the platoon’s frequent physical exhaustion achieve a visceral force:

<blockquote>Their ears filled with the quick, frenetic rustling of insects and animals, the thin screeching rage of mosquitoes, and the raucous babbling of monkeys and parakeets . . . . Slowly, inevitably, the men felt the water soak through the greased waterproofing of their shoes and slosh up to their knees whenever they had to wade through a deeper portion of the stream.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=398}}</blockquote>

Those descriptions of the platoon on patrol winding through the Kunai grass formed a pictorial beauty that would become one of Walsh’s chief inspirations in his film version of ''The Naked and the Dead''.

Turning to the stylistic merits of the Time Machine segments—and not just their proclaimed obtrusiveness as excessively flashy, overly documented, philosophically deterministic baggage for an effective war novel and campaign narrative—critics have been unperceptive. They have also dismissed the Time Machine segments as overly derivative—as too closely modelled after Dos Passos’s telegraphed biographies of national elites in the ''U.S.A.'' However, in making this criticism, critics have overlooked how Mailer’s use of the Time Machine devices follows Pound’s modernist injunction to “make it new.” In particular, they have missed how thoroughly democratic and sometimes playful Mailer’s Time Machines are.{{pg|333|334}}
In contrast with Dos Passos’s use of his profiles to telegraph the life of important national figures in shaping the world, where he situates his cast of rather everyday fictional characters, Mailer’s Time Machine bios file numerous faces of ’everyman.’ They do so via transferring Dos Passos’s elite-oriented device to a popular subject matter. As Mailer writes in the first Time Machine, which profiles Julio Martinez, “Mexican boys also breathe the American Fables, also want to be heroes, aviators, lovers, financiers.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=55}} This is to say that they also want to be figures like those of the ''U.S.A.'' biographers, heroes like Jack Reed and TR, aviators like the Wright Brothers, lovers like Rudolph Valentino, and financiers like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan. They have also failed to notice such playful touches as we find in Mailer’s Woodrow Wilson Time Machine episode.

This evokes Dos Passos’s Meester Veelson biography of President Woodrow Wilson in ''The 42nd Parallel'' in more than title. At the outset of his profile of the white-trash Wilson, Mailer presents him in “''a pair of round, silver-rimmed glasses''” reminiscent of those that appeared on the patrician Southern President in the photograph.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=326}}

In addition, Mailer’s prose sometimes attains a roiling power and dignity, most especially in its “overspirit” mode, using its use or near use of the “heroic” line: “Ahead, ahead, ahead, ahead, moving” catches the cadence of this pentameter, splendidly detailed for Mailer’s writings by Christopher Ricks. For example, “The moon was out, limning the deck housings.”{{sfn|Ricks|2008|p=10}} Returning to Mailer on the movement of that 77mm artillery piece, we have a final phrase that begins with the heroic line:

<blockquote>Once or twice, a flare filtered a wan and delicate bluish light over them, the light almost lost in the dense foliage through which it had to pass. In the brief moment it lasted, they were caught at their guns in classic straining motions with the form and beauty of a frieze. The water and the dark slime of the trail twice blackened their uniforms. Moreover, the light shone on them instantly, and their faces stood out, white and contorted. Even the guns had a slender articulated beauty like an insect reared back on its wire haunches. Then darkness swirled about them again, and they ground the guns forward mindlessly, a line of ants dragging their burden back to their hole.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=116}}</blockquote> {{pg|334|335}} <blockquote>That is, we have, with some intriguing mix of heroic irony, Mailer’s dignification of the routine derided as the “heroic” beat of “a line of ants dragging their burden back.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=116}}</blockquote>

Neither ''The Naked and the Dead'' nor ''From Here to Eternity'' is remarkable for such stylistic innovation or sustained eloquence as we find, say, in ''The Sun Also Rises'', ''The Sound and the Fury'', ''Invisible Man'', A''ugie Marsh'', or ''Pale Fire''. Each, however, is masterful in realizing its basic fictional design. ''From Here to Eternity'' dramatizes a social milieu unexcelled in American writing. ''The Naked and the Dead'' provides a vision of the U.S.A. combat in the Pacific theater of World War II and during the preceding decade, plus a look into the future. Stylistically, ''From Here to Eternity'' frequently attains the peculiar eloquence of great drama in which the audience witnesses intense action directly. ''The Naked and the Dead'' rises intermittently to a level of stylistic eloquence above and beyond the call of its particular fictional duty.

==Notes==
{{notelist}}

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

==Work Cited==
{{refbegin|20em|indent=yes}}
* {{cite book |last=Burgess |first=Anthony |url= |title=99 Novels: The Best English Novels Since 1939 |publisher=New York: Summit |year=1984 |isbn= |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Carson |first=Tom |url= |title=The Hell with Literature: James Jones’s Unvarnished Truths |date=28 September 1984 |publisher=Village Voice Literary Supplement |isbn= |edition=1st |location= |pages=18-20 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Carter |first=Steven R. |url= |title=James Jones: An American Literary Orientalist Master |date= |publisher=U of Illinois P |year=1998 |isbn= |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |url= |title=Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970 |publisher=Harvard UP |year=2005 |isbn= |location=Cambridge, MA |pages=25 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |author=Frye |first=Northrop |url= |title=Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. |publisher=Princeton UP |year=1957 |isbn= |location=Princeton |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Frye |first=Northrop |authormask=1 |title=The Four Forms of Prose Fiction |url= |journal=Hudson Review |volume= 2 |issue=4 |pages=582-598 |date=1950 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Garret |first=George P. |title=James Jones |date=1984 |publisher=Harcourt |isbn= |edition= |location=New York |pages=|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Jones |first=James |url= |title=From Here to Eternity |publisher=Scribner |year=1951 |isbn= |location=New York |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |url= |title=The Naked and the Dead |date= |publisher=Holt, Rinehart, and Winston|isbn= |location=New York |publication-date=1948 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Manso |first=Peter |url= |title=Mailer: His Life and Times |publisher=Simon |isbn= |location=New York |publication-date=1985 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Meyer |first=Michael |url= |title=The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing |publisher=Bedford |year=2005 |isbn= |location=Boston |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Moretti |first=Franco |title=Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez |date=1996 |publisher=Verso |isbn= |location=London |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite speech |last=Ricks |first=Christopher |date=October 2008 |title=Mailer’s Rhythm |url= |event=The Norman Mailer Society Conference |location=Provincetown, MA |publisher= |access-date= }}
{{refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:From Here to Eternity and The Naked and the Dead: Premiere to Eternity?}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/From Here to Eternity and The Naked and the Dead: Premiere to Eternity?

2025-04-29T11:40:41Z

Jules Carry: Fixes.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''From Here to Eternity'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'': Premiere to Eternity?}}
{{MR05}}
{{byline|last=Hicks|first=Alexander |abstract=A review of ''From Here To Eternity'' and ''The Naked and The Dead''. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr05hic}}
{{quote|The novelist deals with personality, with characters wearing their ''personae'' or social masks. He needs the framework of a stable society, and many of our best novelists have been conventional to the verge of fussiness. The romancer deals with individuality, with characters ''in vacuo'' idealized by revery, and, however conservative he may be, something nihilistic and untamable will likely break out of his pages.{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}} }}

{{quote|The epic requires as its object the occurrence of an action which must achieve expression in the whole breadth of its circumstance and relations as a rich event connected with the total world of a nation and epoch.{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}} }}

{{dc|dc=J|ames Jones was a born novelist}}. Norman Mailer was a born writer. This distinction holds, I believe, across the two authors’ life work. I illustrate this distinction here for only the authors’ first published novels, ''The Naked and the Dead'' and ''From Here to Eternity''. However, I believe these illustrations help assess not only the quality of these two books and each author’s career.{{pg|318|319}}
==Two Types of Fiction==
===''From Here to Eternity''===
In the classical taxonomic terms of Northrop Frye, From Here to Eternity is very much what Frye means by a ‘novel.’ Its characters do indeed wear “their personae or social masks.”{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}} Robert E. Lee Prewitt is very much a Private First Class, Milton Anthony Warden a Sergeant, and Ms. Karen Holmes a housewife. (They are vivid and memorable, yet seldom capitalize much on eccentrics as Mark such well-remembered Dickens characters as ''David Copperfield’s'' Mr. Macawber or ''Martin Chuzzlewit’s'' Seth Pecksniff.) The book’s stable societal framework is the U.S. Army just preceding World War II. Right at ''Eternity’s'' outset, we are given the novelistic focus on a character in a social context:<blockquote>When he finished packing, he walked out onto the third-floor porch of the barracks, brushing the dust from his hands. He was a very neat and deceptively slim young man in summer khakis that were still fresh early in the morning.

He leaned his elbows on the porch edge and stood looking down through the screen at the familiar scene of the barracks square laid out below, with the tiers of porches dark in the face of the three-story concrete barracks fronting the square. He felt a half-familiar affection for this vantage point that he was leaving.

Below him, under the blows of the February Hawaiian sun, the quadrangle gasped defenselessly like an exhausted fighter. Through the heat haze and the thin mid-morning film of the parched red dust, a muted orchestra of sounds emerged: the clankings of steel-wheeled carts bouncing over brick, the slappings of oiled leather sling straps, the shuffling beat of scorched shoe soles, and the hoarse expletives of irritated noncoms.

Somewhere along the line, he thought, these things have become your heritage. You are multiplied by each sound that you hear. And you cannot deny them, without denying with them the purpose of your own existence. Yet now, he told himself, you are denying them, by renouncing the place that they have given you.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=3}}</blockquote>{{pg|319|320}}
By the end of Chapter Two, we know of the principal protagonist, Prewitt, whose place in the Company he is leaving, and we know something about the Kentucky mountains from which he hails. Within a few more chapters, Prewitt is deeply engaged in his new world of Company G: the stern but fatherly Warden, the jokester’s friend Pfc. Maggio, company commander Holmes, and the numerous sharply drawn men who will “soljer” and chat and play cards with Prewitt and try to force him to box for the Company or almost make him wish he had, including Anderson, Bloom, Chaote, Kowalski, Leva, Mazzioli, Preem, and Stark.

The dialogue is masterful. Physical and social action clearly is evoked by concrete description and adept use of the empathetic first-person indirect, a vivid and seamlessly shifting point of view on the action and its social circumstance. If there is a mode of writing other than Frye’s “novel” that is aptly evoked by ''Eternity'', it is Frye’s “drama” in which the author hides from the audience and their direct experience.{{sfn|Frye|1957|p=239}} Characters jump off the page, as in this early exchange between Prewitt and Maggio:
<blockquote>“If I had knew,” he said to Prewitt, whose bunk was two beds from his own in Chief Choate’s squad, “if I had only knew what this man’s Army had been like. Of all the people in this outfit, they give that vacant Pfc to Bloom. Because he is a punchie.”

”What did you expect, Angelo?” Prew grinned.

“He aint even a good soljer, mind you,” Maggio said bitterly. “He’s ony just a punchie. I’m only out of ree-croot drill a month and I’m a better soljer than Bloom is.”

“Soljerin aint what does it.”

“But it ought a be. You wait, man. If I ever get out of this Army, you just wait. Draft or no draft, they’ll never get me back.”

“Balls,” Prew grinned. “You got all the makins of a thirty year
man. I can see it on you a block away.”

“Dont say that,” Maggio said, violently. “I mean it. I like you,
but I dont like even you that much. Thirty year man! Not me, buddy. If I’m goin to be a valet, yard man, and general handyman for some fuckin officer, I’m goin to get paid for it, see?”

“You’ll re-enlist,” Prew said.</blockquote>{{pg|320|321}}<blockquote>“I’ll re-enlist,” Maggio said chanting the old bugle call parody, “in a pig’s asshole. If anybody should of had that rating, man, you should of had it. You’re the best soljer in this outfit for my dough. By a hunert million miles.”{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=127}}</blockquote>

Dramatic conflict arises with great naturalness and force from the well-etched milieu:

<blockquote>Andy was dealing when the saloon doors opened and Pfc Bloom came in, pushing the door back so hard it banged against the wall and the swung back and forth squeaking loudly. Pfc Bloom advanced on the men around the blanket with a heavy, meaty confidence grinning and shaking his flat kinky head, so big the tremendous shoulders seemed to fill the door.
“Quiet, jerk,” Maggio said. “You want the CQ up here and break up the game?”

“To hell with the CQ,” Bloom said, in his customary loud vice. “And you too, you little Wop.”

A transformation went over Maggio. He stood up and walked around the blanket, up to the huge Bloom who towered over him.

“Listen,” he said in a contorted voice. “I’m particular who calls me Wop. I aint big and tough, and I aint one of Dynamite’s third rate punchies. But I’m still Maggio to you. I wont mess with you. I work you over, I’ll do it with a chair or a knife.” He stared up at Bloom, his thin face twisted, his eyes blazing.

“Oh yeah?” Bloom said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Maggio said sarcastically. Bloom took a step to- ward him and he leaned his head forward pugnaciously on the thin bony shoulders, and there was the sudden attentive silence that always precedes a fight.

“Lay off, Bloom,” Prew said, surprised at the clear loudness of his voice in the silence. “Come on and sit down, Angelo. Five up to you.”

“I call,” Maggio said without looking around. “Take off, you bum,” he said over his shoulder as he walked away. Bloom laughed after him self-confidently and nastily.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=137}}</blockquote>{{pg|321|322}}Though the book does not appear to aspire to any allegorical significance beyond easily generalizable but hardly unusual outsider-insider, self-society, subordinate-superordinate tensions central to its dramatic construction, its typical “dramatic-novelistic” mode of expression incisively and elaborately illustrates insights into the relation of the individual to society within the specifically military hierarchal orders. ''Eternity'' rises eloquently to nice ironies of social aspiration and class, war, and peace, as in the book’s final pages on the status distortions of Lerene’s recollections of Prewitt’s patriotism and war. Take Karen Holmes and her son on the latter as they leave Honolulu Harbor:

<blockquote>From this far out, if you did not already know it was there you couldnt have seen it.

Behind her, the five boys had swelled to seven and had given up being shuffleboards and taken to shooting at each other with cocked thumbs and explosive “Bohww!”s from behind corners and stanchions.

She took the six flower leis off over her head and dropped them over the side. This was as good a place to drop them over as any. Diamond head, Koko Head, Makapuu Head. Perhaps Koko Head was the best place, really. The six leis fell together and the wind blew them back against the side of the ship and out of sight and she did not see them light on the water.

“Mother,” her son said from behind her. “I’m hungry. When do we eat on this old boat?”

“Pretty soon now,” she said.

“Mother, do you think the war will last long enough so I can graduate from the Point and be in it? Jerry Wilcox said it wouldnt.”

“No,” she said, “I dont think it’ll last that long.”

“Well, gee whiz, mother,” her son said, “I want to be in it.”

“Well, cheer up,” Karen said, “and dont let it worry you. You
may miss this one, but you’ll be just the right age for the next one.”

“You really think so, mother?” her son said anxiously.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=858}}</blockquote>

The dramatic arch of the multi-stranded narrative is strong and clear. Prewitt’s refusal to box for the company, Maggio’s mounting resistance to{{pg|322|323}} abuse of military power and class structures, and Warden’s bold consummation of his desire for Karen Holmes provide parallel disequilibria that trigger a narrative of beleaguered and in Prewitt and Maggio’s cases, doomed quests for “soljer” autonomy within a hierarchical social order. These three central narratives cascade outward, rippling across the others: Maggio’s rebellion is intensified by Prewitt’s ‘treatment’ by Holmes and the Company Boxers, and Maggio’s destruction in the Stockade deepens Prewitt’s rebelliousness. Ironic parallels between the Prewitt-Lorene affair and the Warden-Holmes affair cap the book’s conclusion aboard the liner on which Karen Holmes and ''Alma ‘Lorene’ Burke'' leave Honolulu shortly following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor and war provide a second parallel wave of disequilibria that concentrate the book’s action, speeding it to the conclusion: the AWOL Prewitt is shot by a Wartime sentry while seeking to return to his company, and the call of war cancels Warden’s committed involvement with Karen Holmes.

If there are jarring notes in ''Eternity'', they are stylistic. They are mainly comprised of faulty diction and idiosyncratic rhetoric that tends to arise when the writing veers off into an authorial voice distanced from specific characters and found within sociologically detailed dramatic situations. I address instances of the “bad” writing that has tended to conspire against the book’s chances for immortality, especially after eventually falling under the shadow of extensively negative reviews reviling Jones’s style that ''Some Came Running'' cast.

===''The Naked and the Dead''===
In the terms set out by Frye on the novel and romance, Mailer is as much an author of romances as of novels. Many characteristic portions of Mailer’s fiction express the subjectivity of the “psychological archetype” and “[radiate] a glow of subjective intensity.”{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}} This tendency in Mailer’s writing is perhaps most intensely expressed in the first-person narration of ''An American Dream’s'' Steve Rojack and The Executioner’s Song’s polyphony of consciousnesses. (Song is perhaps more a socially wide-ranging chronicle of snatches of consciousness rather than action scenes.) Although ''Naked'' is hardly a romance, by the ascent of Mt. Anaka, Croft becomes a “psychological archetype” who “radiates a glow of subjective intensity.”{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}} Indeed, with Croft, “something nihilistic and untamable” seems, in Frye’s words, “to keep break-{{pg|323|324}}ing out of [Mailer’s] pages” as would occur in much subsequent writing by Mailer.{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}} However, a novelistic romancer, even as a fiction writer, will not suffice in Mailer. His work resonates not only as novel and romance but also as confession (close to the tenor of O’Shaughnessy’s tale) and anatomy or “Mannipean satire” (with Mailer himself in ''The Armies of the Night'' and with the Presidential contenders of Mailer’s presidential campaign chronicles).

Still, not even evocation of the full range of Frye’s four fictive modes will suffice to categorize much of Mailer’s work. In particular, The Naked and the Dead evokes Moretti’s reference to the appearance of literary “one-off cases, oddities, anomalies” in his discussion of that variant of the high modernist fiction he terms “the modern epic” in his 1996 ''The Modern Epic''. If the original epic can be boiled down rather conventionally into a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation, the “modern epic” is a variation of the epic in which the heroic is downplayed and the expression of the “total world of a nation and epoch” extends to the “supranational” sphere, in which we encounter a somewhat incongruous ungainly mix of modes of expression—not only the very novelistic accounts of exchanges among the tale’s principals but the confessional ardor of Ishmael’s voice when he accounts his high spirits, the cataloging of seamen’s conversation during watches, the lessons in cytology, the pseudo-Shakespearean soliloquies of Ahab along on the forecastle.{{sfn|Meyer|2005|p=2128}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996|pp=11-14}} With the Ahab-like ardor of Croft ascending Mt. Anaka, the social and linguistic cataloging of social types and vernaculars in Time Machine and Chow Line segments, and the epic qualities of the book’s framing and charting, and detailed depiction of the Anopopei campaign and its combat actions; and the fundamental novelistic interactions among the principals, each with members of his immediate sphere—Cummings, Hearn, and Croft, each with his circle of underlings—''The Naked and the Dead'' fits the template of the “modern epic” quite well.

Although ''Naked'' has no individual hero—Croft is arguably an antihero— the action of the Army on Anopopei might be considered heroic. For example, the book begins with a statement about the invading force—the memorable “Nobody could sleep . . . all over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to{{pg|324|325}} be dead”—and it ends with a description of the “mop up” or “successful” campaign.{{sfn|Meyer|2005}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996}}

Further, ''Naked''’s use of its Time Machine segments reaches out toward the “expression” of the “total world of a nation and epoch.”{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}} These devices democratically apply the model of Dos Passos’s elite biographic profiles of great Americans in the ''U.S.A.'' to the description of the American “every man.”

In place of ''U.S.A.''’s Jack Reed and TR, aviators like the Wright Brothers, lovers like Rudolph Valentino, financiers like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan, we get Hispanic Texans like Julio Martinez; Texan and Virgin- ian rednecks Sam Croft and Woodrow Wilson; Montana miner and hobo Red Velsen; working-class Bostonian Irishman Will Gallagher and working-class Jewish Brooklynite Joey Goldstein; small-town Northeastern/Midwestern middle-class William Brown; Northeastern/Midwestern, upper-class, Harvard-educated left intellectual Robert Hearn; and Northeastern/Midwestern, upper-class, West Point-educated Far Right intellectual General Cummings.

Indeed, ''Naked''’s use of its Time Machine segments extends the ''U.S.A.''’s encyclopedia of American social types and speech during the second and third decades of the twentieth century to the third and early fourth decades of the century, for the Time Machine profiles deal with the biographies that highlight the preponderantly 1930s and early 1940s adolescence and youth of ''Naked''’s cast on its principal 1944-ish stage.

''Naked''’s allegorical structure also contributes to the book’s “expression” of a “total world of a nation and epoch.”{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}} As an allegory, The Naked and the Dead is dystopian. It is, in part, a dystopia of fascistic foreboding expressed both in terms of General Cumming’s highbrow aspirations of a domestically authoritarian and internationally imperialistic United States and in terms of Sergeant Croft’s thuggish service for Cummings (i.e., his role in the elimination of the annoying Lieutenant Hearn for Cummings).

However, it articulates a more nuanced vision than the sometimes noted dystopian X-ray of fascist undercurrent at War and a possible fascistic post-war. It also voices the vision of the unexpected military victory that the hum-drum and luck Major Dalleson led right under General Cummings’s nose—a triumph of competence and good luck that is a harbinger less of fascist totalitarianism than of managerialism and centrist liberalism fringed by Cold War hysteria of the Truman and Eisenhower eras. Mailer closes off not with some extension of Cummings’s subtly maneuvered elimination of the intellectually annoying and faintly insubordinate Liberal Lieutenant Hearn.

{{pg|325|326}}
Instead, he leaves us with Major Dalleson captivated by the USO poster and PR charm of the emerging, somewhat demilitarized managerial age, thinking with more innocence than is imaginable for Cummings, “He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co-ordinate grid system laid over it.”{{sfn|Moretti|1996}}

==Style, Construction, and Assessment==
===''From Here to Eternity''===
Jones has been criticized for bad writing. The main site of this criticism and defenses against it is in writing on ''Some Came Running''. However, as we shall see, these criticisms had precursors in responses to ''From Here to Eternity''.{{sfn|Garret|1984|p=100}} Writing on ''Some Came Running'', Edmund Fuller wrote, “[I]f you like bad grammar...shoddy and befuddled philosophy, ''Some Came Running'' is your book,” and Time that “Choctaw rather than English would appear to be [Jones’s] first language.”{{sfn|Carter|1998|p=38}} And, J. Donald Adams attributed Jones with having a “fatuous pride in being illiterate.”{{sfn|Carter|1998|p=38}}

On ''Eternity’s'' literary quality, Burgess{{sfn|Burgess|1984}} wrote the following in ''The Caine Mutiny'' section of his 99 Novels: “[Mutiny] stands somewhere between Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' . . . and James Jones’s ''From Here to Eternity''. It has some literary distinction, far more than Jones’s, much less than Mailer’s.”{{sfn|Carter|1998|p=56}}

Similarly, I recall a 1960s episode of ''The David Susskind Show'' in which Gore Vidal dismissed Jones’s book for bad writing after praising Fred Zin-Neumann’s film ''Eternity''. Although I am both a Jones and a Bloom fan, I was not surprised when I realized that Jones was entirely unmentioned in the extensive critical works of the stylistically finicky Harold Bloom.

Defenders of Jones’s style cast light on its positive and negative criticism. For example, Tom Carson writes, “[A]t its crowded, vernacular best [the prose] does just what he wanted to do, involve you in the events, and put you inside the characters’ heads with striking veracity and conviction.”{{sfn|Carson|1984|p=19}} George Garret writes that “Jones, as he wrote ''Running'', was involved in an experiment with language, a kind of discovery . . . he calls it working with ‘colloquial forms’ by which he means not merely the free and easy use of the living, spoken American language on dialogue or first-person narration but an attempt to carry it into the narrative itself, into third-person narration.”{{sfn|Carson|1984|p=116}} These defenses focus on that aspect of Jones’s writing that his critics seem to stress as his weakest attribute: his writing style.{{pg|326|327}}
One concentration of stylistic criticism seems to focus on Jones’s attempts to put readers “inside the characters’ heads.”{{sfn|Carson|1984|p=19}} This mainly consists of the use of the first-person indirect and free indirect, in which movement between a third-person mimicry of a character’s consciousness approaching stream of consciousness and authorial comment on characters’ consciousness or simple third person occurs, for Jones seldom lapses into the first person in ‘third person’ fictions like ''Eternity'' and ''Running''. This second paragraph of the book’s first page, already quoted above, illustrates the sort of writing:

<blockquote>Through the heat haze and the thin mid-morning film of the parched red dust came up a muted orchestra of sounds: the clankings of steel wheeled carts bouncing over the brick, the slapping of oiled leather slingstraps.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=3}}</blockquote>

So does the third paragraph of ''Eternity’s'' opening:

<blockquote>Somewhere along the line, he thought, these things have become your heritage. You are multiplied by each sound that you hear. And you cannot deny them without denying with them the purpose of your own existence. Yet now, he told himself, you are denying them by denying the place they have given you.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=3}}</blockquote>

A second concentration of stylistic criticism refers to instances of straightforward third-person narration, a voice mainly confined to the tellingly italsized introductory pages to “Book Four: The Stockade.”

Examples of the first sort of faulted writing mainly occur when Jones gages in extended attempts at first-person indirect and free indirect, and his language grows either too arcane to ring true as a plausible voice of the character overheard or too oddly vernacular to work as a shift into authorial voice. Even writing in a tone ostensibly close to a character, Jones may move into an oddly eccentric rhetoric that manages to violate the standards of verisimilitude in the mimicry of a character’s use of language required of the first-person indirect or the standards of good authorial rhetoric, or both standards at once. An example of a double violation arises in the early pages of “Book Four: The Stockade” where Jones describes Prewitt’s thoughts or feelings regarding “a great conflict of fear” that “lay rises flapping from the depth {{pg|327|328}}like a giant manta ray, looming larger and bigger, looming huge, up out of the green depths that you can look down into through a water glass and see the anchor cable dwindling in a long arch down into invisibility, up from far below that even, flapping the two wing fins of choice and ego caught square in the middle.”{{sfn|Jones|1951|pp=410-411}} This refers to fears that Prewitt thinks his unthinking candor precipitates in the minds of others (in this case fears of homosexuality in the mind of Maggio).

Examples of the second sort of blemished writing arise in “Book Four: The Stockade” when we shift into an authorial voice far from that dramatic mode in which the book’s style approximates a dramatic mode in which the audience experiences content directly. In the straight-out italics with which “The Stockade” opens, Jones writes, “''He was held in confinement at the Stockade as a general prisoner while he waited trial''.”{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=405}} Clearly, “awaited” is the appropriate word. Later, still writing in a straight-forward third-person narrator (or omniscient narrator) voice, Jones describes the “many officers, officers’ wives and officers’ children” near Honolulu’s “tennis courts, golf course, and bridle paths as all are looking very tanned and sportive.”{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=409}} Clearly, “sporty” is the appropriate word.

In defense of Jones’s prose, Garret refers to innovations with “colloquial forms” by Faulkner and O’Hara, and Carter extends this line of defense with a few brief evocations (e.g., of Bellow and Updike).{{sfn|Garret|1984|p=116}}{{sfn|Carter|1998|p=39}} However, I do not find these lines of defense persuasive. Where I see no lapse in an author’s use of the first-person and free indirect (e.g., for O’Hara, Faulkner, and Bellow), the defense does not seem worth extended comment in the time and space available. (I think that Faulkner, O’Hara, and Bellow employ idiomatic English more adeptly in using the free indirect).

I see such a lapse when Updike lapses into language too literary (e.g., too metaphorically ornate) to credibly reflect a character’s consciousness, which, compared to the stylistically masterful Updike, seems inappropriate, despite Updike’s lapses. Although I see some dubious use of idiomatic language in straightforward third-person narration divorced from the first-person indirect and free indirect in the work of William Faulkner, the comparison again seems generally inappropriate (i.e., too much a matter of an idiosyncratic syntax), as well as rather too complex for this effort.

The digression of the pros and cons of Jones’s possible stylistic shortcomings, where they turn up in Jones’s writing, seems less relevant to the assessment {{pg|328|329}}of that writing—''Eternity'', in particular—and seems less important than my defense of Jones. This focuses on how infrequently they turn up and how peripheral they are when they do turn up—most especially in ''From Here to Eternity''. In brief, the instances of poor writing that Jones’s stylistic critics have targeted tend to address occasional divergences from Jones’s best and most characteristic writing. This is a “transparent” mode of writing focused on dialogue backed by incisive descriptions of action and setting backed up by preponderantly adept excursions into the first-person indirect and divorced—mostly divorced—from overt authorial voice.

That mode of writing resembles Frye’s dramatic mode in which the author is hidden from the audience, and the audience “experiences content directly.”{{sfn|Frye|1957|p=229}}

This mode provides almost all of the words of ''From Here to Eternity'' and ''Whistle''. It provides enough of Some Came Running to constitute nearly all of Jones’s 1958 Signet abridgment of Running. It perhaps does not apply well to ''The Thin Red Line'' because, in that novel, Jones is far more involved in using the free indirect, in which he shifts between dialogue and physical description. The first-person-son-indirect variant of stream of consciousness jumps so frequently and swiftly from consciousness to consciousness to virtually create a collective consciousness of ''Thin Red Line’s'' GIs.

''From Here to Eternity'' can only receive glancing blows from the criticisms of Jones’s writing for that book because these are largely irrelevant to most of the book’s writing. The same can be said for ''The Thin Red Line'' and ''Whistle''. ''Some Came Running'' may be another story. (For convenience, I ignore all of Jones’s books, but only the four that were mentioned.) On the one hand, the power of its underlying narrative, documentary scope and cogency, and rich characterization seems to compare to that of ''From Here to Eternity''. (Here we have aspects of Jones’s creativity perhaps even more effectively expressed by Minnelli’s 1958 film than by Zinnemann’s excellent 1953 one.) Moreover, Jones scholars have claimed with great zeal thematic and spiritual merits for the voluminous stretches of writing in ''Running'' that do not conform to the model of transparent writing and drama-like novelistic presentation described here for ''Running''. Alas, with ''Running'', critics of Jones’s style have a large target. Perhaps champions of Jones might devise defenses for his literary style—say via elaboration of Garret’s claim that what looks awkward about the style of ''Running'' has an unappreciated idiomatic grace. However, such a defense seems to me no more than sketched.{{pg|329|330}}
===''The Naked and the Dead''===
Some critics found the structure of ''The Naked and the Dead'' baggy.{{efn|{{harvtxt|Dickstein|2005|p=25}} refers to Jones’s ''The Thin Red Line'' as “a tighter, more disciplined rejoinder to ''The Naked and the Dead'' and charges Mailer with filling in his characters’ backgrounds “cumsily.”}} In particular, they have charged that its narrative is encumbered and diffused by the Time Machine profiles of principal characters and by a late usurpation of the protagonist’s role by Sergeant Croft. Here, I dispute these criticisms partly because they are put in a new, more accurate light that is more favorable to ''Naked'' when this is considered an instance of Moretti’s “modern epic.” Regarding the sometimes imputed ungainliness of the Time Machine segments, critics have overlooked the function of the Time Machine segments—not as a plot element in a well-structured novelistic narrative, but as a kind of post-Crash extension of the 1910-1930 sociological and linguistic profile of the U.S.A. provided by the social disparate cast of Dos Passos’s ''U.S.A.'' In doing this, they fail to judge ''Naked'' as a “modern epic” with stress on “a summation of a social and cultural totality” and as no simple traditional war novel.{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}}

Further, critics have tended to overlook the sheer propulsive vigor of ''Naked''’s narrative, which belies technical claims against this narrative’s construction.

Regarding the coherence of ''Naked'', this is quite remarkable considering the book’s social reach as a social chronicle, political allegory, and combat narrative. Suppose some of the book’s coherence rests on traditional nov- elastic foundations. In that case, some derive from the book’s ambitious modernist (i.e., modernist epic) reach for the expression of a capacious social world. The central cumulating dramas of the book’s Anopopei narrative are key to this coherence. To my mind, four interlocking “dramatic substructures” to the Anopopei narrative cohere into one visionary drama. One drama consists of the ''top-down fascistic reach'' of Cummings’s creation of the patrol as an attempted solution to his failures to either effectively assert the dominance of his authoritarian intellectual vision about the left-liberal Hearn or to advance his high career aspirations via his direction of the battle for Anopopei.

The second consists of the ''bottom-up fascistic reach'' of Croft’s attempted assertion of his will to power over Hearn by maneuvering his death and over his squad by pitting it against the symbolic and practical challenge of Mt Anaka. The third consists of the ''heroically solidaristic al-truism'' (and ''resistance'') entailed by Goldstein and Ridges’ attempted assertion of soldier solidarity and group survival in the face of Croft’s assertion of his will to power. The fourth and final drama consists of the ''managerial ascendance'' of Dalleson’s competently assisted usurpation of immediate pragmatic {{pg|330|331}}military success on Anopopei due to a nicely Tolstoyan combination of managerial competence and sheer chance.

''Naked''’s narrative elements cumulate well. The Cummings narrative ends powerfully with the death of Hearn and the trumping of Cummings’s Mt. Anaka strategy by Dalleson’s sea strategy. The Croft story ends with powerful irony with the failure of the Mt. Anaka expedition, especially in the wake of the boldness of the Hearn offing and the strength shown by Croft in the initial attempt at the crossing. The heroic tale of Goldstein and Ridges serves as a nice dramatic and thematic counterpoint to the high and low fascist authoritarianism of Cummings and Croft and the softer, friendlier managerial authoritarianism of Dalleson. The Dalleson tale resolves itself and all the others with the resolution of fascistic and humanistic strains of narrative in the triumph of a managerial competence marked by some mediocrity and much good luck. The range of narrative strands—and their wrap-up with the Dalleson strand—offset the somewhat disproportionate force of the Croft strand, at least as we finish reading, if not necessarily in longer-term memory.

If ''Naked'' allegory helps provide a strong focus, so does the integrative cumulative force of the book’s narrative. This is not merely some incoherent—or coherent—near apotheosis of Croft’s vivid psychopathy but a symmetrical dystopia of fascist foreboding high (as with Cummings) and low (as with Croft). Moreover, it is not merely the often noted dystopian vision of fascist undercurrent at War and possible fascist post-war as well that is conceived of as a harbinger of the dangers and restraints of an age of Eisenhower, managerialism, and centrist liberalism, surface success, and contentment and underlying antagonisms as one can imagine.

The social-documentary scope of ''Naked''’s Time Machines segments and the reach and focus of its allegory fits Moretti’s model of the “modern epic” with its aspirations toward the expression of the “whole breadth” of “the total world of a nation and epoch.”{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=3}}

This modernistic epic character of ''Naked'' vitiates much of the force of arguments against ''Naked'' as a loosely constructed attempt at a traditional novel. Within the context of a ‘modern epic’, ''Naked''’s Time Machines segments and allegorical anatomy function as social visions with literary standing in their own right. That they take little or nothing from the effectiveness of ''Naked''’s more conventional narrative and novelistic pleasures only enhances ''Naked'' as a multifaceted modern epic as much as the novelistic character of{{pg|331|332}} ''Eternity'' is consistent with the type of writing that Jones does best (and does almost exclusively in his first fiction). ''Naked''’s range of literary performances is consistent with the book’s genre, variegated skills, and modes of Mailer’s writing.

This is not to say that the conceptualization of ''Naked'' as a modern epic provides any defense of criticisms of ''Naked''’s use of language in a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph literary style. Much of Mailer’s style shows the limitations of its reliance on a simple combination of dialogue, transparent physical description of the speakers and their settings, and the use of first-person indirect (after the models of James T. Farrell’s ''Studs Lonegan'' and Tolstoy’s ''War and Peace'' and ''Anna Karenina'').{{efn|The atmosphere of ''The Naked and the Dead'', the overspirit, is Tolstoyan; the rococo comes out of Dos Passos; the fundamental slogging style from Farrell, and the occasional overrich descriptions from Wolfe,” said Mailer to interviewer Peter {{harvtxt|Manso|1985}}.}}

However, I would argue that this style is very serviceable for expressing the characters and character interactions at the center of much of the book. The characters are memorable, with several—at least Hearn, Cummings, and Croft— drawn with depth and dynamism. For example, we see Hearn’s intellectual confidence with Cummings and insecurity with “the men” of his platoon; we see Cummings both as aloof intellectual and commander, as schemer maneuvering Hearn into the dangerous patrol, and as the deflated figure who must acknowledge Dalleson’s credit as victor of the Anopopei campaign; and we see Croft as not just a hard and capable commander of men but as one in the throes of a mythic conflict with Mt. Anaka that resonates with Ahab’s quest for ''Moby Dick''.

More generally, lesser characters like Martinez and Goldstein show development, and the dialogue and accounts of soldiering ring forcefully true. Indeed, the physical action of men in battle with the Japanese and with na- ture is often eloquent. For example, the opening rises to the level of tolstoy in his epic descriptive mode on Napoleon’s Russian campaign. Here it is: “Nobody could sleep. When the morning came, assault craft would be low- ered and a first wave of troops would ride through the surf and charge ashore on the beach of Anapopei. All over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to be dead.”{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=3}} The description of a storm hitting base camp is especially memorable:

<blockquote>The wind tore through the bivouac area like a great scythe, slashing the palm fronds from the coconut trees, blasting the rain before it. As they looked, they saw a tent jerk upward from its</blockquote>{{pg|332|333}} <blockquote>mooring, steam away in the wind, flapping like a terrified bird...
A tremendous gust of wind bellied under the tent blew it out like a balloon, and then the ridgepole snapped, tearing a rent in the poncho. The tent fell upon the four men like a wet sheet . . . . “Where are you?” he shouted, and then the folds of the tent filled out again like a sail, ripped loose altogether, and went eddying and twisting through the air . . . . All the tents were down in the bivouac area, and here and there a soldier would go skittering through the mud, staggering from the force of the wind with the odd jerking motions of a man walking in a motion picture when the film is unwinding too rapidly.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|pp=86-88}}</blockquote>

The descriptions of the platoon’s frequent physical exhaustion achieve a visceral force:

<blockquote>Their ears filled with the quick, frenetic rustling of insects and animals, the thin screeching rage of mosquitoes, and the raucous babbling of monkeys and parakeets . . . . Slowly, inevitably, the men felt the water soak through the greased waterproofing of their shoes and slosh up to their knees whenever they had to wade through a deeper portion of the stream.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=398}}</blockquote>

Those descriptions of the platoon on patrol winding through the Kunai grass formed a pictorial beauty that would become one of Walsh’s chief inspirations in his film version of ''The Naked and the Dead''.

Turning to the stylistic merits of the Time Machine segments—and not just their proclaimed obtrusiveness as excessively flashy, overly documented, philosophically deterministic baggage for an effective war novel and campaign narrative—critics have been unperceptive. They have also dismissed the Time Machine segments as overly derivative—as too closely modelled after Dos Passos’s telegraphed biographies of national elites in the ''U.S.A.'' However, in making this criticism, critics have overlooked how Mailer’s use of the Time Machine devices follows Pound’s modernist injunction to “make it new.” In particular, they have missed how thoroughly democratic and sometimes playful Mailer’s Time Machines are.{{pg|333|334}}
In contrast with Dos Passos’s use of his profiles to telegraph the life of important national figures in shaping the world, where he situates his cast of rather everyday fictional characters, Mailer’s Time Machine bios file numerous faces of ’everyman.’ They do so via transferring Dos Passos’s elite-oriented device to a popular subject matter. As Mailer writes in the first Time Machine, which profiles Julio Martinez, “Mexican boys also breathe the American Fables, also want to be heroes, aviators, lovers, financiers.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=55}} This is to say that they also want to be figures like those of the ''U.S.A.'' biographers, heroes like Jack Reed and TR, aviators like the Wright Brothers, lovers like Rudolph Valentino, and financiers like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan. They have also failed to notice such playful touches as we find in Mailer’s Woodrow Wilson Time Machine episode.

This evokes Dos Passos’s Meester Veelson biography of President Woodrow Wilson in ''The 42nd Parallel'' in more than title. At the outset of his profile of the white-trash Wilson, Mailer presents him in “''a pair of round, silver-rimmed glasses''” reminiscent of those that appeared on the patrician Southern President in the photograph.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=326}}

In addition, Mailer’s prose sometimes attains a roiling power and dignity, most especially in its “overspirit” mode, using its use or near use of the “heroic” line: “Ahead, ahead, ahead, ahead, moving” catches the cadence of this pentameter, splendidly detailed for Mailer’s writings by Christopher Ricks. For example, “The moon was out, limning the deck housings.”{{sfn|Ricks|2008|p=10}} Returning to Mailer on the movement of that 77mm artillery piece, we have a final phrase that begins with the heroic line:

<blockquote>Once or twice, a flare filtered a wan and delicate bluish light over them, the light almost lost in the dense foliage through which it had to pass. In the brief moment it lasted, they were caught at their guns in classic straining motions with the form and beauty of a frieze. The water and the dark slime of the trail twice blackened their uniforms. Moreover, the light shone on them instantly, and their faces stood out, white and contorted. Even the guns had a slender articulated beauty like an insect reared back on its wire haunches. Then darkness swirled about them again, and they ground the guns forward mindlessly, a line of ants dragging their burden back to their hole.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=116}}</blockquote> {{pg|334|335}} <blockquote>That is, we have, with some intriguing mix of heroic irony, Mailer’s dignification of the routine derided as the “heroic” beat of “a line of ants dragging their burden back.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=116}}</blockquote>

Neither ''The Naked and the Dead'' nor ''From Here to Eternity'' is remarkable for such stylistic innovation or sustained eloquence as we find, say, in ''The Sun Also Rises'', ''The Sound and the Fury'', ''Invisible Man'', A''ugie Marsh'', or ''Pale Fire''. Each, however, is masterful in realizing its basic fictional design. ''From Here to Eternity'' dramatizes a social milieu unexcelled in American writing. ''The Naked and the Dead'' provides a vision of the U.S.A. combat in the Pacific theater of World War II and during the preceding decade, plus a look into the future. Stylistically, ''From Here to Eternity'' frequently attains the peculiar eloquence of great drama in which the audience witnesses intense action directly. ''The Naked and the Dead'' rises intermittently to a level of stylistic eloquence above and beyond the call of its particular fictional duty.

==Notes==
{{notelist}}

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

==Work Cited==
{{refbegin|20em|indent=yes}}
* {{cite book |last=Burgess |first=Anthony |url= |title=99 Novels: The Best English Novels Since 1939 |publisher=New York: Summit |year=1984 |isbn= |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Carson |first=Tom |url= |title=The Hell with Literature: James Jones’s Unvarnished Truths |date=28 September 1984 |publisher=Village Voice Literary Supplement |isbn= |edition=1st |location= |pages=18-20 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Carter |first=Steven R. |url= |title=James Jones: An American Literary Orientalist Master |date= |publisher=U of Illinois P |year=1998 |isbn= |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |url= |title=Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970 |publisher=Harvard UP |year=2005 |isbn= |location=Cambridge, MA |pages=25 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |author=Frye |first=Northrop |url= |title=Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. |publisher=Princeton UP |year=1957 |isbn= |location=Princeton |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Frye |first=Northrop |authormask=1 |title=The Four Forms of Prose Fiction |url= |journal=Hudson Review |volume= 2 |issue=4 |pages=582-598 |date=1950 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Garret |first=George P. |title=James Jones |date=1984 |publisher=Harcourt |isbn= |edition= |location=New York |pages=|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Jones |first=James |url= |title=From Here to Eternity |publisher=Scribner |year=1951 |isbn= |location=New York |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |url= |title=The Naked and the Dead |date= |publisher=Holt, Rinehart, and Winston|isbn= |location=New York |publication-date=1948 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Manso |first=Peter |url= |title=Mailer: His Life and Times |publisher=Simon |isbn= |location=New York |publication-date=1985 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Meyer |first=Michael |url= |title=The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing |publisher=Bedford |year=2005 |isbn= |location=Boston |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Moretti |first=Franco |title=Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez |date=1996 |publisher=Verso |isbn= |location=London |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite speech |last=Ricks |first=Christopher |date=October 2008 |title=Mailer’s Rhythm |url= |event=The Norman Mailer Society Conference |location=Provincetown, MA |publisher= |access-date= }}
{{refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:From Here to Eternity and The Naked and the Dead: Premiere to Eternity?}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

Talk:The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010

2025-04-28T12:54:32Z

Jules Carry: Josephs finished.

===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%;"
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! Author !! Article !! Editor !! Status
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| Mailer || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Postscript to the Fourth Advertisement for Myself|Postscript to the Fourth Advertisement for Myself]] || [[User:Grlucas]] || {{tick}}
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| Mailer || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Hemingway Revisited|Hemingway Revisited]] || [[User:Grlucas]] || {{tick}}
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| Lennon || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Hemingway to Mailer — A Delayed Response to The Deer Park|Hemingway to Mailer]] || [[User:Hobbitonya]] || {{tick}}
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| 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]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Bufithis & Curnutt || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway|A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway]] || [[User:Grlucas]] [[User:DBond007]] || {{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]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Shuman || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman vs. Ernest: Influence and Identity|Norman vs. Ernest]] || [[User:APKnight25]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Lowenburg || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Hooking Off the Jab: Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway and Boxing|Hooking Off the Jab]] || [[User:ASpeed]] [[User:DBond007]]|| {{yellow tick}}
|-
| 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]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Boddy || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing]] || [[User:JBrown]] || {{yellow tick}}
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| 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]] [[User:Tbara4554]]|| {{tick}}
|-
| Peppard || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and the “Reds”|Mailer, Hemingway, and the “Reds”]] || [[User:KWatson]] || {{tick}}
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| 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]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Hays || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Battles for Regard, Writerly and Otherwise|Battles for Regard]] || [[User:ALedezma]] || {{tick}}
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| 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]] || {{tick}}
|-
| 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]] || {{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]] [[User:CVinson]] || {{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}}
|-
| Jacomo || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Sparring with Norman|Sparing with Norman]] || [[User:Kamyers]] || {{tick}}
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| 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]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Apple || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]] || [[User:Chelsey.brantley]] || {{tick}}
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| 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}}
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| Miele || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/What Norman Mailer Taught Me about Combat|What Norman Mailer Taught Me about Combat]] || [[User:TBorel]] [[User:Flowersbloom]] [[User:Tbara4554]]|| {{tick}}
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| 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]] || [[User:MerAtticus]] || {{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]] || {{tick}}
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| Hinton || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Advertisements for Others: The Blurbs of Norman Mailer|Advertisements for Others]] || [[User:NrmMGA5108]] || {{tick}}
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| Hicks || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway|''Harlot’s Ghost'', ''Bildungsroman'', Masculinity and Hemingway]] || [[User:JKilchenmann]] || {{tick}}
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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-28T12:51:55Z

Jules Carry: Many corrections. Removed banner.

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{{byline |last= Josephs |first= Allen |abstract= The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer’s works and Hemingway’s prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway’s eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway’s work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos. |url= http://prmlr.us/mr04jos
}}
{{quote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=356}} }}

{{quote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|''he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text'' by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan,{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=515}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.” They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=1}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we’re seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín,”) an anonymous {{pg|274|275}} photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''.”{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}} Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932. That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer,”{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}} without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence. In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight.”)

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater? These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.” Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2).”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}} howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=2}} Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004|pp=3–4}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .].”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004|p=4}} Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004|pp=4–5}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=2}} He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=3}} Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=3}} In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=3}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth,”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=4}} this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=5}} The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .].”{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=169}} In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=5}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=6}} And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion,”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=4}} a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .].”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=6}} Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=4}} to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=8}} {{pg|279|280}} The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.” Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=11}} There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=54}} And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit{{' "}};{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=95}} and still not content with his admission, defining the term ‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=95}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass).”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|pp=13–14}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=14}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=176}} One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=192}}

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}} to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=14}} When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=17}} While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=9}} That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=23}} This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=23}} Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=2}} “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=3}} To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=213}} Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}} and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.

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

== Works Cited ==
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |chapter='Far from Simple': The Published Photographs in ''Death in the Afternoon'' |title=A Companion to Hemingway's ''Death in the Afternoon'' |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title=Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |editor-last=Mandel |editor-first=Miriam |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1932 |title=Death in the Afternoon |authormask=1 |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |authormask=1 |date=1941 |title=For Whom the Bell Tolls |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title=Wine, Women & Toros |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |chapter=The Legacy of ''Death in the Afternoon'': Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrad |title=A Companion to Hemingway's ''Death in the Afternoon'' |editor-last=Mandel |editor-first=Miriam |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title=Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007 |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2 |issue=1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer

2025-04-28T11:36:03Z

Jules Carry: Started corrections. Added abstract and url.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer}}
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{{Byline |last=Nakjavani |first=Erik |abstract=An examination of influence theory making intelligible the nature of Hemingway's unusual influence over Mailer’s imagination. This analysis shows how Hemingway’s influence on Mailer characterizes itself as a highly differentiated case. Mailer’s speculation on the nature of Hemingway’s freely chosen, everyday exposure to death is reminiscent of Martin Heidegger’s notion of “being-toward-death.” It does not connote a morbid obsession with death but rather a maximally authentic “way-of-being” human. Imagination constituting the highest faculty of the mind in romanticism, Mailer's lament for Hemingway turns out to be a vibrant imaginative song of life but in a different register, Hemingway’s own. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04nak}}

{{Quote|[T]here is nothing in the critical field that should be of greater philosophical interest or prove more rewarding to analysis than the progressive modification of one mind by the work of another.{{sfn|Valéry|1972|p=241}} }}

==I. Prologue==
{{dc|dc=N|orman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway.}} This phrase brings into proximity two prominent twentieth-century American writers. The phrasal contiguity of the two names suggests an arrangement that at first glance conceals more than it reveals. For, upon reflection, their proximity sketches out areas that often tend toward more pronounced darkness rather than light. One repeatedly thinks about Hemingway’s influence on other writers. Colleagues at various academic conferences refer to it. It appears in scholarly journals, popular magazines, and newspapers. Still one does not readily see what might constitute Hemingway’s influence on Mailer, that is, aside from what amounts to and is derided by some critics as Mailer’s imitative behavior in the worst meaning of the adjective.

Mailer’s imaginal thematics,which often touches on the phantasmagoric, his baroque stylistics, and his distinctive intellectual concerns, all seem to be divergent from those developed and practiced by Hemingway. Does this {{pg|163|164}} mean, then, that the conjunction “and” in my initial verbless and therefore as yet inactive sentence misleadingly sets forth commonalities between the two writers? I think not. Because I would expect one may at least adumbrate a theoretical common ground between them. The conjunctive “and” will exceed its usual grammatical function and eventually carry out an exceptional task. The promise of latent and multiple vistas of the connection between Mailer and Hemingway, which as yet remain unknown, will still become known. However, the fulfillment of this promise requires wide-ranging conceptual meditations and may take a long and nonlinear course. The meditative approach I am proposing will offer an inkling of possible signifying links between Mailer and Hemingway.

Clearly, Hemingway and Mailer’s names are heavily laden with literary, cultural,religious, educational, and socio-political implications. They often connote factual differences, even inevitable conflicts. Consequently, now and again, the differences may seem to be unbridgeable and militate against the prospect of serious comparative studies of the commonalities between the two writers. Since such study endeavors to go beyond wading in the shallows of mere superficial similarities and comparisons, the complexity of its conceptual framework will also proportionally increase. But I would like to go straight to my conclusion and confirm that such a study is indeed realizable, in spite of undeniable obscurities, or paradoxically because of them. For such seemingly impenetrable areas force us to rethink our theoretical guiding principles of literary influence and reconfigure constitutive elements.

Happily, Mailer’s own preoccupation—if indeed not outright obsession—with Hemingway as a singularly distinctive man and writer renders my effort somewhat easier. Mailer’s own articulations of his connection with Hemingway will allow me to make intelligible possible shared literary philosophical views and aspirations. His passionate fascination with Hemingway communicates itself as a combination of theoretical and experiential interests and practices. Altogether, they indicate a space where a serious study of their affinities and visionary literary kinship may come to light as viable. Such likelihood may not be easily discernible if one only limits oneself to the more traditional influence imitation theories. It would seem to me applying such theories to Hemingway and Mailer as tutor and tyro may well prove to be an egregious over-simplification and therefore more aporetic than heuristic. In my view, the whole problematic of Mailer’s relationship{{pg|164|165}}

with Hemingway sets in motion a pervasive expectant mood. A Heideggerian sense of ontological disclosures gives the impression of emerging from it, providing the clearing where the two language artists practiced their profession. This clearing also permits crisscrossing meditations, interpretations, and associative musings. As we well know, Mailer and Hemingway’s personalities and works tend to elicit such activities in their readers.

As a result, in due course I shall propose and will attempt to develop a subcategory to the traditional theory of influence to make intelligible the nature of Hemingway’s unusual influence over Mailer’s imagination. I classify it as visionary hermeneutic appropriation as influence. I hope the general theoretical thrust of such classification differentiates it from the more direct and more easily discernible thematic and stylistic influence as imitation. It will provide us with a useful working concept. I hope the reader will find it less daunting in its logic and practice than its designation at first might suggest.

It would seem helpful to begin our task of examining the particular mode of influence Hemingway exerted on Mailer with a brief overall assessment of Hemingway’s widespread influence on twentieth-century American writers, including Mailer. I shall then proceed to Mailer’s own appraisal of Hemingway’s influence on the writers of his generation. Above all, I will examine Mailer’s perception of Hemingway’s influence on himself as arguably one of the most ambitious writers of his own time right along with the older Hemingway. This sequence will make it possible to study how Hemingway’s influence on Mailer characterizes itself as a highly differentiated case.

'''II. HEMINGWAY’S TRANSPARENT INFLUENCE ON SOME NOTABLE AMERICAN WRITERS'''

There are many American writers who appear to have made Hemingway’s work and way of life their own. They have done so through direct influence and imitation. Two interrelated operations make the effects of such influence intelligible. First, there is a process of phenomenological hermeneutics in the sense that Martin Heidegger understood it as interpretation and understanding. Analogous to the task of gods’ messenger Hermes, the reader writer endeavors to understand Hemingway’s work in the context of his or her own interpretation of it. In practice, this task is readily achievable as a given in human heuristic activities without considering the more technical underpinnings of hermeneutics as such. The act of interpretation permits{{pg|165|166}}

the reader to understand the meaning of a given text as an intended object of his or her own consciousness. It carries in it the reader-writer’s individual desires, fantasies, dreams, daydreams, culture of reading, and socioeconomic circumstances. In short, each interpretation carries in its fold the interpreter’s prior lived experiences. Second, the text, thus read, implies a concomitant epistemology, which the reader-writer can appropriate.

On the plane of his way of life, as Mailer so well knew, Hemingway also exercised an exceptional charismatic influence on readers and writers. To some extent, he still continues to do so. One thinks of his way of life as an instance of Martin Heidegger’s ''“Dasein,”'' a genuine way of being human, which would be open to various interpretations and imitative practices. In a way, Hemingway as an individual makes available to us a specific semio-logical text, as it were. If so inclined, one can engage with it through simple imitation or more labyrinthine paths of influence.

The uncommon influence that Hemingway exercised on readers and writers is largely due to his instinctive inclination to write open-ended fiction and creative nonfiction. Even at the lexical and syntactic levels of his work, the slide from vivid denotation to unrestricted connotations guarantees unlimited interpretive semantics. Based mostly on lived experience and its endless twists and turns, opacities and vagaries, unpredictabilities and mysteries, his fiction
and creative nonfiction are largely unlimited enterprises in the domain of signification and interpretive disclosure. For Hemingway the purity of heart was to will everything, which embraces Kierkegaardian belief on the plane of the
unity of the whole of existence. Nearly all of Hemingway’s sentences, as in all
good fiction, are potentially polysemic and subject to an endless existential
hermeneutics as are the lived experiences they try to recreate imaginatively.
The truth of such fiction can only be regarded in the plural: truths. Thus, Hemingway initiates a dialogue with all of his potential reader writers, to which they can respond emotionally, cognitively, and even actively pursue either by imitation or under the enchantment of influence. “Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it,” he said in “The Art of Fiction,” an interview with George Plimpton. “Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1965|p=229}} It would be hard to find a keener or more accurate description of existential hermeneutic activities and modes of recreating and making a text your own.

To sum up: the combined agencies of three phenomenological operations in the act of reading make it possible for any reader of Hemingway to read{{pg|166|167}}

is work according to his or her own desire and knowledge. They are dialogics, that is, the art and science of dialogue as it burst upon consciousness; hermeneutics, the method of interpreting and comprehending the scriptural work or text guided by the clusters of one’s desire and knowledge; and, finally, recreating the text in the light of all these three operations.

At this point, one may state that Hemingway’s attentive readers, reader writers, and critics (the other group of reader-writers) who may have an interest in the domain of literary influence either have taken mental notes or have made up their lists of writers influenced by Hemingway. It seems to be an irresistible activity. It may well be that each list brings forth the reciprocal effects of the texts read, in turn reading and analyzing the readers and list makers.

Taking into considerations the nature of Hemingway’s influence, I should like to offer a list of writers I consider to have been apparently influenced by him. I limit the list strictly to American male writers and include such diverse names as Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961),James M.Cain (1892-1977), Walter van Tilburg Clark (1909-1979), John Heresy (1914-1993), Robert Ruark (1915-1965), Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), Vance Bourjaily (1922-), Jack (Jean Louis) Kerouac (1922-1969), Cormac McCarthy (1933-), Richard Brautigan (1935-1984), Elmore Leonard (1935-), Raymond Carver (1938-1988), and Hunter Thompson (1937-2005).

This list is illustrative, of course—not at all intended to be either critical or exhaustive. It is at best exploratory and suggestive.I am aware that in each writer’s case the affinities with Hemingway and the extent and depth of his influence on him substantially differ. What does remain constant, however, is the existence of an inevitable vestige of the dynamic dialectic of uniqueness and influence, going from clear-cut direct imitation to intricate indirect influence in fictional conception and execution.

'''III. HEMINGWAY’S NONTRANSPARENT INFLUENCE'''

<blockquote>
Hemingway’s style had an ability to hit the young writers in the
gut, and they weren’t the same after that.{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=298}}
</blockquote>

My intention in treating Hemingway’s influence on American writers at
some length has been to show the nature and extent of the problem Mailer{{pg|167|168}}

was facing in dealing with Hemingway’s pervasive and detectable influence. Placing Mailer within my list would not have done justice to his own unique place in the history of twentieth-century American letters. For this reason, I made no mention of either his name or,I must add, Nelson Algren’s (1909-1981). I would say Hemingway’s influence on them falls into a different category. One may think of it as profound but not readily intelligible influence. They were two writers who were truly “hit in the gut” hard and for good and keeps by Hemingway. But the essence of how they experienced that radical influence remains mostly nontransparent.

Once one understands how—and how hard—with what lasting effects Hemingway as a writer “hit” a younger fellow-writer like Mailer in the “gut,” consequences can then be explored. A proper definition and explication of it may then emerge. Mailer and Algren both came to embody Hemingway’s influence, identifying with him, each in his own way. The result was the development of affinities with him, both as men and writers. Even though the nature, scope, and intensity of their kinship with Hemingway greatly varied, they both went beyond the boundaries of the dialectic of direct imitation and influence. As enlightening and fascinating as it is to compare simultaneously Mailer and Algren’s relationships with Hemingway, it would fall beyond the perimeters of the present study.{{efn|Following the logic of visionary appropriation in this essay, I am currently engaged in writing a study of Hemingway’s mode of influence on Nelson Algren.}}

Accordingly,I would like to add the category of nontransparent influence to the broad sphere of Mailer-Hemingway studies. I designate it as visionary hermeneutic appropriation, primarily as it applies to Mailer. I shall later devote a section to its definition. To my mind, the critical narrative of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer belongs to the logic of this other sphere of influence,which sounds a bit technical but bears out to be less so in practice. I deem it to be a useful concept and place it as a category within the general theory of influence. I am persuaded it will provide forays into uncharted territories. Basically, it will embrace the proximal and the distal, the familiar to the unfamiliar, the expected and the unexpected from within and without the immediate and known boundaries of studies of Hemingway’s influence so far done.

'''IV. MAILER'S RECOGNITION AND ASSESSMENT OF HEMINGWAY's INFLUENCE'''

In “Prisoner of Success,” an interview with Paul Attanasio, Mailer stated with
exceptional lucidity:{{pg|168|169}}

<blockquote>
Hemingway occupied the center in every way, not only coming from the Midwest, but he occupies the very center of writing itself. Anyone who’s ever read a newspaper can feel how good a writer he is—he uses a vocabulary that if anything is smaller than the average newspaperman’s vocabulary. And he does wonderful things with it. So no matter how serious or superficial a reader you are you sense very quickly that you are in the hands of someone who truly can write well. Then, of course, he wrote about things that are very, very interesting to men. There aren’t very
many women going around saying Hemingway is a great writer. I am willing to bet more American women who are good writers have been influenced by Proust than by Hemingway. But for men he’s central: the anxieties he feels about being a man cover
all the anxieties; it’s almost impossible not to identify with his work.{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=187}}(Pontifications 131-32)
</blockquote>

Clearly, this citation is long, but well worth providing. It is well conceived, admirably stated, and far-reaching. As the most stridently ambitious writer of his generation, one can unquestionably see the implications of Mailer’s awareness of all things Hemingway. Mailer shows a keen sense of the truth and the astonishing expanse of the influence Hemingway exercised during his lifetime. Hemingway’s work went beyond regional influence and extended itself to national and international levels.

With striking insight Mailer goes to the very mysterious heart of Hemingway’s magical influence as a creative writer: mastery of the alchemical power of everyday American speech as poetry. With remarkable accuracy, he perceives that the prominence of Hemingway as a writer resides in the wonderful things he does with the English language or, more precisely, with the American colloquial speech. Mailer sees the rare enchantment that Hemingway can work by eliciting a feeling in the reader that true wonders await him or her merely by reading on. He also hints at his appreciation of Hemingway’s meiotic style, and what he could achieve with a minimal poetic diction at the lexical and semantic levels of the language. It is little wonder that Mailer also liked to read the Belgian born French writer Georges Simenon’s detective Jules Maigret series. Simenon, too, practiced a totally unornamented, uncluttered, minimalist style that approached Hemingway’s.{{efn|On Mailer’s appreciation of Georges Simenon’s detective fiction, please see Dwayne Raymond’s ''Mornings with Mailer.''{{sfn|Raymond|2010|p=174}} For more extensive discussions of Hemingway’s meiotic stylistics and the role that the concepts of primal silence and the invisible plays in it please see my articles “The Aesthetics of Silence,” and “The Aesthetics of the Visible and the Invisible.}} Hemingway, too,{{pg|169|170}}

admired Simenon’s fiction, which he originally discovered in the 1920s in Paris.

Let us take a closer look at Mailer’s view of Hemingway’s centrality to twentieth century American writing. In any human community our fellow human beings always surround us in the circle of their ontological presence as the horizon of our life. As a consequence, the notion of occupying the “very center” in such communities spells out a position of unquestionable eminence and prominence. Mailer readily credits Hemingway with the central position in writing in the community of writers in America. In a Playboy interview, conducted by his son John Buffalo Mailer, he spoke of Hemingway’s “prodigious influence for young American writers. He taught a lot of us how to look for the tensile strength of a sentence.”{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|p=122}}

Combining these related declarations about centrality is irresistible. First, because lexically “center” indicates the principal, pivotal, and radial point within a circle or sphere. The center comprises the focal point of the circumference that it defines. Second, the grammatical notion “sentence” defines the foundational, generative, syntactical unit of language. The sentence constitutes the center of our meaningful oral and scriptural discourse. It follows then that the maximal stress that a sentence as the basic unit of discourse may bear is essential. The sentence must do so without syntactically imploding into semantic nonsense. Mailer’s statements pay austere but high homage to Hemingway. The older writer comes through Mailer’s considered opinion as the high priest of creative writing in twentieth-century American writing. Judged by any standard, that is high praise, spontaneously offered. At the same time, it bears witness to the challenge that Hemingway as a writer posed to Mailer and how he dealt with it.

'''V. OUTLINE OF A VISIONARY HERMENEUTIC APPROPRIATION'''

<blockquote>
Examples of greatness lie about us, living texts of renown. Let each set before himself the greatest in his line, not so much as something to follow as something to spur him on.{{sfn|Gracián|2008|p=25}}
</blockquote>

The centrality Mailer attributes to Hemingway among American writers would be seldom, if ever, far from his own mind during his writing life. It acquired the invisible center in his own gravity in his own writing. Initially,{{pg|170|171}}

Mailer’s comments about Hemingway were inspired by genuine fascination as well as frequent intimations of irritation. One may generally regard his irritation as making an effort not to be captivated by the older writer, in the sense of being creatively captured and subjugated. His sporadic early resentment toward Hemingway would seem to be prompted by the inclination to declare himself as the rightful archetypal son and inheritor of the master’s place. Yet this declaration had to be couched in a language that permitted him to continue to be a unique, talented, and independent writer. At times, I would imagine it implied that he, Mailer, would someday be considered an undisputed literary genius in his own right. He would become the new literary champion of the world. So, at the outset, his ambivalence toward Hemingway betrays a telltale sign of a justified Oedipal resentment as the master’s self-appointed heir apparent.

In the fullness of time, Mailer developed a larger and steadier perspective on Hemingway and his work. I very much regret that he did not regard it necessary to devote a book to the subject. It would have been a remarkably enlightening book. His decision not to do so might very likely have been due to his ample but widely dispersed observations on Hemingway. “If one is going to make a statement about Hemingway,” said Mailer as early as 1955, “it can be done either by posing a riddle or else one has to write at least ten thousand words to say something new in the critical literature.”{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=26}} Mailer ended up by saying and writing nearly as much on the subject and implying more during his writing life. One hopes that a Mailer scholar will gather these observations in a collection, which will no doubt prove to be instructive.

Mailer’s comments on Hemingway in their aggregate manifest his own distinctiveness as an individual and writer. Concomitantly, there is a pervasive sense of identification with Hemingway through the agency of empathetic imagination. Mailer’s empathy with Hemingway and his early reservations about him make up the strong antithetical pole of a dialectical synthesis. From a theoretical standpoint, this dialectical synthesis is replete with critical import. For the general patterns of Mailer’s gravitation to Hemingway bear testimony to French poet and critic Paul Valéry’s belief in the truth of “philosophical interest” that “the progressive modification of one mind by the work of another” possesses.{{sfn|Valéry|1972|p=241}}

In the absence of any transparent, extensive, unmediated stylistic or thematic influence by Hemingway on Mailer, my formulation of influence as{{pg|171|172}}

interpretive and visionary offers a new but specific theoretical reconfiguration of constitutive elements of influence.It provides a key to rendering our incomprehension of Mailer’s literary relationship with Hemingway less so. For me, the interrelated operations of interpreting lived experience, elucidating its epistemology, and putting the whole process through a transformative imagination forms Hemingway’s influence on Mailer. Briefly put: It is a way of making written words by one writer the flesh and blood of aother. It confers magical powers of creativity on the writer as the reader. As a result, on the plane of interpretation, this modality of reading involves the immediate effects of our conscious and unconscious activities of the psyche as thoughts, emotions, dreams and their correlates as myth.

On the cultural plane, visionary hermeneutic appropriation brings into play the whole range of our familial,social, cultural, and educational inheritance. All of our prejudgments, prejudices, and received notions, as well as our capabilities to create and imagine the world, enter into it. On the side of appropriation of our interpretation, it functions within the psychological structures of sympathetic imagination, identification, projections, and transformations through textual intermediations. In short, it amounts to our vision of the writer’s work. Henceforth, I use the visionary hermeneutic appropriation to indicate the modality of Mailer’s relationship to Hemingway and I shall refer to it as visionary hermeneutic appropriation in the context that I have just formulated it.

In the interest of taking just a step further the concept of the visionary in hermeneutic appropriation, I wish to emphasize how it plays in the theoretical concept. By visionary, I mean to point out a kind of unconscious intervention that renders our imagination active, making it capable of audacious undertakings. Additionally, I would attribute to a quality of inspiration, a work of animation more akin to its Latin etymology of “to inspire” (''insp r re'') or to “breathe upon” or “breathe into.” It seeks to enliven, quicken, and heighten the senses. Inspiration as such coincides with ''pneuma'' in its etymological Greek meaning as “breath,” which approximates its quasitheological meaning as “vital spirit.”

If we integrate visionary hermeneutic appropriation within its twin phenomenological appearance in our consciousness and its existential implications in our experience, the term would then impart a sense of imaginative apprehension and alignment. This is so because one may perceive it as a type of conversion that would be justifiable. As conversion, it carries in it a{{pg|172|173}}

combined sense of artistic and spiritual adhesion and adherence.As such, it would differentiate itself from the passivity and inertia that usually characterize imitation and influence. Applied to Mailer’s attitude toward Hemingway, the whole process characterizes itself as a freely chosen mode of dynamic commitment and fidelity to an imaginatively energizing ideal. What it categorically refuses is a type of willy-nilly literary seduction. The entire enterprise demands an authentic self-transformation and renewal of identity from within. Therefore, certain perceived affinities and empathies between Mailer and Hemingway are more or less analogous to spiritual and religious longings as influence.

I would like to convey a recollection that may put the concept of Mailer’s visionary hermeneutic appropriation of Hemingway in a clearer proper perspective. I remember reading French philosopher Gabriel Marcel’s effort to tell his readers that although he had read German philosopher Karl Jaspers’ essay ''“Système de philosophie”'' (Philosophical System), his own essay ''“On the Ontological Mystery,”'' had not been ''directly'' influenced by it. Marcel explained that Jaspers’ “terminology” and his “spiritual and religious orientations” were quite different from his own.{{sfn|Marcel|1973|p=6}} Marcel then added, “Nevertheless, I feel obscurely that I owe a real debt to this noble and profound thinker [Jaspers], and I am anxious to acknowledge the ''inward'' and almost ''indefinable'' influence which he has exercised on our own mind.”{{sfn|Marcel|1973|p=6}} I consider this statement to be an elegant, touching acknowledgement. This “inward” and “indefinable” and perhaps ultimately ineffable influence, with all that it implies, is precisely what I mean by visionary hermeneutic appropriation as influence. I detect it in Mailer’s inward and often ineffable responses to Hemingway. This is precisely my reason for differentiating among literary imitation, influence, and visionary hermeneutic appropriation.

'''VI. SEARCH FOR ELEMENTS OF MAILER’S VISIONARY HERMENEUTIC
APPROPRIATION OF HEMINGWAY'''

<blockquote>
Literary influence remains endlessly curious.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=99}}
</blockquote>

I would say that searching for the components of Hemingway’s nontransparent but nonetheless true influence on a writer such as Mailer could resemble the psychological mechanisms of paranoia. Or at least it may appear{{pg|173|174}}

so to readers with a psychoanalytic proclivity and sensitivity. One may think of it as the “hermeneutic of suspicion,” formulated by French philosopher Paul Ricouer. The logic of Marxist hermeneutics essays to explain the role of economic class in determining our consciousness as Freudian psychoanalysis does with the unconscious. This type of intellectual and scholarly paranoia ''(para + nous)'' requires that the conscious mind extend itself beyond the limits it ordinarily imposes upon itself, because it suspects its own motivations. In so doing, the paranoiac mind suspects the existence of correspondences hitherto gone undetected, engaging in thoughts and acts to unveil and disclose them. Such paranoia may impel the scholar to see mysterious influences lurking in everything everywhere.

It is perhaps preferable to the ''“naiveté”'' that is the dialectical opposite of paranoia, to use English psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott’s vocabulary. Literary critical paranoia may indeed be of help here to the extent that it mobilizes our sensitivities to look for what often lies hidden below the exhausted surfaces of our scholarly work. The paranoid critic of influence studies joins Mailer’s “[c]ertain artists, those who see associations and connections everywhere” mentioned in his “The Metaphysics of the Belly.”{{sfn|Mailer|1966|p=265}} In any case, let us not forget the example of the venerable Sir Isaac Newton and his apple.

There is no discernible evidence that Mailer directly imitated Hemingway to any appreciable degree personally or as a writer. I do not believe he became the “neo-Hemingway tough guy who patronize[d] boxing and bullfighting and bars,” as Joseph Glemis dubbed him.{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=156}} Mailer was too proud, too conscious of his own place in American letters to be a straightforward and unsophisticated follower, borrower, and/or imitator. With him it was all much more complicated than that. On the one hand, as an individual he worked hard to learn, say, how to box, which is a punishing way of imitating anyone. He was also interested for some time in bullfighting and other sports. But he was willing to pay the price for the lived
experience of boxing, whose semiotics and metaphysics in his mind had much to do with the language arts, as it did for Hemingway. In The ''Executioner’s Song'' Mailer consciously and transparently adopted Hemingway‘s less ornate, intentionally stripped-down narrative style. I would go as far as to suggest that Mailer’s creative nonfiction such as Armies of the Night might have been inspired by Hemingway’s prototypes of creative nonfiction in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Green Hills of Africa.'' It is our common{{pg|174|175}}

knowledge that some critics have mentioned Truman Capote’s ''In Cold Blood
(1966)'' as the source of inspiration for Mailer’s creative nonfiction. But the two examples of Hemingway’s experimentation with the genre texts precede Capote’s effort by three decades. Given Mailer’s astute mind and his trust in Hemingway as a writer, this possibility would appear to be more convincing than its supposed alternative.

On the other hand, Mailer’s shared literary interests with Hemingway’s were considerably broader and deeper. They grew out of Hemingway’s fundamental literary philosophical concerns such as courage and bravery modes of transcendent behavior. As well-integrated spiritual and corporeal strength, courage offered both men the proper deportment required to find salvation in extremis. They also had in common a vision of living the possibilities of their gender as maximal manhood firmly rooted in the body. I would think that the aim of such vision for Mailer was not machismo as a sense of masculine entitlement. I would suspect a merely assumptive masculine entitlement as a given would have made its embodiment emasculating to him rather than an existential adventure. At its best and in its profoundest sense, it was a matter of seamlessly lodging the psyche within the body as whole and entire. For that reason, they sought a second process of embodiment for their world for posterity within the body of the language of the art of fiction. As Hemingway had predicted, this approach to fiction would then produce a world whose truth would be truer than true. Language had the power to bring cohesion to the chaotic world of lived experience as it bursts upon our consciousness. And the truth of this cohesive world would then be available to anyone who could read. These are complex matters and need more clarification. I shall delve more probingly in due time.

If Mailer thought of Hemingway as worthy of imitation as a way of life and a writer, on a particular plane of reflection one cannot altogether dismiss it as trivial. Literary imitation yields much that is of interest about the imitator and the imitated. Imitation as transformative action has none too simple an origin and a history of development. Imitative acts, literary or otherwise, exceed the pejorative notion of “aping” in the current vernacular; that is to say, mindless mimicking, passively embraced at a low level of intellectual and artistic engagement. Such prejudices or prejudgments still play a part in a hierarchical study of influence. Nevertheless, such received ideas{{pg|175|176}}

ignore too much such as, for example, the psycho-philosophical and aesthetic sense of imitation as ''mimesis.''

Mimetic activities have a well-defined origin and long developmental history of spontaneously assembling, organizing, and ordering our perception of the world’s realities. In relation to Mailer and Hemingway, they still fall within the purlieu of visionary hermeneutic appropriation. Imitation and influence follow us with their compelling biological and atavistic impact as our genetic and familial inheritance at the time of our conception and henceforth throughout our life. Embedded in our familial, religious, cultural, societal and educational patterns of life and in the deep structures of language, imitative behavior permeates our life.Indeed, extensive theories of learning and pedagogical practices derive from them. Imitation and influence relentlessly precede and proceed us wherever we go. They ally themselves with the force that Freud attributes to the super-ego, whose effects as educative processes remain mostly unconscious or at least quasi-conscious. Various patterns of imitations and influences in their aggregate track all the developmental stages of our life. We can only move beyond them in acts of genuine creativity, acts that at once confirm their existence and transcend them in appropriation.

On the plane of the arts, ''Mimesis'' provided the philosophical and aesthetic matrix for classical and neo-classical paintings in the Renaissance period. Much later, as realism, naturalism, and impressionism they created new forms of artistic perception.It even sustained the foundational aesthetics of abstract impressionism and abstract painting as “non-figurative art,” or “non-objective art.” For instance, representations of moods and combinations of quasi-unconscious states of mind in the impressionism of Claude Monet, the post-impressionism of Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne and, later, Jackson Pollock are all mimetic operations. Abstraction in painting merely reverses the direction of the mimetic gaze from without to within and vice versa. Incidentally, Hemingway was acutely cognizant of such mimesis, particularly as he found it in the works of Paul Cézanne.

Thus, one needs to be cautious in accusing Mailer of impersonating Hemingway or directly imitating him. As a writer he was interested in understanding the violence and brutality in such war and the so-called “contact sports.” For the trajectory of imitative behavior covers large and varied expanses, some of which are grounded in spirituality, which everyday language pejoratively relegates to “aping.” Imitation as a legitimate, indeed essential,{{pg|176|177}}

activity persists, as strongly in childhood echolalia as it does on the mystical level that Thomas à Kempis accords it in his ''Imitation of Christ.'' In its profoundest sense, imitation may lead to a visionary conversion that I attribute to Mailer’s relation to Hemingway as visionary hermeneutic appropriation. Imitation would then come forth as transformative action in the process of forming new a new identity. I believe that was one of the contemplative aims that the writer of ''Imitation of Christ'' had in mind. In this light, the true imitation would appear to be seeking a truth not available otherwise, either to the imitated or the imitator.

Contemporary critical thought habitually disregards such imitative efforts as ultimately derivative, producing no more than redundant, second-hand truth, hardly expected to provide original knowledge and understanding. It is because we often forget that our primordial inclination toward imitative behavior serves us as a catalyst at all levels of human educative processes. To be totally impervious to imitation is to be ''uneducable.'' To imitate is to change, and, strictly speaking, no change is death in the midst of life. A s transient as it often proves to be, what makes imitative behavior possible is the freedom to change, to be, with intelligence and luck, betterthan one might have been otherwise. It implies freedom that solely change can elicit, asis evident in the early games in which children dress up and act as grownups.

Hemingway often serves Mailer as a trampoline for further conceptual and creative modifications of his own desires, conscious or otherwise. In general, perhaps the meditative attitude I have adopted in this essay is in and of itself an imitative example to the degree that it draws from the patterns of traditional meditative literature in general. I would like to end this section by citing a fine story Mailer recounts about Nelson Algren giving a class on writing and inviting Mailer to sit in. Mailer recalls,

<blockquote>
He [Algren] read a story by one of the kids. Third-rate Papa.Afterward, I said to Nelson, “Why did you pay that much attention? He was just copying Hemingway.”And Algren,who was ten years older than me and knew that much more,said,“You know, these kids are better off if they attach themselves to a writer and start imitating him, because they learn a lot doing that.If they’re any good at all, sooner or later they’ll get rid of the influence. But first, they have to get attached to somebody.” That was useful.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=76}}
</blockquote>{{pg|177|178}}

'''VII. MAILER’S VISIONARY HERMENEUTIC APPROPRIATION AND
BLOOM’S THEORY OF ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE'''

Can the particular concept of visionary hermeneutic appropriation that I ascribe to Mailer in his relationship as a writer to Hemingway find a justifiable place within the context of Harold Bloom’s magisterial ''The Anxiety of Influence?'' Bloom forcefully applies his theory to Hemingway’s influence on Mailer. I maintain that such placement is possible on the condition that I relegate my own formulation of influence in the Mailer-Hemingway case to a category within Bloom’s own theory of anxiety of influence as an ''exception.'' This effort necessitates a brief exposition of Bloom’s justifiably elaborate theory of influence.

In ''The Anxiety of Influence,'' Bloom offers an analysis of the phenomenon of influence in the development and maintenance of the “poetic,” in which the poetic is to be taken in its traditional sense of literature as a whole. We owe Bloom a large debt of gratitude for this work in the field of influence studies. Passionate, dense, and erudite, one can only underestimate it at one’s own great loss. Bloom analyzes how “poets” guarantee continued literary creation, and dissemination as influence, while paying an exorbitant but necessary price for it in the anxiety of influence.

Bloom informs us that “[t]he precursors flood us, and our imagination can die by drowning in them, but no imaginative life is possible if such inundation is wholly evaded.”{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=154}} Concise, astute, and confident, it is a truly compelling statement. ''The Anxiety of Influence'' legitimately demands that we attempt to periodically test it here and there. Such probes keep the theory of anxiety of influence supple, flexible and therefore applicable to new demands made upon it by new literary visions.I find this exploratory probe to be warranted in the Mailer-Hemingway case. Such activity, I hope, accords ''The Anxiety of Influence'' the attention it so highly deserves as relevant to our contemporary concerns.

My line of reasoning demands more elucidation. In the essential chapter “Clinamen or Poetic Misprision” in ''The Anxiety of Influence'' Bloom states,

<blockquote>
What gives pleasure to the critic in a reader may give anxiety to the poet in him, an anxiety we have learned, as readers, to neglect, to our own loss and peril. This anxiety, this mode of melancholy, is the anxiety of influence, the dark and daemonic ground upon which we now enter.{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=25}}
</blockquote>{{pg|178|179}}

Elaborating further on it, he adds, “Poetic influence—when it involves two strong, authentic poets—always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation.”{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=30}} He stresses, “The history of fruitful poetic influence . . . is a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature, of distortion, of perverse, willful revisionism without which modern poetry as such could not exist.”{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=30}}

These are strong arguments, well conceived and precisely stated. Far reaching in their ramifications, they sound severe, determinant, even formidable and daunting. All the same, I acknowledge their validity in a psychoanalytically inflected general theory of literary influence as Oedipal in its origin and unfolding in one of the multiplicity of forms. Bloom underlines as given the enormous influence writers undergo as they internalize their literary culture and the accompanying psychological guilt that it causes. Citing Mailer as an example, Bloom informs us,

<blockquote>
“The burden of government,” [Samuel] Johnson brooded,“is increased upon princes by the virtues of their immediate predecessors,” and he added: “He that succeeds a celebrated writer, has the same difficulties to encounter.” We know the rancid humor of this too well, and any reader of Advertisements for Myself may enjoy the frantic dances of Norman Mailer as he strives to evade his own anxiety that it is, after all, Hemingway all the way, emphasis added{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=28}}

Oddly, in “First Advertisement for Myself,” the introductory piece to ''Advertisement for Myself,'' what Bloom perceives as “frantic dances” would seem like ritualistic dances. Mailer performs them as he prepares to affect a kind Jungian metanoia to re-form his divided psyche to bring about self-healing and renewed creative energy. The “rancid humor” of it derives from the struggles of the psyche of a writer torn apart between a sense of utter defeat and megalomania. “Defeat has left my nature divided,” declares Mailer, “my sense of timing is eccentric, and I contain within myself the bitter exhaustions of an old man, and the cocky arguments of a bright boy. So I am everything but my proper age of thirty-six, and anger has brought me to the edge of the brutal.”{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=17}} On the other hand, he immediately confesses, “In sitting down to write a sermon for this collection, I find arrogance in much of my mood,” which is an understatement.{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=17}}
</blockquote>{{pg|179|180}}

Later, as it was his inclination, Mailer extravagantly predicts, “it is my present and future work which will have the deepest influence of any work being done by an American novelist in these years.”{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=17}} His contradictory statements make intelligible a psychological swing between defeat and a sense of manic exaltation, a type of bipolar depression that he may have shared for sometime and to some degree with Hemingway. They detract from his confidence in his claim of eventual superior influence and puts it in question. But I would say his vacillations in self-assurance are much to his credit. Because, sad to say for him and for us, Mailer came to acknowledge later in life that his prediction that his work will have “the deepest influence of any work being done by an American novelist in these years” did not transpire—at least not in any appreciable way.

On a certain plane of critical thought, one may argue ''Advertisements for Myself'' constitutes Mailer’s own treatise on influence. In a letter to George Plimpton, Hemingway refers to the book as “the sort of ragtag assembly of his [Mailer’s] rewrites, second thoughts and ramblings ''shot through with occasional brilliance”'', emphasis added.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=912}} If by “ragtag” Hemingway meant that the books contents were diverse and lacking in cohesion in appearance or composition, that might well have been true. But the fact remains that Mailer intentionally structured it as such, as he did, say, in ''Cannibals and Christians.'' But Hemingway’s remark on the text being “shot through with occasional brilliance” is right on the mark. Hardly noticeable, Mailer’s attempts in this text culminate in discovering and establishing a viable, working out a dialectical synthesis between himself and Hemingway as men and writers. Mailer’s articulation of the subject falls into that hard earned occasional brilliance of the text. Did Hemingway realize this in his own way? It is entirely possible.

Mailer’s own sense of “defeat” will not cease tormenting him unless and until this Hemingway matter is truly settled once and for all. “Every American writer,” writes Mailer plainly, “who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=19}} “Faena” is an unusual but pertinent word to use here in connection to Hemingway and the way Mailer proposes to deal with his contemporaries. Faena denotes a series of final ritual passes at the bull that a matador carries out in bullfighting. It occurs immediately before the ''kill,'' the moment of truth, to highlight a matador’s skill. On the other hand, to perform “a faena which borrows from the self-love of a{{pg|180|181}}

Hemingway style” connotes at the same time a moment of pride in the truth of accomplishment as well as exhibition narcissism and a touch of brutality.

The main point, however, is Mailer laying claim to Hemingway’s vision through the agency of his own interpretation of it.It will make it possible for him to identify with Hemingway for better or worse and for good and for keeps. Mailer tells his readers, “I have come finally to have a great sympathy for The Master’s irrepressible tantrum that he is the champion writer of this time, and of all time, and that if anyone can pin Tolstoy, it is Ernest H.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=19}}

Confined to the framework of this essay, I would propose that ''Advertisements for Myself'' is Mailer’s valiant form of confession and initiation into a visionary hermeneutic appropriation, which approaches a kind of literary conversion. It represents a writer’s self-transformation and regeneration as a genuine response to another writer’s thought and work. It does so, however, without any illusion, compromise, and least of all sentimentality. In no way such conversion implies loss of creative uniqueness and integrity, just the contrary.

In relation to Bloom’s general theory of influence, I would relegate Mailer’s hermeneutic appropriation to the “state of exception,” as Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Agamben defines the “state of exception” in reference to Saint Paul’s word “katarego,” roughly translated as “I deactivate” in his First Letter to the Corinthians. Agamben calls it “messianic katarg sis,” or messianic deactivation.{{sfn|Agamben|2005|p=104}} He further clarifies it as a “law that is simultaneously suspended and fulfilled.”{{sfn|Agamben|2005|p=104}} I find it useful to compare “messianic katarg sis” and visionary hermeneutic appropriation, because both concepts fully connote fidelity and flexibility. As Agamben points out, “In our tradition, a metaphysical concept, which takes as its prime focus a moment of foundation and origin, coexists with a messianic concept, which focuses on a moment of fulfillment.”{{sfn|Agamben|2005|p=103-4}} What sanctions such coexistence “is the idea that fulfillment is possible by retrieving and revoking the foundation, by coming to terms with it.”{{sfn|Agamben|2005|p=104}}

'''VIII. MAILER’S VISIONARY INTERPRETIVE APPROPRIATION AND THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX: “THE STATE OF EXCEPTION”'''

In an interview, Mailer scholar and critic Michael Lennon elicited from Mailer the following keen remarks on the perception of his relationship to Hemingway:{{pg|181|182}}

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

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

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Agamben |first=Giorgio |date=2005 |title=The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans |translator-last=Dalley |translator-first=Patricia |location=Stanford |publisher=Stanford UP}}
* {{cite book |last=Anzieu |first=Didier |date=1990 |title=A Skin for Thought: Interviews with Gilbert Tarrab on Psychology and Psychoanalysis |translator-last=Briggs |translator-first=Daphne Nash |location=London |publisher=Karnak Books}}
* {{cite book |last=Beauvoir |first=Simone de |date=1993 |title=The Second Sex |translator-last=Parshley |translator-first=H. M. |location=New York |publisher=Everyman's Library}}
* {{cite book |last=Bloom |first=Harold |date=1979 |title=The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry |location=New York |publisher=Oxford UP}}
* {{cite book |last=Bowie |first=Malcolm |date=1993 |title=Lacan |location=Cambridge, MA |publisher=Harvard UP}}
* {{cite book |last=Freud |first=Sigmund |date=1946 |title=Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics |translator-last=Brill |translator-first=A. A. |location=New York |publisher=Random House}}
* {{cite book |last=Gracián |first=Baltasar |date=2008 |title=The Art of Worldly Wisdom |translator-last=Fischer |translator-first=Martin |location=New York |publisher=Barnes & Noble}}
* {{cite book |last=Heidegger |first=Martin |date=1935 |title=Poetry, Language, Thought |translator-last=Hofstadter |translator-first=Albert |location=New York |publisher=Harper Colophon Books}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |chapter=The Art of Fiction |title=Writers at Work |editor-last=Plimpton |editor-first=George |location=New York |publisher=The Viking Press |year=1965 |pages=217–39}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-link= Norman Mailer| date=1932 |title=Death in the Afternoon |location=New York |publisher=Scribner}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-link= Norman Mailer| title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961 |editor-last=Baker |editor-first=Carlos |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |date=1981}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-link= Norman Mailer| title=Green Hills of Africa |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |date=1935}}
*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-link= Norman Mailer| title=Advertisements for Myself |location=New York |publisher=G.P. Putnam's Sons |date=1959}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-link= Norman Mailer| title=Cannibals and Christians |location=New York |publisher=Dial |date=1966}}
*{{cite interview |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-link= Norman Mailer| title=Conversations with Norman Mailer |location=Jackson |publisher="UP of Mississippi" |date=1988 |pages=20–8; 155-75; 207-27;291-8}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-link= Norman Mailer| title=The Fight |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown and Co. |date=1975}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-link= Norman Mailer| title=Pieces and Pontifications |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown and Co. |date=1982}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-link= Norman Mailer| title=The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing |location=New York |publisher=Random House |date=2003}}
{{cite book |last1=Mailer |first1=Norman |author-link=Norman Mailer|last2=Mailer |first2=John Buffalo |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}}
* {{cite book |last=Marcel |first=Gabriel |title=The Philosophy of Existentialism |translator-last=Harari |translator-first=Manya |location=Secaucus, N.J. |publisher=The Citadel Press |date=1973}}
* {{cite journal |last=Nakjavani |first=Erik |title=The Aesthetics of Silence: Hemingway's "The Art of the Short Story" |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=3 |issue=2 |date=1984 |pages=38–45}}
* {{cite journal |last=Nakjavani |first=Erik |title=The Aesthetics of the Visible and the Invisible: Hemingway and Cézanne |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=5 |issue=2 |date=1986 |pages=2–11}}
* {{cite journal |last=Nakjavani |first=Erik |title=The Prose of Life: Lived Experience in the Fiction of Hemingway, Sartre, and Beauvoir |journal=North Dakota Quarterly |volume=70 |issue=4 |date=2003 |pages=140–65}}
* {{cite book |last=Raymond |first=Dwayne |title=Mornings with Mailer: A Recollection of Friendship |location=New York |publisher=Harper |date=2010}}
* {{cite book |last=Valéry |first=Paul |title=Leonardo, Poe, Mallarmé |translator-last=Cowley |translator-first=Malcolm |translator2-last=Lawler |translator2-first=James R. |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |date=1972}}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer

2025-04-28T11:30:23Z

Jules Carry: Added banner.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer}}
{{Working}}
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{{Byline |last=Nakjavani |first=Erik |url=TBD |abstract=TBD}}

<blockquote>
[T]here is nothing in the critical field that should be of greater
philosophical interest or prove more rewarding to analysis than
the progressive modification of one mind by the work of
another.{{sfn|Valéry|1972|p=241}}
</blockquote>

'''I. Prologue'''

Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway. This phrase brings into proximity two prominent twentieth-century American writers. The phrasal contiguity of the two names suggests an arrangement that at first glance conceals more than it reveals. For, upon reflection, their proximity sketches out areas that often tend toward more pronounced darkness rather than light. One repeatedly thinks about Hemingway’s influence on other writers. Colleagues at various academic conferences refer to it. It appears in scholarly journals, popular magazines, and newspapers. Still one does not readily see what might constitute Hemingway’s influence on Mailer, that is, aside from what amounts to and is derided by some critics as Mailer’s imitative behavior in the worst meaning of the adjective.

Mailer’s imaginal thematics,which often touches on the phantasmagoric,
his baroque stylistics, and his distinctive intellectual concerns, all seem to be
divergent from those developed and practiced by Hemingway. Does this{{pg|163|164}}

mean, then, that the conjunction “and” in my initial verbless and therefore as yet inactive sentence misleadingly sets forth commonalities between the two writers? I think not. Because I would expect one may at least adumbrate a theoretical common ground between them. The conjunctive “and” will exceed its usual grammatical function and eventually carry out an exceptional task. The promise of latent and multiple vistas of the connection between Mailer and Hemingway, which as yet remain unknown, will still become known. However, the fulfillment of this promise requires wide-ranging conceptual meditations and may take a long and nonlinear course. The meditative approach I am proposing will offer an inkling of possible signifying links between Mailer and Hemingway.

Clearly, Hemingway and Mailer’s names are heavily laden with literary, cultural,religious, educational, and socio-political implications. They often connote factual differences, even inevitable conflicts. Consequently, now and again, the differences may seem to be unbridgeable and militate against the prospect of serious comparative studies of the commonalities between the two writers. Since such study endeavors to go beyond wading in the shallows of mere superficial similarities and comparisons, the complexity of its conceptual framework will also proportionally increase. But I would like to go straight to my conclusion and confirm that such a study is indeed realizable, in spite of undeniable obscurities, or paradoxically because of them. For such seemingly impenetrable areas force us to rethink our theoretical guiding principles of literary influence and reconfigure constitutive elements.

Happily, Mailer’s own preoccupation—if indeed not outright obsession—with Hemingway as a singularly distinctive man and writer renders my effort somewhat easier. Mailer’s own articulations of his connection with Hemingway will allow me to make intelligible possible shared literary philosophical views and aspirations. His passionate fascination with Hemingway communicates itself as a combination of theoretical and experiential interests and practices. Altogether, they indicate a space where a serious study of their affinities and visionary literary kinship may come to light as viable. Such likelihood may not be easily discernible if one only limits oneself to the more traditional influence imitation theories. It would seem to me applying such theories to Hemingway and Mailer as tutor and tyro may well prove to be an egregious over-simplification and therefore more aporetic than heuristic. In my view, the whole problematic of Mailer’s relationship{{pg|164|165}}

with Hemingway sets in motion a pervasive expectant mood. A Heideggerian sense of ontological disclosures gives the impression of emerging from it, providing the clearing where the two language artists practiced their profession. This clearing also permits crisscrossing meditations, interpretations, and associative musings. As we well know, Mailer and Hemingway’s personalities and works tend to elicit such activities in their readers.

As a result, in due course I shall propose and will attempt to develop a subcategory to the traditional theory of influence to make intelligible the nature of Hemingway’s unusual influence over Mailer’s imagination. I classify it as visionary hermeneutic appropriation as influence. I hope the general theoretical thrust of such classification differentiates it from the more direct and more easily discernible thematic and stylistic influence as imitation. It will provide us with a useful working concept. I hope the reader will find it less daunting in its logic and practice than its designation at first might suggest.

It would seem helpful to begin our task of examining the particular mode of influence Hemingway exerted on Mailer with a brief overall assessment of Hemingway’s widespread influence on twentieth-century American writers, including Mailer. I shall then proceed to Mailer’s own appraisal of Hemingway’s influence on the writers of his generation. Above all, I will examine Mailer’s perception of Hemingway’s influence on himself as arguably one of the most ambitious writers of his own time right along with the older Hemingway. This sequence will make it possible to study how Hemingway’s influence on Mailer characterizes itself as a highly differentiated case.

'''II. HEMINGWAY’S TRANSPARENT INFLUENCE ON SOME NOTABLE AMERICAN WRITERS'''

There are many American writers who appear to have made Hemingway’s work and way of life their own. They have done so through direct influence and imitation. Two interrelated operations make the effects of such influence intelligible. First, there is a process of phenomenological hermeneutics in the sense that Martin Heidegger understood it as interpretation and understanding. Analogous to the task of gods’ messenger Hermes, the reader writer endeavors to understand Hemingway’s work in the context of his or her own interpretation of it. In practice, this task is readily achievable as a given in human heuristic activities without considering the more technical underpinnings of hermeneutics as such. The act of interpretation permits{{pg|165|166}}

the reader to understand the meaning of a given text as an intended object of his or her own consciousness. It carries in it the reader-writer’s individual desires, fantasies, dreams, daydreams, culture of reading, and socioeconomic circumstances. In short, each interpretation carries in its fold the interpreter’s prior lived experiences. Second, the text, thus read, implies a concomitant epistemology, which the reader-writer can appropriate.

On the plane of his way of life, as Mailer so well knew, Hemingway also exercised an exceptional charismatic influence on readers and writers. To some extent, he still continues to do so. One thinks of his way of life as an instance of Martin Heidegger’s ''“Dasein,”'' a genuine way of being human, which would be open to various interpretations and imitative practices. In a way, Hemingway as an individual makes available to us a specific semio-logical text, as it were. If so inclined, one can engage with it through simple imitation or more labyrinthine paths of influence.

The uncommon influence that Hemingway exercised on readers and writers is largely due to his instinctive inclination to write open-ended fiction and creative nonfiction. Even at the lexical and syntactic levels of his work, the slide from vivid denotation to unrestricted connotations guarantees unlimited interpretive semantics. Based mostly on lived experience and its endless twists and turns, opacities and vagaries, unpredictabilities and mysteries, his fiction
and creative nonfiction are largely unlimited enterprises in the domain of signification and interpretive disclosure. For Hemingway the purity of heart was to will everything, which embraces Kierkegaardian belief on the plane of the
unity of the whole of existence. Nearly all of Hemingway’s sentences, as in all
good fiction, are potentially polysemic and subject to an endless existential
hermeneutics as are the lived experiences they try to recreate imaginatively.
The truth of such fiction can only be regarded in the plural: truths. Thus, Hemingway initiates a dialogue with all of his potential reader writers, to which they can respond emotionally, cognitively, and even actively pursue either by imitation or under the enchantment of influence. “Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it,” he said in “The Art of Fiction,” an interview with George Plimpton. “Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1965|p=229}} It would be hard to find a keener or more accurate description of existential hermeneutic activities and modes of recreating and making a text your own.

To sum up: the combined agencies of three phenomenological operations in the act of reading make it possible for any reader of Hemingway to read{{pg|166|167}}

is work according to his or her own desire and knowledge. They are dialogics, that is, the art and science of dialogue as it burst upon consciousness; hermeneutics, the method of interpreting and comprehending the scriptural work or text guided by the clusters of one’s desire and knowledge; and, finally, recreating the text in the light of all these three operations.

At this point, one may state that Hemingway’s attentive readers, reader writers, and critics (the other group of reader-writers) who may have an interest in the domain of literary influence either have taken mental notes or have made up their lists of writers influenced by Hemingway. It seems to be an irresistible activity. It may well be that each list brings forth the reciprocal effects of the texts read, in turn reading and analyzing the readers and list makers.

Taking into considerations the nature of Hemingway’s influence, I should like to offer a list of writers I consider to have been apparently influenced by him. I limit the list strictly to American male writers and include such diverse names as Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961),James M.Cain (1892-1977), Walter van Tilburg Clark (1909-1979), John Heresy (1914-1993), Robert Ruark (1915-1965), Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), Vance Bourjaily (1922-), Jack (Jean Louis) Kerouac (1922-1969), Cormac McCarthy (1933-), Richard Brautigan (1935-1984), Elmore Leonard (1935-), Raymond Carver (1938-1988), and Hunter Thompson (1937-2005).

This list is illustrative, of course—not at all intended to be either critical or exhaustive. It is at best exploratory and suggestive.I am aware that in each writer’s case the affinities with Hemingway and the extent and depth of his influence on him substantially differ. What does remain constant, however, is the existence of an inevitable vestige of the dynamic dialectic of uniqueness and influence, going from clear-cut direct imitation to intricate indirect influence in fictional conception and execution.

'''III. HEMINGWAY’S NONTRANSPARENT INFLUENCE'''

<blockquote>
Hemingway’s style had an ability to hit the young writers in the
gut, and they weren’t the same after that.{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=298}}
</blockquote>

My intention in treating Hemingway’s influence on American writers at
some length has been to show the nature and extent of the problem Mailer{{pg|167|168}}

was facing in dealing with Hemingway’s pervasive and detectable influence. Placing Mailer within my list would not have done justice to his own unique place in the history of twentieth-century American letters. For this reason, I made no mention of either his name or,I must add, Nelson Algren’s (1909-1981). I would say Hemingway’s influence on them falls into a different category. One may think of it as profound but not readily intelligible influence. They were two writers who were truly “hit in the gut” hard and for good and keeps by Hemingway. But the essence of how they experienced that radical influence remains mostly nontransparent.

Once one understands how—and how hard—with what lasting effects Hemingway as a writer “hit” a younger fellow-writer like Mailer in the “gut,” consequences can then be explored. A proper definition and explication of it may then emerge. Mailer and Algren both came to embody Hemingway’s influence, identifying with him, each in his own way. The result was the development of affinities with him, both as men and writers. Even though the nature, scope, and intensity of their kinship with Hemingway greatly varied, they both went beyond the boundaries of the dialectic of direct imitation and influence. As enlightening and fascinating as it is to compare simultaneously Mailer and Algren’s relationships with Hemingway, it would fall beyond the perimeters of the present study.{{efn|Following the logic of visionary appropriation in this essay, I am currently engaged in writing a study of Hemingway’s mode of influence on Nelson Algren.}}

Accordingly,I would like to add the category of nontransparent influence to the broad sphere of Mailer-Hemingway studies. I designate it as visionary hermeneutic appropriation, primarily as it applies to Mailer. I shall later devote a section to its definition. To my mind, the critical narrative of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer belongs to the logic of this other sphere of influence,which sounds a bit technical but bears out to be less so in practice. I deem it to be a useful concept and place it as a category within the general theory of influence. I am persuaded it will provide forays into uncharted territories. Basically, it will embrace the proximal and the distal, the familiar to the unfamiliar, the expected and the unexpected from within and without the immediate and known boundaries of studies of Hemingway’s influence so far done.

'''IV. MAILER'S RECOGNITION AND ASSESSMENT OF HEMINGWAY's INFLUENCE'''

In “Prisoner of Success,” an interview with Paul Attanasio, Mailer stated with
exceptional lucidity:{{pg|168|169}}

<blockquote>
Hemingway occupied the center in every way, not only coming from the Midwest, but he occupies the very center of writing itself. Anyone who’s ever read a newspaper can feel how good a writer he is—he uses a vocabulary that if anything is smaller than the average newspaperman’s vocabulary. And he does wonderful things with it. So no matter how serious or superficial a reader you are you sense very quickly that you are in the hands of someone who truly can write well. Then, of course, he wrote about things that are very, very interesting to men. There aren’t very
many women going around saying Hemingway is a great writer. I am willing to bet more American women who are good writers have been influenced by Proust than by Hemingway. But for men he’s central: the anxieties he feels about being a man cover
all the anxieties; it’s almost impossible not to identify with his work.{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=187}}(Pontifications 131-32)
</blockquote>

Clearly, this citation is long, but well worth providing. It is well conceived, admirably stated, and far-reaching. As the most stridently ambitious writer of his generation, one can unquestionably see the implications of Mailer’s awareness of all things Hemingway. Mailer shows a keen sense of the truth and the astonishing expanse of the influence Hemingway exercised during his lifetime. Hemingway’s work went beyond regional influence and extended itself to national and international levels.

With striking insight Mailer goes to the very mysterious heart of Hemingway’s magical influence as a creative writer: mastery of the alchemical power of everyday American speech as poetry. With remarkable accuracy, he perceives that the prominence of Hemingway as a writer resides in the wonderful things he does with the English language or, more precisely, with the American colloquial speech. Mailer sees the rare enchantment that Hemingway can work by eliciting a feeling in the reader that true wonders await him or her merely by reading on. He also hints at his appreciation of Hemingway’s meiotic style, and what he could achieve with a minimal poetic diction at the lexical and semantic levels of the language. It is little wonder that Mailer also liked to read the Belgian born French writer Georges Simenon’s detective Jules Maigret series. Simenon, too, practiced a totally unornamented, uncluttered, minimalist style that approached Hemingway’s.{{efn|On Mailer’s appreciation of Georges Simenon’s detective fiction, please see Dwayne Raymond’s ''Mornings with Mailer.''{{sfn|Raymond|2010|p=174}} For more extensive discussions of Hemingway’s meiotic stylistics and the role that the concepts of primal silence and the invisible plays in it please see my articles “The Aesthetics of Silence,” and “The Aesthetics of the Visible and the Invisible.}} Hemingway, too,{{pg|169|170}}

admired Simenon’s fiction, which he originally discovered in the 1920s in Paris.

Let us take a closer look at Mailer’s view of Hemingway’s centrality to twentieth century American writing. In any human community our fellow human beings always surround us in the circle of their ontological presence as the horizon of our life. As a consequence, the notion of occupying the “very center” in such communities spells out a position of unquestionable eminence and prominence. Mailer readily credits Hemingway with the central position in writing in the community of writers in America. In a Playboy interview, conducted by his son John Buffalo Mailer, he spoke of Hemingway’s “prodigious influence for young American writers. He taught a lot of us how to look for the tensile strength of a sentence.”{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|p=122}}

Combining these related declarations about centrality is irresistible. First, because lexically “center” indicates the principal, pivotal, and radial point within a circle or sphere. The center comprises the focal point of the circumference that it defines. Second, the grammatical notion “sentence” defines the foundational, generative, syntactical unit of language. The sentence constitutes the center of our meaningful oral and scriptural discourse. It follows then that the maximal stress that a sentence as the basic unit of discourse may bear is essential. The sentence must do so without syntactically imploding into semantic nonsense. Mailer’s statements pay austere but high homage to Hemingway. The older writer comes through Mailer’s considered opinion as the high priest of creative writing in twentieth-century American writing. Judged by any standard, that is high praise, spontaneously offered. At the same time, it bears witness to the challenge that Hemingway as a writer posed to Mailer and how he dealt with it.

'''V. OUTLINE OF A VISIONARY HERMENEUTIC APPROPRIATION'''

<blockquote>
Examples of greatness lie about us, living texts of renown. Let each set before himself the greatest in his line, not so much as something to follow as something to spur him on.{{sfn|Gracián|2008|p=25}}
</blockquote>

The centrality Mailer attributes to Hemingway among American writers would be seldom, if ever, far from his own mind during his writing life. It acquired the invisible center in his own gravity in his own writing. Initially,{{pg|170|171}}

Mailer’s comments about Hemingway were inspired by genuine fascination as well as frequent intimations of irritation. One may generally regard his irritation as making an effort not to be captivated by the older writer, in the sense of being creatively captured and subjugated. His sporadic early resentment toward Hemingway would seem to be prompted by the inclination to declare himself as the rightful archetypal son and inheritor of the master’s place. Yet this declaration had to be couched in a language that permitted him to continue to be a unique, talented, and independent writer. At times, I would imagine it implied that he, Mailer, would someday be considered an undisputed literary genius in his own right. He would become the new literary champion of the world. So, at the outset, his ambivalence toward Hemingway betrays a telltale sign of a justified Oedipal resentment as the master’s self-appointed heir apparent.

In the fullness of time, Mailer developed a larger and steadier perspective on Hemingway and his work. I very much regret that he did not regard it necessary to devote a book to the subject. It would have been a remarkably enlightening book. His decision not to do so might very likely have been due to his ample but widely dispersed observations on Hemingway. “If one is going to make a statement about Hemingway,” said Mailer as early as 1955, “it can be done either by posing a riddle or else one has to write at least ten thousand words to say something new in the critical literature.”{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=26}} Mailer ended up by saying and writing nearly as much on the subject and implying more during his writing life. One hopes that a Mailer scholar will gather these observations in a collection, which will no doubt prove to be instructive.

Mailer’s comments on Hemingway in their aggregate manifest his own distinctiveness as an individual and writer. Concomitantly, there is a pervasive sense of identification with Hemingway through the agency of empathetic imagination. Mailer’s empathy with Hemingway and his early reservations about him make up the strong antithetical pole of a dialectical synthesis. From a theoretical standpoint, this dialectical synthesis is replete with critical import. For the general patterns of Mailer’s gravitation to Hemingway bear testimony to French poet and critic Paul Valéry’s belief in the truth of “philosophical interest” that “the progressive modification of one mind by the work of another” possesses.{{sfn|Valéry|1972|p=241}}

In the absence of any transparent, extensive, unmediated stylistic or thematic influence by Hemingway on Mailer, my formulation of influence as{{pg|171|172}}

interpretive and visionary offers a new but specific theoretical reconfiguration of constitutive elements of influence.It provides a key to rendering our incomprehension of Mailer’s literary relationship with Hemingway less so. For me, the interrelated operations of interpreting lived experience, elucidating its epistemology, and putting the whole process through a transformative imagination forms Hemingway’s influence on Mailer. Briefly put: It is a way of making written words by one writer the flesh and blood of aother. It confers magical powers of creativity on the writer as the reader. As a result, on the plane of interpretation, this modality of reading involves the immediate effects of our conscious and unconscious activities of the psyche as thoughts, emotions, dreams and their correlates as myth.

On the cultural plane, visionary hermeneutic appropriation brings into play the whole range of our familial,social, cultural, and educational inheritance. All of our prejudgments, prejudices, and received notions, as well as our capabilities to create and imagine the world, enter into it. On the side of appropriation of our interpretation, it functions within the psychological structures of sympathetic imagination, identification, projections, and transformations through textual intermediations. In short, it amounts to our vision of the writer’s work. Henceforth, I use the visionary hermeneutic appropriation to indicate the modality of Mailer’s relationship to Hemingway and I shall refer to it as visionary hermeneutic appropriation in the context that I have just formulated it.

In the interest of taking just a step further the concept of the visionary in hermeneutic appropriation, I wish to emphasize how it plays in the theoretical concept. By visionary, I mean to point out a kind of unconscious intervention that renders our imagination active, making it capable of audacious undertakings. Additionally, I would attribute to a quality of inspiration, a work of animation more akin to its Latin etymology of “to inspire” (''insp r re'') or to “breathe upon” or “breathe into.” It seeks to enliven, quicken, and heighten the senses. Inspiration as such coincides with ''pneuma'' in its etymological Greek meaning as “breath,” which approximates its quasitheological meaning as “vital spirit.”

If we integrate visionary hermeneutic appropriation within its twin phenomenological appearance in our consciousness and its existential implications in our experience, the term would then impart a sense of imaginative apprehension and alignment. This is so because one may perceive it as a type of conversion that would be justifiable. As conversion, it carries in it a{{pg|172|173}}

combined sense of artistic and spiritual adhesion and adherence.As such, it would differentiate itself from the passivity and inertia that usually characterize imitation and influence. Applied to Mailer’s attitude toward Hemingway, the whole process characterizes itself as a freely chosen mode of dynamic commitment and fidelity to an imaginatively energizing ideal. What it categorically refuses is a type of willy-nilly literary seduction. The entire enterprise demands an authentic self-transformation and renewal of identity from within. Therefore, certain perceived affinities and empathies between Mailer and Hemingway are more or less analogous to spiritual and religious longings as influence.

I would like to convey a recollection that may put the concept of Mailer’s visionary hermeneutic appropriation of Hemingway in a clearer proper perspective. I remember reading French philosopher Gabriel Marcel’s effort to tell his readers that although he had read German philosopher Karl Jaspers’ essay ''“Système de philosophie”'' (Philosophical System), his own essay ''“On the Ontological Mystery,”'' had not been ''directly'' influenced by it. Marcel explained that Jaspers’ “terminology” and his “spiritual and religious orientations” were quite different from his own.{{sfn|Marcel|1973|p=6}} Marcel then added, “Nevertheless, I feel obscurely that I owe a real debt to this noble and profound thinker [Jaspers], and I am anxious to acknowledge the ''inward'' and almost ''indefinable'' influence which he has exercised on our own mind.”{{sfn|Marcel|1973|p=6}} I consider this statement to be an elegant, touching acknowledgement. This “inward” and “indefinable” and perhaps ultimately ineffable influence, with all that it implies, is precisely what I mean by visionary hermeneutic appropriation as influence. I detect it in Mailer’s inward and often ineffable responses to Hemingway. This is precisely my reason for differentiating among literary imitation, influence, and visionary hermeneutic appropriation.

'''VI. SEARCH FOR ELEMENTS OF MAILER’S VISIONARY HERMENEUTIC
APPROPRIATION OF HEMINGWAY'''

<blockquote>
Literary influence remains endlessly curious.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=99}}
</blockquote>

I would say that searching for the components of Hemingway’s nontransparent but nonetheless true influence on a writer such as Mailer could resemble the psychological mechanisms of paranoia. Or at least it may appear{{pg|173|174}}

so to readers with a psychoanalytic proclivity and sensitivity. One may think of it as the “hermeneutic of suspicion,” formulated by French philosopher Paul Ricouer. The logic of Marxist hermeneutics essays to explain the role of economic class in determining our consciousness as Freudian psychoanalysis does with the unconscious. This type of intellectual and scholarly paranoia ''(para + nous)'' requires that the conscious mind extend itself beyond the limits it ordinarily imposes upon itself, because it suspects its own motivations. In so doing, the paranoiac mind suspects the existence of correspondences hitherto gone undetected, engaging in thoughts and acts to unveil and disclose them. Such paranoia may impel the scholar to see mysterious influences lurking in everything everywhere.

It is perhaps preferable to the ''“naiveté”'' that is the dialectical opposite of paranoia, to use English psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott’s vocabulary. Literary critical paranoia may indeed be of help here to the extent that it mobilizes our sensitivities to look for what often lies hidden below the exhausted surfaces of our scholarly work. The paranoid critic of influence studies joins Mailer’s “[c]ertain artists, those who see associations and connections everywhere” mentioned in his “The Metaphysics of the Belly.”{{sfn|Mailer|1966|p=265}} In any case, let us not forget the example of the venerable Sir Isaac Newton and his apple.

There is no discernible evidence that Mailer directly imitated Hemingway to any appreciable degree personally or as a writer. I do not believe he became the “neo-Hemingway tough guy who patronize[d] boxing and bullfighting and bars,” as Joseph Glemis dubbed him.{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=156}} Mailer was too proud, too conscious of his own place in American letters to be a straightforward and unsophisticated follower, borrower, and/or imitator. With him it was all much more complicated than that. On the one hand, as an individual he worked hard to learn, say, how to box, which is a punishing way of imitating anyone. He was also interested for some time in bullfighting and other sports. But he was willing to pay the price for the lived
experience of boxing, whose semiotics and metaphysics in his mind had much to do with the language arts, as it did for Hemingway. In The ''Executioner’s Song'' Mailer consciously and transparently adopted Hemingway‘s less ornate, intentionally stripped-down narrative style. I would go as far as to suggest that Mailer’s creative nonfiction such as Armies of the Night might have been inspired by Hemingway’s prototypes of creative nonfiction in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Green Hills of Africa.'' It is our common{{pg|174|175}}

knowledge that some critics have mentioned Truman Capote’s ''In Cold Blood
(1966)'' as the source of inspiration for Mailer’s creative nonfiction. But the two examples of Hemingway’s experimentation with the genre texts precede Capote’s effort by three decades. Given Mailer’s astute mind and his trust in Hemingway as a writer, this possibility would appear to be more convincing than its supposed alternative.

On the other hand, Mailer’s shared literary interests with Hemingway’s were considerably broader and deeper. They grew out of Hemingway’s fundamental literary philosophical concerns such as courage and bravery modes of transcendent behavior. As well-integrated spiritual and corporeal strength, courage offered both men the proper deportment required to find salvation in extremis. They also had in common a vision of living the possibilities of their gender as maximal manhood firmly rooted in the body. I would think that the aim of such vision for Mailer was not machismo as a sense of masculine entitlement. I would suspect a merely assumptive masculine entitlement as a given would have made its embodiment emasculating to him rather than an existential adventure. At its best and in its profoundest sense, it was a matter of seamlessly lodging the psyche within the body as whole and entire. For that reason, they sought a second process of embodiment for their world for posterity within the body of the language of the art of fiction. As Hemingway had predicted, this approach to fiction would then produce a world whose truth would be truer than true. Language had the power to bring cohesion to the chaotic world of lived experience as it bursts upon our consciousness. And the truth of this cohesive world would then be available to anyone who could read. These are complex matters and need more clarification. I shall delve more probingly in due time.

If Mailer thought of Hemingway as worthy of imitation as a way of life and a writer, on a particular plane of reflection one cannot altogether dismiss it as trivial. Literary imitation yields much that is of interest about the imitator and the imitated. Imitation as transformative action has none too simple an origin and a history of development. Imitative acts, literary or otherwise, exceed the pejorative notion of “aping” in the current vernacular; that is to say, mindless mimicking, passively embraced at a low level of intellectual and artistic engagement. Such prejudices or prejudgments still play a part in a hierarchical study of influence. Nevertheless, such received ideas{{pg|175|176}}

ignore too much such as, for example, the psycho-philosophical and aesthetic sense of imitation as ''mimesis.''

Mimetic activities have a well-defined origin and long developmental history of spontaneously assembling, organizing, and ordering our perception of the world’s realities. In relation to Mailer and Hemingway, they still fall within the purlieu of visionary hermeneutic appropriation. Imitation and influence follow us with their compelling biological and atavistic impact as our genetic and familial inheritance at the time of our conception and henceforth throughout our life. Embedded in our familial, religious, cultural, societal and educational patterns of life and in the deep structures of language, imitative behavior permeates our life.Indeed, extensive theories of learning and pedagogical practices derive from them. Imitation and influence relentlessly precede and proceed us wherever we go. They ally themselves with the force that Freud attributes to the super-ego, whose effects as educative processes remain mostly unconscious or at least quasi-conscious. Various patterns of imitations and influences in their aggregate track all the developmental stages of our life. We can only move beyond them in acts of genuine creativity, acts that at once confirm their existence and transcend them in appropriation.

On the plane of the arts, ''Mimesis'' provided the philosophical and aesthetic matrix for classical and neo-classical paintings in the Renaissance period. Much later, as realism, naturalism, and impressionism they created new forms of artistic perception.It even sustained the foundational aesthetics of abstract impressionism and abstract painting as “non-figurative art,” or “non-objective art.” For instance, representations of moods and combinations of quasi-unconscious states of mind in the impressionism of Claude Monet, the post-impressionism of Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne and, later, Jackson Pollock are all mimetic operations. Abstraction in painting merely reverses the direction of the mimetic gaze from without to within and vice versa. Incidentally, Hemingway was acutely cognizant of such mimesis, particularly as he found it in the works of Paul Cézanne.

Thus, one needs to be cautious in accusing Mailer of impersonating Hemingway or directly imitating him. As a writer he was interested in understanding the violence and brutality in such war and the so-called “contact sports.” For the trajectory of imitative behavior covers large and varied expanses, some of which are grounded in spirituality, which everyday language pejoratively relegates to “aping.” Imitation as a legitimate, indeed essential,{{pg|176|177}}

activity persists, as strongly in childhood echolalia as it does on the mystical level that Thomas à Kempis accords it in his ''Imitation of Christ.'' In its profoundest sense, imitation may lead to a visionary conversion that I attribute to Mailer’s relation to Hemingway as visionary hermeneutic appropriation. Imitation would then come forth as transformative action in the process of forming new a new identity. I believe that was one of the contemplative aims that the writer of ''Imitation of Christ'' had in mind. In this light, the true imitation would appear to be seeking a truth not available otherwise, either to the imitated or the imitator.

Contemporary critical thought habitually disregards such imitative efforts as ultimately derivative, producing no more than redundant, second-hand truth, hardly expected to provide original knowledge and understanding. It is because we often forget that our primordial inclination toward imitative behavior serves us as a catalyst at all levels of human educative processes. To be totally impervious to imitation is to be ''uneducable.'' To imitate is to change, and, strictly speaking, no change is death in the midst of life. A s transient as it often proves to be, what makes imitative behavior possible is the freedom to change, to be, with intelligence and luck, betterthan one might have been otherwise. It implies freedom that solely change can elicit, asis evident in the early games in which children dress up and act as grownups.

Hemingway often serves Mailer as a trampoline for further conceptual and creative modifications of his own desires, conscious or otherwise. In general, perhaps the meditative attitude I have adopted in this essay is in and of itself an imitative example to the degree that it draws from the patterns of traditional meditative literature in general. I would like to end this section by citing a fine story Mailer recounts about Nelson Algren giving a class on writing and inviting Mailer to sit in. Mailer recalls,

<blockquote>
He [Algren] read a story by one of the kids. Third-rate Papa.Afterward, I said to Nelson, “Why did you pay that much attention? He was just copying Hemingway.”And Algren,who was ten years older than me and knew that much more,said,“You know, these kids are better off if they attach themselves to a writer and start imitating him, because they learn a lot doing that.If they’re any good at all, sooner or later they’ll get rid of the influence. But first, they have to get attached to somebody.” That was useful.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=76}}
</blockquote>{{pg|177|178}}

'''VII. MAILER’S VISIONARY HERMENEUTIC APPROPRIATION AND
BLOOM’S THEORY OF ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE'''

Can the particular concept of visionary hermeneutic appropriation that I ascribe to Mailer in his relationship as a writer to Hemingway find a justifiable place within the context of Harold Bloom’s magisterial ''The Anxiety of Influence?'' Bloom forcefully applies his theory to Hemingway’s influence on Mailer. I maintain that such placement is possible on the condition that I relegate my own formulation of influence in the Mailer-Hemingway case to a category within Bloom’s own theory of anxiety of influence as an ''exception.'' This effort necessitates a brief exposition of Bloom’s justifiably elaborate theory of influence.

In ''The Anxiety of Influence,'' Bloom offers an analysis of the phenomenon of influence in the development and maintenance of the “poetic,” in which the poetic is to be taken in its traditional sense of literature as a whole. We owe Bloom a large debt of gratitude for this work in the field of influence studies. Passionate, dense, and erudite, one can only underestimate it at one’s own great loss. Bloom analyzes how “poets” guarantee continued literary creation, and dissemination as influence, while paying an exorbitant but necessary price for it in the anxiety of influence.

Bloom informs us that “[t]he precursors flood us, and our imagination can die by drowning in them, but no imaginative life is possible if such inundation is wholly evaded.”{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=154}} Concise, astute, and confident, it is a truly compelling statement. ''The Anxiety of Influence'' legitimately demands that we attempt to periodically test it here and there. Such probes keep the theory of anxiety of influence supple, flexible and therefore applicable to new demands made upon it by new literary visions.I find this exploratory probe to be warranted in the Mailer-Hemingway case. Such activity, I hope, accords ''The Anxiety of Influence'' the attention it so highly deserves as relevant to our contemporary concerns.

My line of reasoning demands more elucidation. In the essential chapter “Clinamen or Poetic Misprision” in ''The Anxiety of Influence'' Bloom states,

<blockquote>
What gives pleasure to the critic in a reader may give anxiety to the poet in him, an anxiety we have learned, as readers, to neglect, to our own loss and peril. This anxiety, this mode of melancholy, is the anxiety of influence, the dark and daemonic ground upon which we now enter.{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=25}}
</blockquote>{{pg|178|179}}

Elaborating further on it, he adds, “Poetic influence—when it involves two strong, authentic poets—always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation.”{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=30}} He stresses, “The history of fruitful poetic influence . . . is a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature, of distortion, of perverse, willful revisionism without which modern poetry as such could not exist.”{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=30}}

These are strong arguments, well conceived and precisely stated. Far reaching in their ramifications, they sound severe, determinant, even formidable and daunting. All the same, I acknowledge their validity in a psychoanalytically inflected general theory of literary influence as Oedipal in its origin and unfolding in one of the multiplicity of forms. Bloom underlines as given the enormous influence writers undergo as they internalize their literary culture and the accompanying psychological guilt that it causes. Citing Mailer as an example, Bloom informs us,

<blockquote>
“The burden of government,” [Samuel] Johnson brooded,“is increased upon princes by the virtues of their immediate predecessors,” and he added: “He that succeeds a celebrated writer, has the same difficulties to encounter.” We know the rancid humor of this too well, and any reader of Advertisements for Myself may enjoy the frantic dances of Norman Mailer as he strives to evade his own anxiety that it is, after all, Hemingway all the way, emphasis added{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=28}}

Oddly, in “First Advertisement for Myself,” the introductory piece to ''Advertisement for Myself,'' what Bloom perceives as “frantic dances” would seem like ritualistic dances. Mailer performs them as he prepares to affect a kind Jungian metanoia to re-form his divided psyche to bring about self-healing and renewed creative energy. The “rancid humor” of it derives from the struggles of the psyche of a writer torn apart between a sense of utter defeat and megalomania. “Defeat has left my nature divided,” declares Mailer, “my sense of timing is eccentric, and I contain within myself the bitter exhaustions of an old man, and the cocky arguments of a bright boy. So I am everything but my proper age of thirty-six, and anger has brought me to the edge of the brutal.”{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=17}} On the other hand, he immediately confesses, “In sitting down to write a sermon for this collection, I find arrogance in much of my mood,” which is an understatement.{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=17}}
</blockquote>{{pg|179|180}}

Later, as it was his inclination, Mailer extravagantly predicts, “it is my present and future work which will have the deepest influence of any work being done by an American novelist in these years.”{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=17}} His contradictory statements make intelligible a psychological swing between defeat and a sense of manic exaltation, a type of bipolar depression that he may have shared for sometime and to some degree with Hemingway. They detract from his confidence in his claim of eventual superior influence and puts it in question. But I would say his vacillations in self-assurance are much to his credit. Because, sad to say for him and for us, Mailer came to acknowledge later in life that his prediction that his work will have “the deepest influence of any work being done by an American novelist in these years” did not transpire—at least not in any appreciable way.

On a certain plane of critical thought, one may argue ''Advertisements for Myself'' constitutes Mailer’s own treatise on influence. In a letter to George Plimpton, Hemingway refers to the book as “the sort of ragtag assembly of his [Mailer’s] rewrites, second thoughts and ramblings ''shot through with occasional brilliance”'', emphasis added.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=912}} If by “ragtag” Hemingway meant that the books contents were diverse and lacking in cohesion in appearance or composition, that might well have been true. But the fact remains that Mailer intentionally structured it as such, as he did, say, in ''Cannibals and Christians.'' But Hemingway’s remark on the text being “shot through with occasional brilliance” is right on the mark. Hardly noticeable, Mailer’s attempts in this text culminate in discovering and establishing a viable, working out a dialectical synthesis between himself and Hemingway as men and writers. Mailer’s articulation of the subject falls into that hard earned occasional brilliance of the text. Did Hemingway realize this in his own way? It is entirely possible.

Mailer’s own sense of “defeat” will not cease tormenting him unless and until this Hemingway matter is truly settled once and for all. “Every American writer,” writes Mailer plainly, “who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=19}} “Faena” is an unusual but pertinent word to use here in connection to Hemingway and the way Mailer proposes to deal with his contemporaries. Faena denotes a series of final ritual passes at the bull that a matador carries out in bullfighting. It occurs immediately before the ''kill,'' the moment of truth, to highlight a matador’s skill. On the other hand, to perform “a faena which borrows from the self-love of a{{pg|180|181}}

Hemingway style” connotes at the same time a moment of pride in the truth of accomplishment as well as exhibition narcissism and a touch of brutality.

The main point, however, is Mailer laying claim to Hemingway’s vision through the agency of his own interpretation of it.It will make it possible for him to identify with Hemingway for better or worse and for good and for keeps. Mailer tells his readers, “I have come finally to have a great sympathy for The Master’s irrepressible tantrum that he is the champion writer of this time, and of all time, and that if anyone can pin Tolstoy, it is Ernest H.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=19}}

Confined to the framework of this essay, I would propose that ''Advertisements for Myself'' is Mailer’s valiant form of confession and initiation into a visionary hermeneutic appropriation, which approaches a kind of literary conversion. It represents a writer’s self-transformation and regeneration as a genuine response to another writer’s thought and work. It does so, however, without any illusion, compromise, and least of all sentimentality. In no way such conversion implies loss of creative uniqueness and integrity, just the contrary.

In relation to Bloom’s general theory of influence, I would relegate Mailer’s hermeneutic appropriation to the “state of exception,” as Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Agamben defines the “state of exception” in reference to Saint Paul’s word “katarego,” roughly translated as “I deactivate” in his First Letter to the Corinthians. Agamben calls it “messianic katarg sis,” or messianic deactivation.{{sfn|Agamben|2005|p=104}} He further clarifies it as a “law that is simultaneously suspended and fulfilled.”{{sfn|Agamben|2005|p=104}} I find it useful to compare “messianic katarg sis” and visionary hermeneutic appropriation, because both concepts fully connote fidelity and flexibility. As Agamben points out, “In our tradition, a metaphysical concept, which takes as its prime focus a moment of foundation and origin, coexists with a messianic concept, which focuses on a moment of fulfillment.”{{sfn|Agamben|2005|p=103-4}} What sanctions such coexistence “is the idea that fulfillment is possible by retrieving and revoking the foundation, by coming to terms with it.”{{sfn|Agamben|2005|p=104}}

'''VIII. MAILER’S VISIONARY INTERPRETIVE APPROPRIATION AND THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX: “THE STATE OF EXCEPTION”'''

In an interview, Mailer scholar and critic Michael Lennon elicited from Mailer the following keen remarks on the perception of his relationship to Hemingway:{{pg|181|182}}

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

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

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Agamben |first=Giorgio |date=2005 |title=The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans |translator-last=Dalley |translator-first=Patricia |location=Stanford |publisher=Stanford UP}}
* {{cite book |last=Anzieu |first=Didier |date=1990 |title=A Skin for Thought: Interviews with Gilbert Tarrab on Psychology and Psychoanalysis |translator-last=Briggs |translator-first=Daphne Nash |location=London |publisher=Karnak Books}}
* {{cite book |last=Beauvoir |first=Simone de |date=1993 |title=The Second Sex |translator-last=Parshley |translator-first=H. M. |location=New York |publisher=Everyman's Library}}
* {{cite book |last=Bloom |first=Harold |date=1979 |title=The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry |location=New York |publisher=Oxford UP}}
* {{cite book |last=Bowie |first=Malcolm |date=1993 |title=Lacan |location=Cambridge, MA |publisher=Harvard UP}}
* {{cite book |last=Freud |first=Sigmund |date=1946 |title=Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics |translator-last=Brill |translator-first=A. A. |location=New York |publisher=Random House}}
* {{cite book |last=Gracián |first=Baltasar |date=2008 |title=The Art of Worldly Wisdom |translator-last=Fischer |translator-first=Martin |location=New York |publisher=Barnes & Noble}}
* {{cite book |last=Heidegger |first=Martin |date=1935 |title=Poetry, Language, Thought |translator-last=Hofstadter |translator-first=Albert |location=New York |publisher=Harper Colophon Books}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |chapter=The Art of Fiction |title=Writers at Work |editor-last=Plimpton |editor-first=George |location=New York |publisher=The Viking Press |year=1965 |pages=217–39}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-link= Norman Mailer| date=1932 |title=Death in the Afternoon |location=New York |publisher=Scribner}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-link= Norman Mailer| title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961 |editor-last=Baker |editor-first=Carlos |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |date=1981}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-link= Norman Mailer| title=Green Hills of Africa |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |date=1935}}
*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-link= Norman Mailer| title=Advertisements for Myself |location=New York |publisher=G.P. Putnam's Sons |date=1959}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-link= Norman Mailer| title=Cannibals and Christians |location=New York |publisher=Dial |date=1966}}
*{{cite interview |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-link= Norman Mailer| title=Conversations with Norman Mailer |location=Jackson |publisher="UP of Mississippi" |date=1988 |pages=20–8; 155-75; 207-27;291-8}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-link= Norman Mailer| title=The Fight |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown and Co. |date=1975}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-link= Norman Mailer| title=Pieces and Pontifications |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown and Co. |date=1982}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-link= Norman Mailer| title=The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing |location=New York |publisher=Random House |date=2003}}
{{cite book |last1=Mailer |first1=Norman |author-link=Norman Mailer|last2=Mailer |first2=John Buffalo |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}}
* {{cite book |last=Marcel |first=Gabriel |title=The Philosophy of Existentialism |translator-last=Harari |translator-first=Manya |location=Secaucus, N.J. |publisher=The Citadel Press |date=1973}}
* {{cite journal |last=Nakjavani |first=Erik |title=The Aesthetics of Silence: Hemingway's "The Art of the Short Story" |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=3 |issue=2 |date=1984 |pages=38–45}}
* {{cite journal |last=Nakjavani |first=Erik |title=The Aesthetics of the Visible and the Invisible: Hemingway and Cézanne |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=5 |issue=2 |date=1986 |pages=2–11}}
* {{cite journal |last=Nakjavani |first=Erik |title=The Prose of Life: Lived Experience in the Fiction of Hemingway, Sartre, and Beauvoir |journal=North Dakota Quarterly |volume=70 |issue=4 |date=2003 |pages=140–65}}
* {{cite book |last=Raymond |first=Dwayne |title=Mornings with Mailer: A Recollection of Friendship |location=New York |publisher=Harper |date=2010}}
* {{cite book |last=Valéry |first=Paul |title=Leonardo, Poe, Mallarmé |translator-last=Cowley |translator-first=Malcolm |translator2-last=Lawler |translator2-first=James R. |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |date=1972}}
{{Refend}}

Talk:The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010

2025-04-28T11:28:18Z

Jules Carry: Closed Shuman.

===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]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Bufithis & Curnutt || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway|A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway]] || [[User:Grlucas]] [[User:DBond007]] || {{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]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Shuman || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman vs. Ernest: Influence and Identity|Norman vs. Ernest]] || [[User:APKnight25]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Lowenburg || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Hooking Off the Jab: Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway and Boxing|Hooking Off the Jab]] || [[User:ASpeed]] [[User:DBond007]]|| {{yellow tick}}
|-
| 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]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Boddy || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing]] || [[User:JBrown]] || {{yellow tick}}
|-
| 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]] [[User:Tbara4554]]|| {{tick}}
|-
| Peppard || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and the “Reds”|Mailer, Hemingway, and the “Reds”]] || [[User:KWatson]] || {{tick}}
|-
| 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]] || {{tick}}
|-
| 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]] || {{tick}}
|-
| 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]] || {{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]] [[User:CVinson]] || {{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}}
|-
| Jacomo || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Sparring with Norman|Sparing with Norman]] || [[User:Kamyers]] || {{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]] || {{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]] [[User:Flowersbloom]] [[User:Tbara4554]]|| {{tick}}
|-
| 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]] || [[User:MerAtticus]] || {{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]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Hinton || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Advertisements for Others: The Blurbs of Norman Mailer|Advertisements for Others]] || [[User:NrmMGA5108]] || {{tick}}
|-
| 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]] || [[User:MerAtticus]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Westaway || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator|“A Noble Pursuit”]] || [[User:Chelsey.brantley]] || {{yellow tick}}
|-
| Fox || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norris Church Mailer|Norris Church Mailer]] || [[User:Kamyers]] || {{tick}}
|}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman vs. Ernest: Influence and Identity

2025-04-28T11:27:03Z

Jules Carry: Fixes. Added url.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{byline|last=Shuman|first=Michael L.|abstract=Norman Mailer acknowledges Ernest Hemingway’s influence on his artistic style and public character. The two authors never met, but Hemingway’s lone letter to Mailer—and Mailer’s book inscription prompting that letter—illuminate the interest the two men expressed in each other’s work.|note=I would like to thank Christine Auger and Margarita Abramova for their excellent work in assisting in the research of this essay.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr04shu}}

{{dc|dc=I|n his short essay introducing ''The Bullfight'' (1967)}}, a collection of photographs capturing the heat and light of a spectacle nearly synonymous with style and masculinity, Norman Mailer confesses not only his passion for the brutal ceremony but also his love for a bullfighter, El Loco, the Crazy One. “He was an apparition,” Mailer writes:

<blockquote>
He had a skinny body and a funny ugly face with little eyes set close together, a big nose, and a little mouth. He had very black Indian hair, and a tuft in the rear of his head stood up like the spike of an antenna. . . . He had comic buttocks. They went straight back like a duck’s tail feathers. His suit fit poorly. He was some sort of grafting between Ray Bolger and Charley Chaplin.{{sfn|Mailer|1998|pp=185–6}}
</blockquote>

El Loco was the clown, of course, the unsung bullfighter meant to provide comic relief as a succession of young novilleros take on the serious business of a raucous blood sport. In the remarkable match described with all the detail fitting a life-changing event, Mailer tells how El Loco lifts the audience from sullen funk to cathartic excitement: “Then he came out with the muleta and did a fine series of ''derechazos,'' the best seen in several weeks, and to everyone’s amazement, he killed on the first ''estocada.'' They gave him an ear. He was the ''triunfador'' of the day.”{{sfn|Mailer|1998|p=187}}

Mailer cautions readers that he never met El Loco, a country rube whose real name was Amado Ramirez, “Beloved Remington,” but Mailer never regrets missing that encounter. “I would not have wanted to meet him,” Mailer{{pg|90|91}} maintains. “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.”{{sfn|Mailer|1998|pp=182-3}} But the comedic bumpkin helped Mailer understand the personality underlying bullfighting and how method becomes a defining aspect of any accomplished artist

<blockquote>
After a while I got good at seeing the flaws and virtues in novilleros, and in fact I began to see so much of their character in their style, and began to learn so much about style by comprehending their character . . . that I began to take the same furious interest and partisanship in the triumph of one style over another that is usually reserved for literary matters . . . or what indeed average Americans and some not so average might take over political figures{{sfn|Mailer|1998|p=182|id=Time}}
</blockquote>

Mailer’s adoration of El Loco, a highlight of the essay and one of Mailer’s most provocative statements of the relationship between character and style, comes at the midpoint of the article. As a literary man writing about bullfighting, Mailer mentions the name of Ernest Hemingway early in the essay. Mailer first hangs on the color of the afternoon sunlight, the agony of a gored bull, the flow of bright red blood. His words provoke a feeling of melancholy loss amid the horror, a sense of nostalgia for places and times beyond our own experience. We are moved by his words as much as by the ritualistic atmosphere they describe, and Mailer clearly becomes captivated by his own display of rhetorical style. Mailer’s mention of Hemingway, when it comes, is not so much homage as apology. “It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway,” he insists, but then barters that claim to distinction for the simple act of solid representation. The hour just before the bullfight, in Mexico, is always the best hour of the week, and there is no other way to say that without following Hemingway’s trail of language.{{sfn|Mailer|1998|p=177}}

Hemingway’s public character and authorial style indeed influenced Mailer throughout his long career, much as El Loco’s in-ring identity and crowd-pleasing flourish affected Mailer following that memorable 1954 bullfight in Mexico City. And just as Mailer never met his bullfighting hero, Mailer and Hemingway never met, either, although the two literary giants once came close when both were visiting New York. Hemingway had planned a dinner with George Plimpton and A.E. Hochner, author of an early Hemingway biography, and Plimpton had been anxious to invite {{pg|91|92}} Mailer. Hemingway had agreed, expressing his appreciation for ''The Naked and the Dead'', and Plimpton started the ball rolling. “So I called Norman in the morning,” Plimpton relates, “and I said, ‘Listen, I’m going out with Mr. Hemingway, and I’m going to try to get you to come along: surely you two must meet?’ But Hochner intervened, claiming that the two wouldn’t be a good mix. “Oh, it was awful,” Plimpton tells Oliver Burkeman in a 2002 interview in ''The Guardian''. “Poor old Norman sat by the telephone. It was . . . very bad.” Plimpton admits that Hemingway was a rough man to be around, and perhaps sparks would have flown in abundance if Mailer’s own abrasive ego had been on the scene, too.{{sfn|Plimpton|2002|p=4}}

According to Plimpton, Hemingway nevertheless spent much of that odd dinner at the Colony Restaurant inquiring about Mailer and listening, with great interest, to Plimpton’s account of the Mailer’s macho practices: roping women into staring contests and beating men in the curious game of knock-the-heads. Plimpton reports asking Mailer, later, what he and Hemingway would have discussed and Mailer contemplates, but just for a moment: “After a while I probably would have criticized him for not being in the country when we needed him—spending so much time out of it when we were slipping into totalitarianism. . . . I would have said, ‘Stop perfuming your vanity, get your hands dirty; we’re tired of you and your little hurts.{{' "}}{{sfn|Plimpton|1977|p=262}}

Mailer elsewhere confirms Plimpton’s account of that near-miss meeting, admits that his admiration for Hemingway began at an early age and, at the same time, laments that society’s respect for authors and for literary ambition in general is on the decline. “How I aspired!” he says in ''The Spooky Art.'' “In those years at Harvard, if I had heard that Ernest Hemingway was going to speak in Worcester, Mass.,I might have trudged the forty miles from Cambridge. That was how we felt then about writers. It is probably how I still feel. The shock, decades later, was to realize that this view of the writer is rare by now.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=13}} Mailer acknowledges Hemingway’s influence on his college-age short stories but considers the great man’s presence an accommodation for his deficiencies: “Although I was more excited by Dos Passos and Farrell,” Mailer writes in ''Advertisements for Myself,'' “it was Hemingway I imitated—probably because he seemed easier. To write like Farrell or Dos Passos would have required more experience than I could possibly have had at eighteen."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=27}} This gentle dig at Hemingway’s simple style is an admission of youthful inexperience, although it challenges{{pg|92|93}} Hemingway’s syntactical abilities more than his extensive life experience. Indeed, in ''Spooky'' Mailer attributes the early and full-blown development of Hemingway’s style with an existential awareness of the proximity of death: “He had, before he was twenty, the unmistakable sensation of being
wounded so near to death that he felt his soul slide out of him, then slip back.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=75}} Ultimately Hemingway’s style, in Mailer’s interpretation, is a natural process of accommodation shared by other major authors: “It is comforting to argue that some major writers develop a style out of the very avoidance of their major weakness,” Mailer notes. “Hemingway was not capable of writing a long, complex sentence with good architecture in the syntax. But he turned that inability into his personal skill at writing short declarative sentences or long run-on sentences connected by conjunctions.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|pp=77-8}}

Yet Hemingway has flaws in character that the author cannot compensate for and that remain largely unredeemed, and Mailer is not hesitant to cite those shortcomings. Most prominent of all, perhaps, is the personal vanity Mailer points to, at Plimpton’s request, in his imaginary dinner-party conversation with Hemingway, and especially that vanity accompanying a large reputation or the lust for one. In fact vanity, Mailer says in an interview with Andrew O’Hagan,

<blockquote>
can take your down. Look at poor Truman [Capote]. His attitude became, if I’m not recognized in my own time then something absolutely awful is taking place in society. And that vanity is something that we all have to approach and walk around with great care. It can destroy a good part of you. You know, you really have to be able to exhale, just to exhale, and say, Why don’t we just leave it to history.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=80}}
</blockquote>

Hemingway’s own vanity is revealed in an anecdote in ''That Summer in Paris,'' Morley Callaghan’s memoir of his 1929 stay in Paris, and colorfully retold by Mailer in his book review,“Punching Papa.” Callaghan, an upstart reporter for ''The Toronto Sun'' when Hemingway joined the staff as a war correspondent, tells the story of a botched boxing match with Hemingway, an account that becomes the centerpiece of Mailer’s review of the memoir. One day Fitzgerald suggests that Hemingway is a boxer of heavyweight champion ability, and Callaghan, taking the bait, counters that after all {{pg|93|94}}
Hemingway is just an amateur like himself. A match is arranged between the two men and Fitzgerald agrees to serve as timekeeper. As the second round progresses, the boxers became tired and Hemingway, in a careless moment, gets knocked down by Callaghan. Fitzgerald, realizing that he had abdicated his responsibility as timekeeper by letting the round go too long, admits his error with some astonishment and shame. Hemingway is not convinced: {{" '}}All right, Scott,’ Ernest said. ‘If you want to see me getting the shit knocked out of me, just say so. Only don’t say you made a mistake.{{' "}}{{sfn|Mailer|1963|p=13}} Four months later Hemingway joined Fitzgerald in demanding an apology from Callaghan, whose story was wildly distorted in The Herald Tribune book section, but Hemingway’s character flaws already had been revealed. Not only would he, in the interest of personal pride, call Fitzgerald a liar for suggesting his timekeeping error was a mistake rather than a calculated attempt to see Hemingway on his back, but he also would insist on an apology for the bad explanation of an incident that was, after all, a simple and informal sparring match.

Despite any perceived lapses in Hemingway’s character, Mailer ultimately finds a single trump card in an otherwise mixed hand: the man’s expression and exercise of fundamental courage. “If the intellectual antecedents of this generation can be traced to such separate influences as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Wilhelm Reich,” Mailer maintains in “The White Negro,” “the viable philosophy of Hemingway fit most of their facts: in a bad world . . . there is no love nor mercy nor charity nor justice unless a man can keep his courage. . . . What fitted the need of the adventurer even more precisely was Hemingway’s categorical imperative that what made him feel good became therefore The Good.”{{sfn|Mailer|1963}} When asked if Hemingway’s suicide compromised his sense of the author’s courage, Mailer admits that he struggled with the notion but then imagines a scenario making the tragic incident seem like yet another expression of curiosity and manhood, another attempt to provoke insight through the near loss of soul: “Hemingway had learned early in life that the closer he came to daring death the healthier it was for him,” he tells O’Hagan

<blockquote>
And so I had this notion that night after night when he was alone, after he said goodnight to Mary, Hemingway would go to his bedroom and he’d put his thumb on the shotgun trigger and put the barrel in his mouth and squeeze down on the trigger a
</blockquote>{{pg|94|95}}<blockquote>
little bit, and—trembling, shaking—he’d try to see how close he could come without having the thing go off.{{sfn|Mailer|1963|p=51}}
</blockquote>

Hemingway’s suicide becomes a catastrophic misstep in this continual quest for The Good: “On the final night he went too far. That to me made more sense than him just deciding to blow it all to bits.”{{sfn|Mailer|1963|p=51}} Elsewhere Mailer admits the personally devastating effect of Hemingway’s final act: “Hemingway’s death was cautionary to me. His suicide was as wounding as if one’s own parent had taken his life.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=120}} So pure was my affection, Mailer might say, Papa’s suicide as a conscious act is beyond contemplation.

Mailer never maintains, as he does with El Loco, that proximity to this hero would diminish his adoration. Yet Hemingway’s influence on Mailer is predicated upon the same masculine courage that drove the willful bullfighter, again and again, to coax his audience into mass euphoria. In ''Advertisements,'' Mailer announces Hemingway’s preeminence with dignity, authority, and a sense of gravity perhaps reserved for no other author. And he does so using the metaphor of the ''faena,'' a matador’s final passes at the bull just before the kill:

<blockquote>
So, mark you. Every American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style. Any reader who will let me circle back later, in my own way, via the whorls and ellipses of my knotted mind, to earlier remarks, will be entertained en route by a series of comments I have to make (not altogether out of the rhythms of Hemingway) on the man, on my contemporaries and on myself. {{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=19}}
</blockquote>

Mailer goes on to praise Hemingway’s acute powers of observation and the calculated care Hemingway exercised when crafting his role as the preeminent masculine artist:

<blockquote>
For you see I have come finally to have a great sympathy for The Master’s irrepressible tantrum that he is the champion writer of this time, and of all time, and that if anyone can pin Tolstoy, it is Ernest H. Somewhere in Hemingway is the hard mind of a shrewd small-town boy, the kind of boy who knows you have a
</blockquote>{{pg|95|96}}<blockquote>
real cigar only when you are the biggest man in town, because to be just one of the big men in town is tiring, much too tiring, you inspire hatred, and what is worse than hatred, a wave of crosstalk in everyone around you.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=19-20}}
</blockquote>

While Mailer also charges his hero with a lack of relevancy, an abandonment of moral duty as a late-career thinker, he realizes that that great deficit is countered by the man’s impeachable reputation and sense of public self:

<blockquote>
Hemingway knows this: for years he has not written anything which would bother an eight-year old or one’s grandmother, and yet his reputation is firm—he knows in advance, with a fine sense of timing, that he would have to campaign for himself, that the best tactic to hide the lockjaw of his shrinking genius was to become the personality of our time. And here he succeeded.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=20}}
</blockquote>

In Hemingway’s unparalleled reputation, his ambition, his manly courage, Mailer finds the rationale for a concerted advertisement for himself. Not only can reputation slow down the audience to appreciate some masked meaning in a sentence perhaps accessible to the writer alone, but indeed the author’s personality can make the difference between success and failure:

<blockquote>
An author’s personality can help or hurt the attention readers give to his books,” Mailer maintains in ''Advertisements,'' “and it is sometimes fatal to one’s talent not to have a public with a clear public recognition of one’s size. The way to save your work and reach more readers is to advertise yourself, steal your own favorite page out of Hemingway’s unwritten Notes from Papa on How the Working Novelist Can Get Ahead.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=21}}
</blockquote>

Once again Hemingway leads Mailer into the light of self-promotion and authorial egotism.

Yet some indelible cosmic force prevented Mailer and Hemingway from that historic meeting that would have allowed Mailer, finally, to size up himself with his literary antecedent. Perhaps it was a subtext of Mailer’s own powerful character, a personal karma projected to keep away the great man{{pg|96|97}} just as Mailer had wanted to keep away El Loco. Despite the early influence and the later powerful testament to Hemingway’s preeminence, Mailer sometimes marginalizes Hemingway’s influence on his work with parenthetical comments and under-the-breath asides. In a conversation with J. Michael Lennon, for instance, Mailer minimizes his appreciation for one of Hemingway’s most characteristic books: “Hemingway meant a great deal to me,” he maintains, “but I wouldn’t say The Sun Also Rises is a large part of that. I read it in college, and like all college kids I was impressed by it. But there are other books that meant more to me then.”{{sfn|Lennon|1999|p=141}} Mailer, too, allows that his opinion of Hemingway’s work changes from day to day and that the great man normally is not at all a persistent concern: “I think he’s been very important as an influence on all American writers,” Mailer points out in a 1955 interview with Lyle Stuart{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=26}} and reiterates in ''Advertisements'', “even if like Faulkner they were stimulated to writing in the opposite and possibly greater direction. But just how I rate Hemingway is impossible to answer because each time I think of him— which is not that often—I find that my estimate of him goes up or down a little on the basis of the new thing I’ve thought.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=275}}

In the “Postscript to the Fourth ''Advertisement for Myself'',” Mailer curiously recounts an attempt to contact Hemingway following the 1955 publication of ''The Deer Park.'' Mailer’s account of the incident, along with Hemingway’s eventual response, may be the closest we will get to a virtual sparring match between these two literary pugilists. Mailer begins by acknowledging both an admiration for Hemingway’s strength and a disappointment for his weaknesses, and then announces himself as one of the few writers of his generation sharing with Hemingway a fundamental belief: that only the will to sustain courage can allow a person to become a writer of any import; that it’s “more important to be a man than a very good writer.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=265}} Always inclined to post yet another advertisement for himself, Mailer has the impulse to promote his reputation, too: “I could not keep myself from thinking that twenty good words from Ernest Hemingway would make the difference between half-success and a breakthrough. He would like the book, he would have to—it would be impossible for him not to see how much there was in it.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=265}} So Mailer tracks down Hemingway’s address in Cuba and mails him a copy of ''Park.'' Worried about violating some cosmic law related to seeking connection, or “cheating life,” Mailer inscribes the book to Hemingway in a manner intended to{{pg|97|98}} preserve dignity in a situation courting defeat. He notes in his inscription that he is “deeply curious” to get Hemingway’s reaction to the book, but then offers an aggressive and profane rebuff, an advance punch to Papa’s jaw just in case the old man ignores Mailer’s outreach or marginalizes his literary authority:

<blockquote>
—but if you do not answer, or if you answer with the kind of crap you use to answer unprofessional writers, sycophants, brown-nosers, etc., then fuck you, and I will never attempt to communicate with you again.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=266}}
</blockquote>

Mailer lets loose a second quick jab, a one-two punch apparently intended to provoke Hemingway if he were not irritated enough already:

<blockquote>
—and since I suspect that you’ve even more vain that I am, I might as well warn you that there is a reference to you on page 353 which you may or may not like.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=266}}
</blockquote>

The supposed outrage buried within the novel, and highlighted here perhaps to hasten Hemingway’s affront, is little more than O’Shaugnessy’s admission that he had attempted to write a novel about bullfighting but had failed: “It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway,” O’Shaugnessy confesses, “and I was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer.”{{sfn|Mailer|1955|p=353}} Did Mailer suspect that Hemingway would be miffed by being called good and not great? Or that Hemingway was a coolly calculating author rather than an inspired artist? Or perhaps that upstart writers should avoid Mailer’s early error and attempt to find, ''ex nihil'', distinct voices of their own? The answer may be elusive but the challenge is clear: we both are accomplished artists, Mailer says, and you must treat me as an equal or suffer the consequences.

Ten days after Mailer sends the book to Hemingway, the parcel comes back by return mail, the “same wrapper and maybe the same string enclosing {{pg|98|99}} the package. Stamped all over it was the Spanish equivalent of Address Unknown Return to Sender.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=266}} Mailer recounts the possibilities with an increasing sense of paranoia and wild speculation well inflated into the zones of comedy, even numbering possible scenarios in a virtual laundry list of existential worry. Maybe the address was wrong; maybe Hemingway has an ironclad policy against receiving unsolicited books; maybe Hemingway’s wife, Mary, previews the inscription and decides to save her husband from the affront. Perhaps Hemingway peruses the book and, afraid to make the commitment of a comment, engages local postal authorities to repackage the book in an approximation of its original wrapping, forge Mailer’s handwriting on the address label and ship it back, apparently unopened. Or even worse: Hemingway unwraps the book, reads the inscription, and perplexed by Mailer’s temperate curiosity tinged with straightforward aggression, rewraps the package, marks it with his own “Address Unknown” stamp, and sends it on its way back to Mailer’s doorstep. Both of the final two outrageous scenarios end with Hemingway enjoying a celebratory toast while anticipating Mailer’s shattered self-respect as he reclaims the rejected parcel.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=266-67}}

Mailer ends the whirlwind account of his suspicions with—what else?— a boxing allegory, a spectacular recovery by Carmen Basilio during a televised match with Paddy DeMarco. Refusing to take an eight-count rest following a nasty knock-down by DeMarco, Basilio explains his reason: {{" '}}I didn’t want to start any bad habits.{{' "}}{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=267}} Mailer alludes to the possibility that Basilio’s comment is apocryphal, but nevertheless leans on it as an emblem of his own masculine resiliency. Nevertheless the author comes clean about the personal blow to his dignity, treating his “Postscript” as a “confession”:

<blockquote>
I must have carried the memory as a silent shame which helped to push me further and deeper into the next half year of bold assertions, half-done work, unbalanced heroics, and an odd notoriety of my own choice. I was on the edge of many things and I had more than a bit of violence in me.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=267}}
</blockquote>

The truth of the matter is far less exciting than Mailer’s wildest fears and precisely fits his most mundane speculation: Hemingway in fact never received the package. He did, however, acquire a copy of ''Advertisements'' and {{pg|99|100}} read Mailer’s confession, and Hemingway’s response is the basis for the only extant letter to Mailer above Hemingway’s signature.

The letter,with its “Dear Mr. Mailer” salutation, is cordial and direct, certainly granting Mailer the respect he had looked for when Mailer mailed the inscribed copy of ''The Deer Park.'' Hemingway explains that packages sometime take months to reach Finca Vigia San Francisco de Paula, Cuba, his home, or they never arrive at all. He graciously apologizes and assures Mailer that he would have written to express his positive opinion of the book. “As it was,” Hemingway explains, “I bought it and read it while laid up in bed and still liked it and thought it had shitty reviews.” All this must have been comforting to Mailer’s own bruised vanity, but then Hemingway asserts his own literary position with a one-two punch of his own: “Do not remember any reference to me,” he explains, “but have not taken references to me or me as a writer personally for a long time now.” Hemingway in effect is telling Mailer not only that he did not read ''The Deer Park'' closely, but that he had not gone back to review the passage after seeing Mailer’s explicit citation of the page number containing O’Shaugnessy’s comment. Moreover, by taking the high road and not worrying about personal or artistic affronts, Hemingway points to the folly of Mailer’s own hand-wringing confession, no matter how inflated for humorous effect. Real men don’t worry about such things, Hemingway implies, and he councils so explicitly later in the letter: “Remember only suckers worry. You can’t write, fuck or fight if you worry.” The letter ends with Hemingway instructing Mailer on courtesy and telling him not to respond to his correspondence, one boxer pushing another away after a close-range clinch.“I have no time to write letters with my work piled up and no time ever to be rude. I just wanted to write this to let you know I’d never received the book” (Hemingway). The match between two headstrong authors ends in a technical draw.

Hemingway’s letter perhaps reveals less in its content than it does in the simple fact of its existence. Indeed, under the circumstances Hemingway had no obligation to address the incident at all. That he did respond, and with no other prompt than reading Mailer’s comment in ''Advertisements,'' presumably demonstrates not only Hemingway’s great goodness but also his admiration for the younger man’s opinion and work. Expecting no response from Hemingway, Mailer no doubt received a much different letter than he might have otherwise anticipated, once again affirming Mailer’s view of the complexity of the older man’s personality. “What characterizes every book {{pg|100|101}} about Hemingway I have read is the way his character remains out of focus,” Mailer notes in both Spooky and the “Preface” to ''Papa.'' This lone letter does little to clear up that image.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=xi}}

For all his insistence on the slippery, scattershot nature of Hemingway’s character, Mailer at least twice acknowledges success at locating and revealing the root-being of this complex man. Once is in Morley Callaghan’s account of the Hemingway/Fitzgerald match-up and Hemingway’s subsequent outburst at being knocked down by a man who, in his opinion, was an inferior boxer. “For the first time,” Mailer writes in his review of Callaghan’s
book,
<blockquote>
one has the confidence that an eyewitness has been able to cut a bonafide trail through the charm, the mystery, and the curious perversity of Hemingway’s personality. One gets a good intimation of what was very bad in the man, and the portrait is reinforced by the fact that Callaghan was not out to damage the reputation—on the contrary, he is nearly obsessed by the presence of taint in a man he considers great.{{sfn|Mailer|1963|p=13}}
</blockquote>

The second clear vision of Hemingway comes by way of the great author’s son, Gregory, and his personal memoir Papa. “He is there,” Mailer writes in
the “Preface”:

<blockquote>
By God, he exists. . . . and his contradictions are now his unity, his dirty fighting and his love of craft come out of the same blood. We can feel the man present before us, and his complexes have now become no more than his moods. His pride and his evasions have become one man, his innocence and sophistication, his honesty and outsize snobbery, his romantic madness and inconceivably practical sense of how to be outrageously romantic, it all comes through as in no other book about Hemingway, and for the simplest reason the father was real to the son{{sfn|Hemingway|1976|pp=xi–xiii}}
</blockquote>

Mailer here might be confessing once again, admitting to his own duplicitous nature just as he confessed the subtext of wounded pride and contained violence following the receipt of that returned copy of ''The Deer Park.'' Mailer {{pg|101|102}} may have seen, in Hemingway’s reflection, the same complex mixture of courage and vanity, pride and ambition, moral righteousness and abandonment of duty that fueled his own abrupt ascendancy to accomplishment and fame. The literary son may have embraced, with honor and with love, the literary father.

Mailer indeed became the Hemingway for a new generation of writers, a model of masculine courage, adventurous physical appetite, and singular style. The correspondence between the two, although not a typical exchange of stamped-and posted personal letters, at last provides insight into what Hemingway was and what Mailer would become. Marie Brenner, in a ''New York Magazine'' article on ''Ancient Evenings,'' describes an interview with Mailer in his Brooklyn Heights home in early 1983 when Mailer was sixty years old. The family is winding down from another busy day while Mailer moves around the kitchen, nostalgic, reminiscing about his long literary life and looking at a collage of photographs he made years ago, as if for the first time: “His assemblage features a photograph of Hemingway, bearded and gray, as round as a stevedore, posed beneath a moose head with an enormous antler span.”{{sfn|Brenner|1983|p=38}} Below the moose is a picture of Mailer as a young man, just back from Paris in 1948, about to ascend the literary stage. In the photograph, Mailer is a skinny kid with frizzy hair and “ears out to Brooklyn.”{{sfn|Brenner|1983|p=38}} Brenner’s description of the pose resounds with the same comedic charm Mailer inflicted on El Loco, years earlier, in his revelation of an uncertain outsider about to captivate a crowd of weary and humorless aficionados. Mailer had committed an apparent photographic affront, merging images of two men separated by different physical ages and cultural generations, but in doing so affirmed the influence of one literary giant on another. {{" '}}Look at that picture,{{' "}} Mailer remarks, perhaps contemplating the years of acclaim, honors, defeats, and downright scandal separating that shot from the man now standing with his family. {{" '}}God, how thin I was. Isn’t it strange. I’ve grown into Hemingway’s body. I think he was 60 in that photograph, too. How strange, how damn strange.{{' "}}{{sfn|Brenner|1983|p=38}}

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

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
*{{cite magazine |last=Brenner|first=Marie|date=May 1983|title=Mailer Goes to Egypt|magazine=New York Magazine|pages=28-38|ref=harv}}
*{{cite book |last=Callaghan|first=Morley |date=August 1959|title= That Summer in Paris|location=Toronto|publisher=MacMillan|ref=harv}}
*{{cite letter |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=12 August 1959 |recipient=Norman Mailer |title=Letter to Norman Mailer |location=Austin, TX |repository=Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin |type=MS |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Gregory H. |date=1976 |title=Papa: A Personal Memoir |location=Boston |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |pages=xi–xiii |ref=harv}}
*{{cite journal |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=1999 |title=A Conversation with Norman Mailer |journal=New England Review |volume=20 |issue=3 |pages=138–148 |ref=harv}}
*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authorlink=Norman Mailer |date=1959 |chapter=Advertisement for "A Calculus at Heaven" |title=Advertisements for Myself |location=New York |publisher=Putnam's |pages=17-24,27-9,265-7|ref=harv}}
*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |date=1988 |title=Conversations with Norman Mailer |location=Jackson |publisher=University Press of Mississippi |ref=harv}}
*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1955 |title=The Deer Park |location=New York |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1998 |chapter=Homage to El Loco |title=The Time of Our Time |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages=177–193 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2007 |title=Norman Mailer: The Art of Fiction No. 193 |journal=The Paris Review |issue=181 |pages=44–80 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1 August 1963 |title=Punching Papa (Review of That Summer in Paris by Morley Callaghan) |journal=New York Review of Books |pages=13 |ref=harv}}
*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=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 |authormask=1 |date=1957 |title=The White Negro |location=San Francisco |publisher=City Lights |ref=harv}}
* {{cite news |last=Plimpton |first=George |date=1 October 2002 |title=Hemingway, Mailer and Me|work=The Guardian |pages=4 |ref=harv | type=Interview by Oliver Burkeman}}
*{{cite book |last=Plimpton|first=George |authormask=1 |date=1977 |title=Shadow Box: An Amateur in the Ring |location=New York |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Norman vs. Ernest: Influence and Identity}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

Talk:The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010

2025-04-25T11:54:42Z

Jules Carry:

===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]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Bufithis & Curnutt || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway|A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway]] || [[User:Grlucas]] [[User:DBond007]] || {{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]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Shuman || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman vs. Ernest: Influence and Identity|Norman vs. Ernest]] || — || {{cross}}
|-
| Lowenburg || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Hooking Off the Jab: Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway and Boxing|Hooking Off the Jab]] || [[User:ASpeed]] [[User:DBond007]]|| {{yellow tick}}
|-
| 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]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Boddy || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing]] || [[User:JBrown]] || {{yellow tick}}
|-
| 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]] [[User:Tbara4554]]|| {{tick}}
|-
| Peppard || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and the “Reds”|Mailer, Hemingway, and the “Reds”]] || [[User:KWatson]] || {{tick}}
|-
| 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]] || {{tick}}
|-
| 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]] || {{tick}}
|-
| 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]] || {{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]] [[User:CVinson]] || {{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}}
|-
| Jacomo || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Sparring with Norman|Sparing with Norman]] || [[User:Kamyers]] || {{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]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Apple || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]] || [[User:Chelsey.brantley]] || {{tick}}
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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing

2025-04-25T11:38:35Z

Jules Carry: Corrections, mostly to sources.

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{{Byline|last=Boddy|first=Kasia |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04bod |abstract=This article explores the literary and cultural intersections of boxing, masculinity, and authorship in the works of Hemingway, Mailer, and others. It highlights how these writers engaged with boxing both as metaphor and material, using the sport to shape their public personas and literary styles.}}
{{dc|dc=I|n 1998, Norman Mailer published ''The Time of Our Time''}}, a 1,300 page retrospective of his own work, covering not simply of the “fifty years of American time” which had passed since his first novel, ''The Naked and the Dead'', had appeared but also the previous nineteen, as Mailer had understood them.{{sfn|Mailer|1998}} The book begins with two “preludes,” the first, an account of the “historic afternoon” in June 1929 when Morley Callaghan floored Ernest Hemingway in a boxing ring at the American Club in Paris, is entitled "Boxing with Hemingway."

It is often assumed that the relationship between Mailer, Hemingway and boxing is a matter of simple repetition. As Hemingway sought to “square up” Turgenev, Maupassant and Tolstoy in order to become the heavy weight “champion” of the literary world,{{sfn|Hemingway|1981|p=673}} so Mailer aspired to become the next generation's “novelist as giant” by taking on and superseding Hemingway.{{sfn|Mailer|1966|p=96}} Mailer himself then became “the man to beat for the men and women who punch out words”{{sfn|Healy|1996|p=173}}—so Max Apple imagines being “Inside Norman Mailer”{{sfn|Apple|1986|p=49}} while Joyce Carol Oates fantasizes about “eat[ing] Mailer’s heart.”{{sfn|Oates|1988|p=335}} But it may not be as straightforward as all that.

Mailer was certainly happy to use boxing to express competitiveness. If the original Romantic writer as boxer Lord Byron had dismissed the “quarrels of authors” as an inferior form of sparring, mere evidence of “an irritable set,” Mailer believed that regular spats with other male writers at parties, during protest marches and, mostly, on TV was an essential part of “keep[ing] in shape.”{{sfn|Gunn|1972|p=142}}{{sfn|Mailer|1966|p=217}} The chat show provided an ideal forum for literary quarrels which Mailer repeatedly imagined as boxing matches. After an appearance with Nelson Algren, for example, he concluded that “[t]wo middleweight artists had fought a draw.”{{sfn|Mailer|1966|p=178}} His much- {{pg|139|140}} publicized quarrel with Gore Vidal on ''The Dick Cavett Show'' in 1971 was a less satisfactory affair. Sharing the couch with the two men was Janet Flanner, whom Mailer accused of being “Mr. Vidal’s manager” instead of the “referee”;{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=65}} at the end of the show, Cavett asked the audience to “let us know who you think won.”{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=73}}

How seriously should we take all this? Mailer once declared himself the “Ezzard Charles of the heavyweight division”{{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=161}} and argued that to claim the title in the sixties was hardly hubris when the competition “was so minor.”{{sfn|Mailer|1966|p=124}} To announce that {{" '}}I’m going to be the champ until one of you knocks me off{{' "}} was, Mailer suggested, simply a way of offering Baldwin, Bellow and the others a little encouragement.{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=70}} But “champ” was just one of many “half-heroic and three-quarters comic” advertisements for himself that he cultivated.{{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=153}} In ''The Armies of the Night'' (1968), for example, he noted the instability of his speaking voice at the Pentagon demonstration against the Vietnam war; how, without any plan, his accent shifted from Irish to Texan, from “Marlon Brando’s voice in ''The Wild One''”{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=127}} to some “Woo-eeeee’s" and grunts which showed “hints of Cassius Clay.”{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=48}} Eventually he tried “to imitate a most high and executive voice,” but that too came out as “[s]hades of Cassius Clay.”{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=60}} The extent to which Mailer played with, or cultivated for effect, a “false legend of much machismo” is often forgotten.{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=21}}

Mailer’s humor, and his self-mocking presentation of manliness as an elaborately constructed masquerade, has often been missed in discussions of his relationship with Hemingway. Most commentators read their respective claims of champ (or should that be “dumb ox”?) as indicators of a straightforward genealogy of decline of an easy to understand (and thus easy to dismiss) machismo; the passage from writer to writer providing a pale imitation of the “series of punches on the nose” said to connect the bare knuckle fighter Bob Fitzsimmons to his feeble, gloved successors.{{sfn|Liebling|1982|p=1}} As John Whalen-Bridge has noted, it was not unusual for Mailer’s obituaries to announce that he had “wanted,” and failed, “to be the Hemingway of his generation,” thus refusing to recognize “that Mailer, in presenting himself as a ‘poor man’s papa’ offered a parodic, postmodern rejuvenation and not a wannabe.”{{sfn|mailer|2010|pp=181-82}}

While it would be misleading to deny that, for both, to talk of writing in relation to boxing was a way of talking about ambition and manliness as {{pg|140|141}} well as literature, the precise “equation of masculinity with greatness in literature,” as Oates puts it, is hardly self-evident.{{sfn|Oates|1988|p=303}}

==Boxing as an American Craft==
For Mailer, Hemingway represented a distinct variety of the “quintessentially American”—the kind that responds to “legitimate” fears of “the river,” or “chaos,” by writing about, and indeed enacting, the effort to secure “the camp.”{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=92}} By constructing, and reducing, style, Hemingway created both a circumscribed “mold into which everything else had to fit” and a kind of “rabbit’s foot.”{{sfn|Kazin|1973|p=5}}

Hemingway’s view of boxing is closely connected to this conception of style—what Alfred Kazin describes as the modernist “dream of literature as perfect order.”{{sfn|Kazin|1973|p=15}} But, of course, it was only ever a dream. In practice, as ''The Sun Also Rises'' (1926) suggests, boxing and writing are seldom perfectly ordered.{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} Boxing is first introduced into the novel as the sport of amateurs such as Robert Cohn, whose dilettante dabbling in the gymnasiums of Princeton and Paris is straightforwardly aligned with his “very poor novel” from a “fairly good publisher.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=10}}{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=9}} Cohn is contrasted with two professionals: first Jake himself, a journalist who is happiest after a “good morning’s work,” and then Bill Gorton, who has “made a lot of money on his last book, and was going to make a lot more.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=13}}{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=34}} Gorton arrives in Paris from New York Where he has seen a “whole crop of great light heavyweights. Any one of them was a good prospect to grow up, put on weight and trim Dempsey.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=33-34}} The suggestion is that Gorton is himself a literary contender, although his experience of crooked prize fighting in Vienna reminds us how impure the profession of boxing (and, by extension, the profession of writing) really is.

Bullfighting is like boxing "should" be—Jake describes a bull having "a left and a right just like a boxer."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=116}} Pedro Romero, the only completely admirable character in the novel, represents the professional ideal. His "work"—neither he nor Jake call it "sport" or "art"—is characterized by its "sincerity" (he does not "simulate") and its "absolute purity of line."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=140}}{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=144}} “It was not brilliant bull-fighting,” Jake says, “it was only perfect bull-fighting.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=178}} But such perfection can only exist in what Jake characterizes as the primitive culture of Spain; elsewhere, all that fighters or writers can do is try to work as “hard” and as “clean” as the modern world will allow.{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=181}}{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=14}} {{pg|141|142}} Mailer evoked the boxing-and-bullfighting combination in ''The Deer Park'', his third novel and the one in which he most directly confronts the Hemingway persona and style.{{sfn|Mailer|1955}} It is the story of an Irish-American orphan called Sergius O’Shaugnessy, who before the story begins had “boxed [his] way into the middleweight semi-finals of an Air Force enlisted man’s tournament” and therefore into flying school.{{sfn|Mailer|1955|p=45}} O’Shaugnessy goes first to Hollywood, where the producers are initially dismissive ("I didn’t even know the athlete could read;" and then, when he gets depressed—becoming “a boxer without a punch”—he goes to Mexico. There he plans to learn to be the “first great and recognized American matador” , but finally he gives up his novel on bullfighting as “inevitably imitative” of Hemingway.{{sfn|Mailer|1955|p=198}}{{sfn|Mailer|1955|p=325}}{{sfn|Mailer|1955|p=352}}{{sfn|Mailer|1955|p=353}} O’Shaugnessy’s crisis of confidence reflected that of his creator. On receiving the novel’s proofs, Mailer decided that ''The Deer Park'' needed substantial revision. He would abandon its “poetic prose,” rip up its “silk,” smash its “porcelain,” create a first person voice “bigger” and more “muscular” than himself, and, “like a fighter who throws his right two seconds after the bell,” think much more closely about variations in pace.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=235}}{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=239}} In leaving the controlled Hemingway style behind, in other words, the novel would regain punch. His next book, ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), he later said, was the first one to be “written in what became my style.”{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=145}}

That style was never again going to be confused with Hemingway’s—not that it ever really was. However much O’Shaugnessy might worry about imitation, no one had ever thought of Mailer as a pure and orderly minimalist. And yet, throughout his career Mailer nevertheless felt the need to speak out forcefully against the modernist credo of technique as mere “craft,” its tendency to reach for “a grab bag of procedures, tricks, lore, formal gymnastics, symbolic superstructures—methodology, in short.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=104}} “Craft” was a dirty, or at least dismissive, word—one Mailer elsewhere associates with “light and middleweight” boxers. Heavyweights are always something more than “hardworking craftsmen”; they have “inner lives.”{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=10}} As late as "Harlot’s Ghost" (1991), Mailer was linking a devotion “to craft” and “Procedures ”with a misplaced desire for order—here employed by the CIA all over the globe—with the American camp-building (or Hemingwayesque) tradition.{{sfn|Mailer|1991}} Hemingway himself crops up many times in the novel. The narrator, Harry Hubbard, recalls getting an “A”on a college paper about Shakespearean quality of the “consciously chosen irony of

{{pg|142|143}}

the later style.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=167}} When he expands on this to Rodman Knowles Gardiner, the Shakespeare scholar retorts,“‘Why concern yourself with the copyist?’” But Gardiner himself is a kind of copyist, naming his daughter for
Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, whose hair (“cut short like a boy’s”) is also in imitation of the original.{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=167}}
Harry marries the girl. Still other characters are associated either with Hemingway hangouts—Oak Park or Sloppy Joe’s bar in Havana—or quote his "bon mots". But the key connection comes in the form of the narrator’s father, Cal Hubbard, who bears a considerable “degree of resemblance” to the writer in build, mustache and presence; he’s a drunk and a “prodigious philanderer” who’s fond of big-game hunting and cross-country skiing and who hangs elephant tusks and a pair of miniature boxing gloves said to belong to Jack Dempsey above his drinks cabinet.{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=166-7}}{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=114}} He is also, as a CIA operative, a great proponent of “protocol,” “craft,” and the “rules of procedure.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=869}}{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=445}} {{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=241}}

Harry Hubbard is only half Hubbard, of course—his mother is a Silberzweig—and as well as reading Hemingway, he enjoys Irwin Shaw’s "The Young Lions" because “Noah Ackerman, the Jew, had appealed to me.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=145}}
Harry also reflects upon the character of Robert Cohn—whose upper class New York background he shares—and to some extent, he belongs to the ranks of Cohn’s literary “avengers.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=422}}{{sfn|Fiedler|1964|p=71}} "Harlot’s Ghost" reveals the limits of methodology and “purity of intent” and instead asserts the virtues of division and dialectic, of ongoing “war”and “relation.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1021}}{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=594}}

And yet, in Mailer’s eyes Hemingway was divided, too. He may have been a craftsman but he was not a "mere" craftsman. As much as D.H. Lawrence or Henry Miller—indeed, every major figure in the Mailer pantheon—Hemingway was a “great writer, for he contained a cauldron of boiling opposites.”{{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=137}} Reviewing Morley Callaghan’s "That Summer in Paris" in 1963, Mailer declared that Hemingway’s bravery was “an act of will”; the “heroic”product of a lifelong struggle with “cowardice” and an ability to carry “a weight of anxiety within him” which would have “suffocated any man smaller than himself."{{sfn|Mailer|1966|p=159}} His decision to reprint these comments as the first “prelude” to "The Time Of Our Time" suggests that they should be thought of, in some way, as initiating his own work.{{sfn|Mailer|1998|p=4}} What Hemingway’s example initiated was not a style or methodology—not camp—building—but a fascination with the futile effort involved in such constructions and an awareness of the incapacity of all camps to remain secure, to keep the river away. For all that Hemingway

{{pg|143|144}}

strove to be “classic,” “sophisticated,” “purer,” and “graceful,” for all that he represented the ideals of “scrupulosity,”“manners,” and “gravity”, the chaos of his “inner” life was still apparent to Mailer.{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=912}}{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=10}} In other words, like Cal Hubbard,"[t]he two halves of his soul were far apart."{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=117}} The question was one of balance. At his best, like Hubbard, Hemingway’s “strength was that he had managed to find some inner cooperation between these disparate halves.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=117}} At “his worst” shortly before his death, the “old moldering” writer was adding to “the nausea he once cleared away.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=474}}{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=477}}{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=474}}

'''BEING MACHO IS NO FUN'''{{sfn|Mailer|2006|p=185}}

Nowhere in Hemingway’s fiction does what Mailer called the “continuing battle” of “being a man” emerge more clearly than in his representation of boxers.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=222}} To consider a boxer (especially a heavyweight) is to consider a man who should—at least in the world into which Hemingway was born—epitomize a straightforward, unambiguous Anglo-Saxon heterosexual manliness. But, for one reason or another, Hemingway’s boxers are unable to fulfill the brief. Cooperation between one’s disparate halves— “the Champ and the Fraud” —is not always possible.{{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=160}}

Consider “The Light of the World” (1933), in which the teenage narrator and his friend, Tom, encounter a motley crew of late-night travelers at a rail-way station: “five whores . . . and six white men and four Indians.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1933}}{{sfn|Hemingway|1966|p=385}} Among the prostitutes are two “big” women, Alice and Peroxide, who argue about who really knew “Steve” or “Stanley” Ketchel (they also can’t agree on the first name). The cook remembers Stanley Ketchel’s 1909 fight with Jack Johnson, in particular how Ketchel had floored Johnson in the 12th round just before Johnson knocked him out. Peroxide attributes Ketchel’s defeat to a punch by Johnson (“the big black bastard” when Ketchel, “the only man she ever loved,” smiled at her in the audience.{{sfn|Hemingway|1966|p=389}}{{sfn|Hemingway|1966|p=388}} Alice remembers Steve Ketchel telling her she was “a lovely piece.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1966|p=390}} Both women refer continuously to Ketchel’s “whiteness”—“I never saw a man as clean and as white and as beautiful,” says Peroxide.{{sfn|Hemingway|1966|p=388}} “White,” as Walter Benn Michaels notes, “becomes an adjective describing character instead of skin;” and so, Ketchel is figured as a kind of Christ-like figure, while Johnson, “that black son of a bitch from hell,” is the devil.{{sfn|Michaels|1988|p=193}}{{sfn|Hemingway|1966|p=389}} Ketchel’s pseudo-divinity is

{{pg|144|145}}

further suggested by such statements as “I loved him like you love God;” “His own father shot and killed him. Yes, by Christ, his own father;” and, of course, the title.{{sfn|Hemingway|1966|p=388}} Philip Young points out that Hemingway placed this story after “the most pessimistic of all his stories,” “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” in Winner Take Nothing, “as if the point of the story is really that the light of the world has gone out.”{{sfn|Young|1966|p=50}}

But there seems to be more going on under the surface of this particular iceberg. First, the confusion of names and facts is important. Stanley Ketchel was not killed by his father—that was Steve Ketchel, a lightweight boxer, who never got near Johnson. Stanley was shot in 1910 by the husband of a woman with whom he was having an affair. Second, of all boxers, Stanley Ketchel was perhaps the most unlikely possible candidate for Redeemer. His nickname was the “Michigan Assassin,” and, according to one reporter, “he couldn’t get "enough" blood.”{{sfn|Roberts|1986|p=82}} While the prostitutes may be seeking salvation, the story that they tell is absurd. So what is going on? Howard Hannum argues that much of the dialogue between the two women “has the quality of counterpunching,” as if they are restaging Ketchel’s contest against Johnson: here, the (bleached) blonde versus the heavyweight.{{sfn|Roberts|1986|p=325}} But the cook’s role also needs to be considered. The discussion of whiteness begins when the narrator notices a “white man” speaking; “his face was white and his hands were white and thin.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1966|p=385}} The other men tease the cook about the whiteness of his hands (“he puts lemon juice on his hands”) and hint that he is gay.{{sfn|Hemingway|1966|p=386}} Are these two things connected? And, if they are, what does that suggest about clean, white, beautiful Ketchel? When asked his age, Tom joins in the sexual bantering with hints at “inversion”—“I’m ninety-six and he’s sixty-nine”—but throughout the boys remain uneasy and confused.{{sfn|Hemingway|1966|p=387}} By the end of the story, the narrator seems quite smitten with Alice (“she had the prettiest face I ever saw.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1966|p=391}} Tom notices this and says it is time to leave. The supposedly natural order of whites beating blacks, men having sex with women, and “huge” whores being unappealing has been unsettled.{{sfn|Hemingway|1966|p=386}} When the cook asks where the boys are going, Tom replies, “the other way from you.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1966|p=391}}

Racial and sexual ambiguities also trouble “The Battler,” one of the Nick Adams initiation stories in "In Our Time" (1925).{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} The story begins with Nick himself having just survived a battle with a brakeman on a freight train. He has been thrown off the train and lands with a scuffed knee and bruise on the face, of which he is rather proud— “He wished he could see it”

{{pg|145|146}}

—but he is still standing.{{sfn|Hemingway|1966|p=129}} “He was all right.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1966|p=129}} Nick then ventures into another battling arena—a fire-lit camp that seems to be a refuge but which also turns out to be a kind of boxing ring. There he encounters Ad Francis, an ex-champion prizefighter whose bruises are more impressive, and much more disgusting, than his own:

<blockquote>In the firelight Nick saw that his face was misshapen. His nose was sunken, his eyes were like slits, he had queer-shaped lips. Nick did not perceive all this at once, he only saw the man’s face was queerly formed and mutilated. It was like putty in color. Dead looking in the firelight.{{sfn|Hemingway|1966|p=131}}</blockquote>

That “Nick did not perceive all this at once” suggests that he kept looking away.{{sfn|Hemingway|1966|p=131}} “Don’t you like my pan?” the fighter asks, revealing even worse: “He had only one ear. It was thickened and tight against the side of his head. Where the other one should have been there was a stump.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1966|p=131}} Although Nick is “a little sick,” he counters Ad’s pugnacious assertions with gusto:

<blockquote>'It must have made him [the brakeman] feel good to bust you,’the man said seriously.
‘I’ll bust him.’

. . . . . . . . . . .

‘All you kids are tough.’

‘You got to be tough,’ Nick said.
‘That’s what I said.’{{sfn|Hemingway|1966|p=131}}</blockquote>

Nick’s pleasure at establishing a rapport with a fellow battler is short-lived, however. Ad, he discovers, is unstable (“crazy”), and depends on his companion Bugs to stop him from battling.{{sfn|Hemingway|1966|p=132}} When Ad tries to start a fight with Nick, in “an ugly parody of a boxing match,” Bugs intervenes by knocking him out with a stick from behind in a manner that recalls Hemingway’s very first story, “A Matter of Color.”{{sfn|Strychacz|1989|p=252}}{{sfn|Bruccoli|1971|p=98-100}} Color is also important here as Nick is obviously startled by the fact that Bugs is black, and makes a great deal of his “negro's voice,” the “negro” way he walks, and his “long nigger’s legs.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1966|p=133}} Although it has been argued that the story reveals Hemingway’s racism, these almost compulsively repeated epithets (like those describing whiteness in “The Light

{{pg|146|147}}

of the World”) seem to be Nick’s as he struggles to understand the relationship between the two men. White prizefighters, after all, were not supposed to have black friends. Bugs tells Nick a story about Ad which adds to his confusion. Ad had a woman manager, and it was always being “written up in the papers all about brothers and sisters and how she loved her brother and how he loved his sister, and then they got married in New York and that made a lot of unpleasantness.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1966|p=136-137}} Nick vaguely remembers this, but then Bugs adds,“[O]f course they wasn’t really brother and sister no more than a rabbit, but there was a lot of people didn’t like it either way.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1966|p=137}} Bugs repeatedly stresses how “awful good-looking” the woman was, and how she “looked enough like him to be twins.”{{sfn|Strychacz|1989|p=252}} Some have read this admiring comment (along with the description of Ad’s face as “queerly formed” and his lips as “queer shaped” as a suggestion that the two men may be lovers.{{sfn|Hemingway|1966|p=131}} Less directly, like “The Light of the World,” the story slides anxiously between taboos—incest becomes homosexuality becomes miscegenation. The “perplexing behavior” of boxers once more promises to reveal the perplexing nature of masculinity, and again the boy flees.{{sfn|Brenner|1990|p=159}}

What boxers reveal again and again is that the biggest of men are just “not big enough” to take on the “dark” and ambiguous world that surrounds the most well-regulated and well-lit ring, as the narrator of “Fifty Grand” notes.{{sfn|Hemingway|1966|p=320}} The first quotation above is from Mailer’s response to a question from his son, John Buffalo Mailer, about the relation between boxing and writing. A writer, he said, like a fighter, can come to realize that he’s “[b]ig, but not big enough.”{{sfn|Mailer|2006|p=189}} This is an insight that Nick Adams tries to avoid in “The Killers” (1927){{sfn|Hemingway|1927}} Two men show up in a small-town café and hold the staff hostage as they wait for the man they want to kill, Ole Andreson, a former heavyweight boxer. When Nick, who has been in the café, tells Andreson about the men, the boxer says that nothing can be done to save him and turns his face to the wall. Little more than a page of this eleven-page story is devoted to Nick’s encounter with Andreson, but it changes everything. The gangsters dub Nick “bright boy,” but the story reveals how little he knows about power and powerlessness.{{sfn|Hemingway|1927|p=283}} In an attempt to escape his revelation—that the heavyweight, the epitome of masculinity, is not prepared to fight back—Nick decides to move on. “I can’t stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he’s going to get it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1927|p=289}} As in the case of “The Battler” and “The Light

{{pg|147|148}}

of the World,” the story ends with Nick preparing to “get out of this town.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1927|p=289}}

'''BOXING AS AMERICAN WAR'''

The boxers in these stories reveal the ways in which seemingly solid distinctions between hypermasculinity and homosexuality, between whiteness and blackness or Jewishness—confront and often threaten to collapse into each other. As Walter Benn Michaels remarks of "The Sun Also Rises," “Hemingway’s obsessive commitment to distinguishing between Cohn and Jake only makes sense in the light of their being in some sense indistinguishable.”{{sfn|Michaels|1995|p=27}} For all their differences, Robert Cohn and Jake Barnes are both “taken in hand” by Brett Ashley, “manipulated” in a way that recalls the boxer dolls that Jake nearly trips over on the Boulevard des Capuchines.{{sfn|Hemingway|1976|p=8}} There, a “girl assistant lackadaisically pulls the threads that make the dolls dance, while she stands with “folded hands,” “looking away.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1927|p=32}}

America (condensed into American masculinity) was, to use a favorite Mailer word, “schizoid,” and the boxing match—for Mailer much more persistently than for Hemingway—provided a metaphor or structure within which to explore its violently felt divisions. Like a literary Tex Rickard or Don King, Mailer specialized in setting up big matches: an essential masculinity is pitted against an essential femininity; an idealized heterosexuality confronts a mythical homosexuality; imaginary “blacks” encounter imaginary “whites.” The continuing clash of one hero against each other is what constitutes “[e]xistential politics,” and “form . . . is the record of a war . . . as seen in a moment of rest.{{sfn|Mailer|1963|p=6}}{{sfn|Mailer|1966|p=370}} In fiction then, Mailer’s characters became the embodiments of opposing positions which need to be argued through; in non-fiction, he favored the Q&A, in which he could have “A Rousing Club Fight” with an interviewer, or sometimes enter the “arena” with an imagined alter ego.{{sfn|Mailer|1963|p=125}}{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=182-90}} And sometimes genres—in particular, fiction and history—argue with each other. “[T]he element which is exciting, disturbing, nightmarish perhaps, is that incompatibles have come to bed.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=342}}

If all relationships have a comparable dialectic structure, then it makes equal sense to use the language of sex to describe boxing—the first fifteen seconds of a fight are equivalent “to the first kiss in a love affair”—and the

{{pg|148|149}}

language of boxing to describe sex.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=29}} For the narrator of "The Time of Her Time," for example, the "dialectic" of sex stages conflicts between Jewishness and non-Jewishness, high culture and low culture, and even the competing therapeutic claims of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich.{{sfn|Mailer|1959}}{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=495}} If conflict is the model for the relationship between men and women, men additionally face an internal battle between heterosexuality and homosexuality (Mailer does not think that women have this problem). So the brutal outcome of the 1962 fight between Emile Griffith and Benny (Kid) Paret is said to dramatize the "biological force" with which men disavow their inherent homosexuality.{{sfn|Mailer|1963|p=243}} Paret had taunted Griffith with homophobic remarks at the weigh-in and during the fight, and Griffith responded by beating him to death. For Mailer, this is an example of the ring not doing its usual job of containing and controlling (or sublimating) sexual desire.

The boxing ring also enacts, and thus mostly contains, another conflict that Mailer saw as fundamental to American culture of "our time," one between blacks and whites ("Time" x). Again, the challenge is to foreground and disrupt familiar stereotypical dichotomies: between whites, who are civilized, sophisticated, cerebral, literate, and literary; and blacks, who are primitive, illiterate, attuned to the pleasures of the body, and fluent in its language.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=341}} James Baldwin (and many others) complained about Mailer’s tendency to see "us as goddam romantic black symbols." But Mailer saw everyone and everything symbolically. For Patterson vs. Liston, therefore, read Art vs. Magic, Love vs. Sex, God vs. the Devil.

'''HEMINGWAY AND ALI: EXISTENTIAL EGO'''

“I think there is a wonderful study to be made about the similarities between Ernest Hemingway and Muhammad Ali,” Mailer told Michael Lennon in 1980, making a start himself. Both men, he argued, “come out of that same American urgency to be the only planet in existence". "To be the sun"—and at the heart of each was a dialectical struggle that was somehow both personal and national.{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=161-162}} The fact that "the mightiest victim of injustice in America" was also “the mightiest narcissist in the land,” he observed of Ali in 1971, proved that "the twentieth century was nothing if not a tangle of opposition."{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=28}} "Ego" (later renamed "King of the Hill"), an account of Ali’s comeback fight against Joe Frazier, is not only

{{pg|149|150}}

about a "dialogue between bodies," but about a dialogue within Ali himself.{{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=19}} For Mailer, the triumph of the fight’s end is that Ali has somehow managed to reconcile his two "sides"—he could dance, displaying "exquisite" grace, figured as black and feminine—but he could also "stand," revealing, for the first time, qualities of endurance to "moral and physical torture," figured as white and masculine.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=86}}{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=93}}

Troublesome "contradictions" also "[fall] away" in "The Fight" (1974), an account of Ali’s "Rumble in the Jungle" with George Foreman.{{sfn|Mailer|1974}} Once again, the issue is survival as much as victory. Mailer models his essay on Hazlitt’s 1821 piece of the same name. As Hazlitt’s narrator-protagonist begins by announcing his desire to escape the sentimental complications of daily life, Mailer declares his disappointing love affair with himself. As Hazlitt travels companionably to the heart of the country, discussing Cobbett and Rousseau en route, Mailer flies Pan Am to Conrad’s "Heart of Darkness" in Vachel Lindsay’s "Congo,"” and on the return journey, plays dice with the air stewardess. Both men experience a "restoration of being" through journeys to watch boxing.{{sfn|Mailer|1974|p=239}} But while Hazlitt ends by simply acknowledging the ephemeral achievement of both the boxing match and his own essay, Mailer wants more—nothing less, in fact, than the restoration of the title "champ among writers."{{sfn|Mailer|1974|p=33}} The book plays with various versions of magical thinking, but all are designed to the same end: "the powers of regeneration in an artist."{{sfn|Mailer|1974|p=162}} Ali works magic on Mailer by showing him that regeneration is possible; and set against his example is that of Hemingway, whose suicide fourteen years earlier haunts the book.{{sfn|Mailer|1974|p=123}}{{sfn|Mailer|1974|p=162}} Ali, in other words, is both Hemingway and a kind of anti-Hemingway.

'''BOXING WITH HEMINGWAY'''

So what does it mean to box with another writer? For Hemingway, at least in his youth, the analogy expressed the inevitability of succession. Once a great boxer or writer had lost his crown, there was no reclaiming it. The old must give way to the new. So in 1924 he complained to Ezra Pound that the writers Ford Madox Ford was selecting for transatlantic review were the literary equivalents of Great White Hope Jim Jeffries, dragged out of retirement for one last fight: "The thing to do with Ford is to kill him.... I am fond of Ford. This ain’t personal. It’s literary."{{sfn|Hemingway|1985|p=116}} Killing is also what Hemingway envisaged for Sherwood Anderson, reimagined as the has-been heavyweight Ole Andreson in "The Killers;" "a sock on the jaw" was not

{{pg|150|151}}

enough to settle the score. In an early draft of the story, the fighter was called Nerone; Hemingway changed the name to Anderson and then, finally, to Andreson.

For all that he joshed about minor and major contenders, Mailer’s sense of literary influence was—like everything else in his worldview—less teleological than dialectical, less a matter of drastic, once-and-for-all Oedipal action than a conversation between competing tastes and loyalties.{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=149}} To develop as a writer, Mailer did not want to kill Hemingway off so much as to continue to spar with him, while also sparring with (among many others along the way) Henry Miller and Herman Melville. If “Prelude—I” of "The Time of Our Time" evokes Hemingway, the presiding figure of its concluding "Acknowledgments and Appreciations" is Dos Passos, whose 1936 trilogy "USA" Mailer once described as "the most successful portrait of America in the first half of the twentieth century."{{sfn|Bruce/Webster|1982|p=173}} Setting up one "great American author" or "literary athlete" against another while, at the same time, looking forward to other juxtapositions—that was what boxing meant to Mailer: a way of exposing the truth that, in the ring or on the page, "no two Americas will prove identical."{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=87}}{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=92}}{{sfn|Mailer|1998|p=x}} Nothing, as he liked to say, "is settled after all."{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=86}}

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

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* {{cite journal |last=Messenger |first=Christian |year=1987 |title=Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative |journal=Modern Fiction Studies |pages=85–104 |ref=harv}}
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* {{cite book |last=Monteiro |first=George |year=1990 |editor-last=Benson |editor-first=Jackson J. |title=This is My Pal Bugs: Ernest Hemingway’s “The Battler” |location=Durham |publisher=Duke University Press |pages=224–228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Oates |first=Joyce Carol |year=1974 |title=New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature |location=New York |publisher=Vanguard Press |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Oates |first=Joyce Carol |author-mask=1 |year=1988a |title=On Boxing |location=London |publisher=Pan |ref=harv}}
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* {{cite book |last=Poirier |first=Richard |year=1972 |title=Mailer |location=London |publisher=Fontana |ref=harv}}
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{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

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

2025-04-23T21:04:57Z

Jules Carry: Fix.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}} }}
{{MR04}} 
{{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:
{{quote|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” {{harvnb|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” ({{harvnb|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” ({{harvnb|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, {{harvtxt|Mailer|1975|p=212}} suggests that “Maybe he never appeared more handsome.”}} 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.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1985|p=198}}{{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” ({{harvnb|Hemingway|1985|p=106}}). }} 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
{{quote|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}} {{quote|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. {{harvtxt|Mailer|1975|p=495}}: “I used to compare the bed to the bullfight, sometimes seeing myself as the matador and sometimes as the bull.”}} 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: {{quote|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: {{quote|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}} }}

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 {{harvtxt|Svoboda|1983}}.}} 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.”{{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: {{quote|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===
{{Notelist}}

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

===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 }}
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{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Norman Mailer's The Fight: Hemingway, Bullfighting, and the Lovely Metaphysics of Boxing}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

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

2025-04-23T18:55:56Z

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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:
{{quote|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” {{harvnb|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” ({{harvnb|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” ({{harvnb|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, {{harvtxt|Mailer|1975|p=212}} suggests that “Maybe he never appeared more handsome.”}} 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.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1985|p=198}}{{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” ({{harvnb|Hemingway|1985|p=106}}). }} 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
{{quote|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}} {{quote|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. {{harvtxt|Mailer|1975|p=495}}, when he writes, “I used to compare the bed to the bullfight, sometimes seeing myself as the matador and sometimes as the bull.”}} 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: {{quote|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: {{quote|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}} }}

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 {{harvtxt|Svoboda|1983}}.}} 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.”{{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: {{quote|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===
{{Notelist}}

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

===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}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Norman Mailer's The Fight: Hemingway, Bullfighting, and the Lovely Metaphysics of Boxing}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

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

2025-04-15T14:57:41Z

Jules Carry: Cleaned up the first few ¶s an an example. See templates.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Hemingway and Women at the Front: Blowing Bridges in ''The Fifth Column'', ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', and Other Works}}
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{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| type = Written
| last = Moreland
| first = Kim
| abstract = An exploration of Hemingway’s interest in the topic of love and war in a number of his important works.
| notes = publication or editor's notes (if applicable)
| url = http://prmlr.us/mr05mor}}
{{dc|dc=O|ne of the central issues on which critics}} of ''A Farewell to Arms'' focus is the vexed relationship between love and war, a response Hemingway invites with his punningly ambiguous title. Certainly Frederic Henry rejects the arms of war in his “separate peace,”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=243}} an act of desertion validated by the confused and murderous actions of the Italian officers in the army he serves. Yet Frederic is also pulled from the arms of war by the arms of love in the person of Catherine Barkley. The two flee the war arena—she abandoning her post as nurse in the American Red Cross Hospital in Milan—for a safe retreat in neutral Switzerland, an idyllic haven that protects them from wartime reality. That Frederic must ultimately say farewell to the arms of love when Catherine dies in childbirth is tragedy of a different order from his first farewell—existential or perhaps ontological tragedy, the tragedy of life itself, not the sociopolitical tragedy of war.

Some nine years later Hemingway revisits this same vexed relationship in his 1938 play ''The Fifth Column'', whose setting is the Spanish Civil War. Whereas Frederic Henry ultimately chooses love over war, Philip Rawlings chooses war over love, declaring, “We’re in for fifty years of undeclared wars and I’ve signed up for the duration.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969|p=80}} He rejects his lover Dorothy Bridges, along with her fantasy of sharing “a long, happy, quiet life at some {{pg|370|371}} place like Saint-Tropez or, you know, some place like Saint-Tropez ''was''”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=23}}—that is, an idyllic haven outside of time. Instead, he embraces the wartime reality, declaiming, “Where I go now, I go alone, or with others who go there for the same reason I go.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=83}} Loyalty to his comrades in arms supersedes loyalty to his lover, whom he pointedly stops calling “comrade” in a politically and emotionally significant act. Not a separate peace but voluntary enlistment “for the duration” is the fate Philip Rawlings chooses.

Why love over war in the novel and war over love in the play? Independent critical discussions of the two works point to several explanations, including differing composition circumstances, differing perceptions of the wars’ meanings, and differing characterizations of the female protagonists. These three reasons deserve brief discussion here because they point to an additional issue that has not been discussed in this context, that of the increasing breakdown of the boundary between the foundational western categories of “home front” and “war front.” This breakdown had two causes. One cause was the increasing penetration of the home front by so-called total war, which was enabled by changing military technology and a concomitant changing ethic of war. Another cause was the increasing penetration of the war front by women in various professional roles—a change less abstract, more personalized, than the first. As home front and war front became increasingly difficult to distinguish, confusion and anger inevitably resulted.

Hemingway’s significance as a cultural icon reveals itself in his own confusion at this breakdown of boundaries. On the one hand, he repeatedly expressed anger at the impersonal forces of technology that characterize the “strange new kind of war” represented in all his war fiction.{{efn|For an extended discussion of Hemingway’s attitude toward the transformation of traditional warfare by modern technology, see {{harvtxt|Moreland|1969|pp=163–68}} ''Medievalist Impulse''.}} On the other hand, he also expressed anger at the strange new kind of woman who was invading the male war front, displacing his anger onto the personal behavior of individual women and expressing it dramatically by his characterization of his female protagonists. He thereby transformed geopolitical war into what he called “the great unending battle between men and women.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=481-482}} As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar brilliantly explore in their ''No Man’s Land'' trilogy, the sexual struggle initiated by the suffrage movement of the mid-nineteenth century became “a key theme in late Victorian literature and ultimately a shaping element in modernist and post-modernist literature . . . [such that] writers increasingly represented women’s unprecedented invasion of the public sphere as a battle of the sexes.”{{sfn|Gilbert|Gubar|1988|loc=1:4}} {{pg|371|372}} Hemingway thus valorizes in ''Farewell'' the war nurse who abandons her military hospital for life as a wife at home in neutral Switzerland, whereas he repudiates in ''Fifth Column'' the female war correspondent who refuses to leave the war front of Madrid when her lover directs her to do so. Not one war but two—the geopolitical and the sexual—are thus fought in the pages of Hemingway’s works.

The composition circumstances of the novel and play are markedly different. Hemingway wrote ''Farewell'' some ten years after World War I had ended in victory for the Allies. The years between the war’s conclusion and the novel’s composition provided time for reflection on the war’s meaning. Hemingway’s post-war novel offered the opportunity to call the war itself into question—in effect, to argue against the war while not endangering the chance of victory. In contrast, Hemingway wrote ''Fifth Column'' while living in war-ravaged Madrid at the Hotel Florida, some fifteen blocks from the front. Ronald Fraser sums up many first-person accounts in his oral history by noting that Madrid was “the only city where you could go to the front by tram,”{{sfn|Fraser|1979|p=455}} citing an interview subject as remembering that conductors called out “To the front—five céntimos.”{{sfn|Fraser|1979|p=265}} Peter Wyden notes that secret-police chief Alexander Orlov once told war correspondent Louis Fischer of ''The Nation'', “There is no front. Madrid is the front.”{{sfn|Wyden|1983|p=202}} The Hotel Florida was shelled over thirty times in the fall of 1937 while Hemingway was drafting his play, during the second and longest of his four wartime visits to Spain (completing a clean typescript manuscript titled ''A Play'' in Madrid on 23 November 1937, and revising the manuscript in Key West in the summer of 1938, between his third and fourth visits to Spain). Published in October 1938, the play was largely a propaganda vehicle designed to encourage American sympathy for the Republican cause, which might result in a change in American policy that would allow the sale of war material to Republican Spain. It was thus necessary that Philip Rawlings choose war over love, else the play would have seemed to support the American neutrality policy.

Perceptions about World War I and the Spanish Civil War were also markedly different. The causes of World War I were murky, the conduct of the war disconcerting because traditional ways of battle had been rendered obsolete, and the meaning of the Allied victory in this war of attrition was unclear. The only hope was that this was the war to end all wars—ironic, given that the Treaty of Versailles in effect set up the circumstances that led to World War II. Speaking for an entire generation, Hemingway’s Frederic {{pg|372|373}} Henry famously says, “I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=185}}—in short, a slaughter without meaning or higher purpose.{{efn|Hemingway draws an equivalent relationship between the Chicago slaughterhouse and World War I, and then between the Spanish bullfight and the knightly tournament. He deconstructs the seeming equality of these sets of terms, revealing the hierarchical relationship that always already obtains, the first set of terms being subordinated to the second set of terms. For an argument as to the central significance of these terms to an interpretation of ''Farewell'', see {{harvtxt|Moreland|1969}}.}} As such, Frederic Henry is justified in making his famous “separate peace.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=243}}

In contrast, the Spanish Civil War was “a most passionate war,” {{sfn|Thomas|1961|p=616}} indeed a cause célèbre perceived as a fight for the soul of Spain and ultimately that of the world. Those who sympathized with the democratically elected Republican government of Spain regarded the war as a conflict between freedom and tyranny, offering an opportunity to stop fascism (most immediately in the person of General Franco and the rebellious Spanish Army, which was supported with material and men by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy). A war to determine who would govern Spain—in this regard “a conflict small enough to be comprehensible to individuals” {{sfn|Thomas|1961|p=616}}—it was more largely an ideological war, a war of competing belief systems. The Loyalists who supported the Republican government included a complicated coalition of Spanish and foreign communists, socialists, syndicalists, anarchists, and democratic liberals, ultimately subsumed into the Popular Front.<ref group=Notes> For a detailed analysis of the ideological positions of these various groups, and also for an analysis of the political in-fighting among them, see </ref>{{sfn|Orwell|1980|p=46–71}} Moreover, both sides regarded the war as important not only in itself and for what it represented, but also for what it presaged—either the containment of fascism, or its expansion and a resultant world war. Everyone involved knew that the war’s outcome would profoundly matter to the course of history. To make a “separate peace” from the Spanish Civil War, as indeed England and France in effect had done via the Non-Intervention Pact and America via a revision of the Neutrality Act, would unwittingly encourage the triumph of fascism, the destruction unleashed by another world war, and the possible end of political freedom and self-determination in the modern world. In these terms, it is unthinkable that Philip Rawlings not commit himself to the fight “for the duration.”

The attributes of the female protagonists of Hemingway’s two works also differ significantly, especially insofar as they reflect Hemingway’s attitudes toward the actual women on whom they were based. Catherine Barkley is based on Agnes von Kurowsky, Hemingway’s first love, a World War I nurse he asked to marry him during his convalescence under her care, who jilted him for an Italian artillery officer after Hemingway’s return to the American home front. The lyric passages of ''A Farewell to Arms'', especially in Switzer- land, reflect Hemingway’s love for Agnes, just as Catherine’s death (however {{pg|373|374}} tragic to Frederic) reflects Hemingway’s anger at Agnes’s betrayal, as does the bitter portrait of Luz in “A Very Short Story.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1966|p=1925}}

Dorothy Bridges is based on Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s lover during the Spanish Civil War and later his third wife—once Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer had divorced, a long process whose conclusion was often in doubt, Pauline insistent on maintaining the marriage, and Hemingway wavering between his wife and his lover. The few lyric passages of ''The Fifth Column'' occur at night, when Philip expresses his love for Dorothy and asks her to marry him, a reflection of Hemingway’s own intensifying love for Martha. The daytime exchanges between Philip and Dorothy are marked by arguments and Philip’s contempt, reflecting Hemingway’s anger at Martha for threatening his domestic life with Pauline and their sons. In a telling hand-written letter to Martha in June 1943, Hemingway reminisced about their Spanish Civil War love affair and their subsequent marriage, about which she had hesitated, to his terrible distress. He thanked her for “interven[ing]” in his life, but he first wrote “interf” (that is, interfering) and then marked out this slip of the pen that unconsciously revealed his continuing ambivalence.<ref group=Notes> This unpublished letter is dated 9–10 June 1943 and was written by Hemingway while he was submarine hunting on the Pilar.</ref>

Though the characterization of Dorothy Bridges is typically read only in relation to Hemingway’s personal and psychological struggle concerning Martha Gellhorn, it is also a reflection of Hemingway’s complicated attitude toward the appropriate role for women at a time of radical change that was simultaneously independent of and precipitated by modern warfare. While the “New Woman” in America and England had been demanding more political, economic, and social rights since the nineteenth century, the role women played in modern wars—notably World War I, when women were first encouraged to do “male” jobs to free men for the battle front—exacerbated this sense of entitlement. If not on the surface of the text, at the subtextual level Dorothy Bridges threatens a set of foundational categories more or less operative in the western world since the chivalric code of the Middle Ages—that is, the home front in binary opposition to the battle front. Love is for the home front, war is for the battle front. Women are for the home front, men for the battle front. Women are idealized because they symbolize the stakes of male combat, while men are realized by their role as combatants. According to this binary opposition, the role of “wife” is at the home front, away from the intensity of battle, which enables male self-realization while also encouraging an inevitable live-for-the-moment mentality that socially {{pg|374|375}} and morally justifies brief sexual liaisons. Melissa Herbert notes that “the military is a ‘gendered institution’ because soldiering has been about not only war, but being ‘a man’,” {{sfn|Herbert|1998|p=7}} and she argues that “much of the strategy [designed to establish one’s status as soldier] seems to rely on being that which is not feminine.”{{sfn|Herbert|1998|p=8}} To be a soldier in this sense is to not be a woman.

Historically, the visible roles for women in the male arena of war have been limited. Always, of course, and especially in civil wars (“the best war for a writer,” Hemingway claims in ''Green Hills of Africa,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1963|p=71}} women have been war victims, often victims of rape, whereby the woman’s body is regarded as enemy property to be looted, or as enemy military terrain to be invaded and conquered, as is Maria’s body by the Nationalist soldiers in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls''. Women are even at risk from their own army, whose soldiers may regard use of the female body as rightful recompense for placing their own bodies on the line. Marion Merriman, the wife of Robert Merriman of the Lincoln Battalion, who was the figure on whom Hemingway based Robert Jordan, recounts her own rape by a Lincoln Battalion officer in her 1986 memoir, ''American Commander in Spain''. Having traveled to Spain to nurse her husband after his first wounding, she chose to remain with him in the only way possible, International Brigade officials allowing her to enlist “if [she] would promise to never, under any circumstances, try to get to the front lines.”{{sfn|Merriman|1986|p=78}} One of only two American women actually in the Lincoln Battalion (women comprising a majority of the staff of the twenty-five-or-so American medical units), she was assigned largely to office duties, at one point making an official trip with two officers under her husband’s command. She recounts her thoughts after one of her fellow officers raped her in the night:

<blockquote>I had to calm myself. This is a war, I told myself. Men are dying and maimed. This is my burden. . . . But should I tell Bob? . . . [I] finally concluded: I must not hurt Bob with this. No, this must be my secret burden. I cannot tell anyone—ever. I could not get the rape off my mind. But I went on with my work. I said nothing about the rape. The war filled Bob’s mind. I could not trouble him further, and I did not.{{sfn|Merriman|1986|p=148–49}}</blockquote>

Just as women historically, if often silently, have been war victims, so too have women historically functioned, in Hemingway’s term, as ‘‘whores de {{pg|375|376}} combat”{{sfn|Kert|1983|p=297 quote}} (quoted by Kert 297). His pun suggests woman’s dual role with regard to war—either party to it at the battle front as whore, or apart from it (that is, “hors de combat”) at the home front as wife. As Katharine Moon notes:

<blockquote>Historical conditions of war and military occupation have helped foster socioeconomic conditions that have forced women and girls . . . into sexual labor for the military. In general, they have been grouped together as camp followers, women who have made their sexual and other forms of feminized labor, such as cooking and washing, available to troops either voluntarily or involuntarily.{{sfn|Moon|1999|p=210}}</blockquote>

In her study of camp followers in the American Revolution, Holly Mayer reminds us that camp followers should be understood broadly as the men and women who “live[d] and work[ed] with the military.”{{sfn|Mayer|1996|p=1}} They traditionally formed part of the European and American military communities, supplying many of the support services (transportation, nursing, laundry, food and other supplies) that were gradually absorbed into the military itself only beginning in the eighteenth century. The increasing professionalization of the army in the nineteenth century resulted in the decline of the camp-following community in which women, especially of the lower classes, had played a significant if historically unremarked role from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. This military change was supported by the nineteenth-century “cult of true womanhood” or “cult of domesticity,” which vigorously delineated the female and male spheres as private and public, respectively. In short, the boundary between home front and war front has always already existed in western society, and simultaneously it has been permeable to a greater or lesser extent.

Moon notes that “[camp-following] women belonged to the army, but they belonged to it in the same way they belonged to anything else—as domestic attachments.”{{sfn|Moon|1999|p=275}} Typically ordered to “accompany the baggage and stay out of the way,”{{sfn|Moon|1999|p=14}} they were regarded as outsiders, historically marginalized though they traveled with and supported the army. Mayer notes that this community was class-inflected, such that officer’s wives were “ladies” who typically visited only during winter quarters and created a social life for the officers, while lower-class women not only traveled year- {{pg|376|377}} round with their men-folk but also necessarily worked to support themselves and their families, thus rendering them suspect since some female merchants inevitably “supplement[ed] their incomes by engaging in prostitution.”{{sfn|Mayer|1996|p=7}} Prostitutes from nearby and typically urban areas also saw encamped armies as commercial opportunities. Moon notes that “the degree to which military prostitutes’ lives have been controlled or regulated by the armed forces has depended on [a variety of factors],”{{sfn|Moon|1999|p=210}} and Herbert asserts that “historically, in many instances prostitution was organized, or at the very least made available, by the military.”{{sfn|Herbert|1998|p=64}} In ''A Farewell to Arms'', Hemingway describes a relatively regulated degree of military control, Frederic observing that Gorizia has two separate “bawdy houses, one for troops and one for officers.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=5}} Rinaldi alludes to “bad administration,” complaining that “for two weeks now they haven’t changed [the girls, who have become] . . . old war comrades.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=64-65}}

It would seem that rape victims and prostitutes represent ways in which the boundary between women and war is breached, but women in these two categories are essentially redefined as war booty and are therefore appropriated to the war front by men. In effect, the only women who belong at the war front are rape victims and prostitutes, and their place at the front is validated by men—more specifically, by male sexual activity, which reinforces the “masculinity [that is] . . . one mechanism by which men become soldiers.”{{sfn|Herbert|1998|p=6}}

But the woman who goes willingly to war calls into question independently the boundary between women and war, between the private sphere of the home front and the public sphere of the war front. Perhaps that is why the Lincoln Battalion officer felt he had the right to rape Marion Merriman, simultaneously his commander’s wife and a corporal serving in what Marion herself called “woman-less war.”{{sfn|Merriman|1986|p=148}} And perhaps that is why, over the centuries, whenever women have approached the war front their activities have been marginalized and dismissed, rendered historically invisible, as in the case of the camp-following communities except insofar as they have been reduced to the single identity of prostitute.

While women have historically served as soldiers, until comparatively recently they have done so only by disguising themselves as men, and they have most often been discovered only after being wounded. Most important is that these women-disguised-as-men remain largely disguised in the pages of history. Those who succeeded in their disguises were neither identified {{pg|377|378}} nor counted; those who died were regarded as aberrations whose freakishness was buried with them; those who were wounded were removed behind the lines and warned not to return to the battle front.<ref group=Notes> For an account of two disguised female soldiers in the Spanish Civil War who were discovered only after being wounded, see Brome 206–08. For an extended discussion of female soldiers in the American Civil War, see Leonard 99–272. </ref> From the male perspective, the more palatable motivation for such behavior was the search for a lover or husband, while less palatable was a desire to fight for the cause directly on the battle front rather than indirectly on the home front.

Atypically, in the early stages of the Spanish Civil War, Republican women fought openly beside men:

<blockquote>The first masculine sphere to which women had access was the military one . . . due, primarily to the initial troop disorganization and, second, to the fact that the Republican army was formed of militia columns organized by trade unions and political parties without any military hierarchy. Thousands of
women under arms and in female battalions, for example, took part in the defense of Madrid in November of 1936.{{sfn|Coleman|1999|p=48}}</blockquote>

But once the crises of the first six months or so had passed and the militias were increasingly professionalized as the Popular Front army (this so-called militarization a micro-version of the historical professionalization of armies in the nineteenth century), the Republican leadership moved quickly to discourage women from functioning at the front lines as soldiers—notably, not so much for their own comfort or safety, but that of the male soldiers: “Republican soldiers were uncomfortable with the ''miliciana''. For the most part, men expected ''milicianas'' to do kitchen and laundry duties and to act as nurses.”{{sfn|Coleman|1999|p=49}} One International Brigade soldier, for example, was “infuriated” by a women’s battalion that was fighting before the Segovia Bridge, for “women at the battle seemed to him the final degradation of the Republican side.”{{sfn|Thomas|1961|p=322, n.1}} Because such responses testified to male embarrassment and threatened the destruction of male morale, Republican officials launched a propaganda campaign whose slogan was “Men to the front / Women to the home front.”{{sfn|Coleman|1999|p=49}}

The Republican propaganda effort had a harsher side as well, the ''milicianas'' soon publicly redefined as prostitutes who endangered the army by transmitting sexual diseases. Allen Guttmann notes that the contemporary British and American publics were “fascinated by the females who fought {{pg|378|379}} with the Spanish militia in the early days of the war,”{{sfn|Guttman|1962|p=11}} and he notes the pornographic combination of sex and violence in the overheated press descriptions of the ''milicianas'' as “Red Amazons, many of them actually stripped to the waist, carrying modern rifles, and with blood in their eye,” and as “supple-hipped Carmens of the Revolution, [who] for want of roses, toss bombs as they whirl.”{{sfn|Guttman|1962|p=11-12}} Hemingway offers a variation on this perspective in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'': “The twenty-three-year-old mistress [of the Republican officer] was having a baby, as were nearly all the other girls who had started out as ''milicianas'' in the July of the year before.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=399}}

After a Republican decree was issued that forbade women from fighting at the front, the “''miliciana'' icon” reappeared, now a “symbol of Republican resistance” rather than a celebration of military heroines, which was used “to inspire men to serve their patriotic duty.”{{sfn|Coleman|1999|p=50}} The balance between the female home front and the male war front was thus reestablished, at least as a useful fiction.

But in point of fact, the “total war” strategy that Nazi Germany was practicing in Spain meant that besieged Madrid (and later Barcelona, as well as the infamous Guernica and other less famous towns) was itself a war front where women died daily without the opportunity to fight for the Cause or even to defend themselves. Martha Gellhorn observes in ''The Face of War'', a collection of her war correspondence, that “what was new and prophetic about the war in Spain was the life of the civilians, who stayed at home and had war brought to them The people of the Republic of Spain were the first to suffer the relentless totality of modern war.” {{sfn|Gellhorn|1986|p=22}} Gellhorn describes her arrival in Madrid as follows: “I had not felt as if I were at a war until now. [The] whole city was a battlefield.”{{sfn|Gellhorn|1986|p=20-21}} Marion Merriman describes the combination of terror and frustration engendered by her own trip to Madrid: “In the trenches I had been nervous but not afraid. That was war. In the city I felt defenseless, trapped. In the city the bombing was a deep personal affront, with no reprisals except a soul-shaking hatred There was no way to fight back.”{{sfn|Merriman|1986|p=139}} Gellhorn similarly describes “this helpless war in the city,” where women cannot fight back but can only scatter for cover “professionally, like soldiers.”{{sfn|Gellhorn|1986|p=32, 43}}

Though the ''milicianas'' were banned from the battle front, ''guerrillerinas'' continued to work behind the fascist lines, as Maria Teresa Toral describes in her historical account, providing at great personal risk “aid to the {{pg|379|380}} wounded, to the hungry, to the sick guerrilla, who had descended from the sierra to the village.”{{sfn|Toral|1987|p=308}} In ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', Hemingway creates an unforgettable portrait of a ''guerrillerina'' in the sympathetic and psychologically complex character of Pilar. A ''miliciana'' like many other women at the start of the war, she participated in her lover Pablo’s takeover of their village for the Republicans. When the fascists retook the village, she fled into the mountains as the only female member of Pablo’s guerrilla band, not providing food and nursing care to guerrillas who had descended to the village, as Toral describes, but participating in sabotage activities like Robert Jordan’s blowing of the bridge. Though General Golz had noted that “the more irregular the service, the more irregular the life,”{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=8}} Pilar is a most irregular figure indeed. She announces, “Here I command” as she accepts “the allegiance. . . given [by the guerrillas]” once they lose confidence in the increasingly unstable Pablo.{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=53, 55}} She is admired as a model of courage by Robert Jordan: “You’re shaking, like a Goddamn woman. What the hell is the matter with you? . . . I’ll bet that Goddamn woman up above isn’t shaking. That Pilar.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=437}}

An admirable figure, Pilar is constructed by Hemingway as simultaneously revolutionary and conventional in her military role. While her aberrance draws the most attention, it is her conventionalism that is ultimately most telling. Certainly her physical presence is unusual. She is massive, ugly, even masculine in appearance (in this regard reminiscent of the female soldiers who have historically disguised themselves as men), and she sexually admires both Robert and Maria. Her Gypsy blood is invoked throughout the novel as an explanation of her sexual power and her supernatural ability to read the future and smell death. Having been the lover of three matadors, among more casual liaisons, before becoming Pablo’s woman, she has “the heart of a whore,” according to Pablo.{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=53}} When she describes her years of traveling with the matadors, she represents herself as a camp-follower of sorts, typically describing the women present as “gypsies and whores of great category.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=185}}

Pilar’s status as guerrilla leader is unusual not only in terms of history but also Hemingway’s canon. But she supplants Pablo only after Robert Jordan arrives, serving largely as symbolic leader while Jordan acts as operational leader. When Pablo returns after having deserted and sabotaged the band, Pilar largely cedes her authority to him, sympathizing with his need to appear as leader before the men he has newly recruited to help blow the {{pg|380|381}} bridge. So by the end of the novel, Pilar willingly shares with Pablo the role of symbolic leader and Jordan continues as operational leader until Pablo takes charge of the band’s escape.

Provocatively, Pilar’s combat activities are never dramatized in the novel, despite her putative role as guerrilla leader. For example, though she identifies herself as an active participant in the initial Republican takeover of her town, thereby sharing moral responsibility for its excesses, her description reveals her to have functioned largely as an observer. She watches Pablo execute the four ''guardia civiles''. She stands in the gauntlet through which fascists run to their death though she never wields a flail. She leaves the gauntlet to watch from a bench after becoming sickened by the action. She does not enter the bullring where the remaining fascists are imprisoned, instead witnessing their execution while standing on a chair. Even then she misses the final horrific events because the chair breaks. Pilar sums up her experience by unconscious reference to her role as witness rather than participant: “That was the end of the killing of the fascists in our town and I was glad I did not ''see'' more of it” (emphasis mine).{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=126}}

As a member of the guerrilla band, she participates in the dynamiting of a train, but the only action of Pilar that is actually represented involves her rescue of Maria, who is being transported to prison.<ref group=Notes> See Prago and Toral for discussions of conditions in women’s prisons. Prago notes that “in addition to the sufferings common to all political prisoners, women were subjected to unique humiliations and tortures, [including] the violations of the body by ‘macho’ guards.”</ref>{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=300}} Pilar insists that the guerrillas carry Maria away, beating them when they want to drop her during the dangerous retreat, and also carrying Maria herself. Even during Jordan’s military action, when Pilar directs her own small band above the bridge, separate from Pablo and his small band below the bridge, she is never represented in actual battle (even though gunfire is reported from her position), in contrast to the male characters whom we actually see shooting at the enemy—Robert, Anselmo, Rafael, even Pablo shooting ineffectually at a tank. In short, we never see Pilar in the act of shooting a gun, only holding a gun, carrying a gun, or reloading guns for the men. Instead, Pilar is almost always represented performing domestic activities—cooking, cleaning, sewing. When Pilar declares herself leader, Pablo grudgingly cedes his position while simultaneously undermining her power by commanding her to perform her domestic duty: “‘All right. You command,’ he said. ‘And if you want he [Jordan] can command too.’ . . . He paused. ‘That you should command and that you should like it. Now if you are a woman as well as a commander, that we should have something to eat’.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=56-57}}

In representing Pilar in a military role, whether as ''miliciana'' or ''guerrille-'' {{pg|381|382}} ''rina'', Hemingway clearly presents her as sympathetic and admirable, yet he also restricts his representation of her actions to the domestic sphere, ignoring dramatically her military actions as though they were unthinkable or inappropriate—indeed, not to be witnessed. Moreover, insofar as Pilar is represented as a woman comfortable at the battle front, she is represented as a whore—sexually knowledgeable, widely experienced, at ease describing herself in the company of prostitutes, indeed at ease hearing herself described in rough language by the male guerrillas and using such language herself. She is located in binary opposition to Maria, the virgin raped by Nationalist soldiers, who is simultaneously part of and apart from the guerrilla band.

Tellingly, Pilar wants to send Maria, whom she has nursed back to sanity, to a “home” {{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=32, 70}}—that is, to the home front. Robert Jordan first promises to send her to a home for war orphans that also provides shelter for female war victims, but when he falls in love with her, he determines instead to locate a home in Madrid and later Montana for her to inhabit as his wife. Agustin tells Jordan that “Pilar has kept her away from all as fiercely as though she were in a convent of Carmelites,” carefully explaining, “Because she sleeps with thee she is no whore. You do not understand how such a girl would be if there had been no revolution. She is not as we are.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=290-291}}

In one sense, Hemingway presents in Pilar a revolutionary portrait of a woman active as a soldier at the front, indeed behind enemy lines. Yet in another sense he invokes the familiar stereotype of the female at the battle front as whore (indeed, whore with a heart of gold), while invoking in his portrait of Maria the other familiar stereotype of rape victim. These two women in the otherwise male guerrilla band thus represent the only two historically visible roles for women at war. Moreover, even Pilar is restricted dramatically to the domestic sphere, as Maria always is (to the degree that is possible given the constraints of her environment). Paradoxically, Hemingway participates by these strategies in the historical erasure of women other than the whore and the rape victim from the war front, despite his seemingly revolutionary portrait of Pilar as guerrilla leader.<ref group=Notes> See Weitz for a brilliant discussion of the often overlooked military roles that women in Occupied France played, including as guerrillas. Weitz candidly discusses not only their contributions but also the difficulties they encountered; for example, they were often “assigned traditional feminine support roles, for the customary view was that ‘War is a man’s affair’.”</ref>{{sfn|Weitz|1995|p=147}}

But this ongoing historical erasure was countered, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, by the emergence of new professional roles for women at war. The New Woman was first incarnated on the battlefield as the female war nurse.<ref group=Notes> See Reeves for an overview of the role female nurses have played in American wars from the Revolution to the Persian Gulf War. For a discussion of their role in the American Civil War, see Garrison, Maher, Oates, Pryor, and Wormeley; in World War I, see Gavin 43–76; and as camp followers in the American Revolution, see Mayer 17, 142–43, and 219–23. </ref> This new development was marked in England by the Crimean {{pg|382|383}} War (1853–56) and in the United States by the American Civil War (1861–1865). In part, this new female identity developed in response to the actions of men who were themselves creating a new male identity, that of the war correspondent. William Howard Russell of the ''London Times'' is most often cited as the first war correspondent, though other challengers inevitably exist. It was the reporting of Russell and several others, for example Edwin Lawrence Godkin and especially Thomas Chenery, that roused the English public to outrage over the despicable conditions of the British army in the Crimea, especially regarding medical care.<ref group=Notes> This new male identity was initially suspect, the military deriding war correspondents as camp followers. For a discussion of the vexed question of the identity of the first war correspondent, see Mathews 31–78. For a description of the role of the Crimean war correspondents, their treatment by the military, and their role in the introduction of female nurses to the war theater, see Knightley 6–17. For a discussion of William Howard Russell’s actions in the Crimea, see Bullard 31–48. </ref> Florence Nightingale responded to the request for nursing aid (female nurses from France were already on scene), and her “aristocratic background” and “social and political connections” enabled her to overcome the prejudice against sending female nurses to the field.{{sfn|Garrison|1999|p=12}} But the nurses nonetheless suffered under public charges of immodesty and worse—that is, sexual promiscuity and prostitution—because they breached the boundary between home front and war front. They left the private for the public sphere, even though they did so while practicing the traditionally female actions of nurturing and caretaking, often fulfilling specifically domestic functions such as cooking and cleaning. In this regard, Hemingway’s Pilar is ironically like them.

Nightingale and her party of thirty-eight women constituted “an historic deputation which established a precedent for women determined to serve as nurses in military hospitals, and became the model for respectable female Sanitarians [members of the US Sanitary Commission, a volunteer organization established during the American Civil War] as they entered a male environment previously forbidden to them.”{{sfn|Garrison|1999|p=13}} In fact, the precedent was class-inflected, concerning middle- and upper-class women, since female camp-followers had long functioned as nurses in earlier wars, though their actions went unremarked.{{sfn|Mayer|1996|p=219-223}}

Like the female war nurses of the Crimea, those led by Dorothea Dix in the American Civil War largely remained behind the lines, though more often near the battle front. Katherine Prescott Wormely wrote of her experiences, “I see the worst, short of the actual battle-field, that there is to see.”{{sfn|Wormeley|1998|p=131}} Clara Barton responded yet more radically, providing independent nursing and relief services on the battle front itself. The middle- or upper- class status of these “ladies” rendered their wartime actions surprising on the one hand (why weren’t they satisfied rolling bandages in ladies’ aid societies?) yet also protected them to some degree from sexual gossip. As a {{pg|383|384}} mark of over-compensation, they were apostrophized as saints and angels, Nightingale known as “The Angel of the Crimea” and “The Lady with the Lamp,” and Barton as “The Angel of the Battlefield.” They were also apostrophized more domestically as mothers and sisters, which was especially appropriate for the many Roman Catholic nuns who served as nurses in the American Civil War.<ref group=Notes> See Maher for a discussion of the role of Roman Catholic nuns as nurses in the American Civil War. </ref> Their vows of chastity and obedience rendered them particularly appealing to male authorities, notably doctors; female doctors were forbidden from serving—a situation that also obtained in World War I, though many female doctors found their way around American Expeditionary Force regulations by attaching themselves to volunteer organizations.<ref group=Notes> See Hawks for a first-hand account of a female doctor in the American Civil War. For a discussion of the role of female doctors in World War I, see Gavin 157–78.</ref>

Nightingale, Dix, and Barton are the direct ancestors of later female war nurses, among whom are the VADs (that is, the Voluntary Aid Detachment, a British service auxiliary) like Hemingway’s Lady Brett Ashley in ''The Sun Also Rises'' and Catherine Barkley in ''A Farewell to Arms'', and also like American Red Cross nurse Agnes von Kurowsky. To combat the potentially salacious reputation of female war nurses, they labored under strict rules of appearance and behavior. Dix required her nurses to be middle-aged and “plain to the point of ugliness.”{{sfn|Garrison|1999|p=18}} American Red Cross nurses serving in World War I were “forbidden to carry on serious romances, even to be alone with a gentleman caller.”{{sfn|Villard and Nagel|1989|p=239}}

Hemingway reflects these rules in ''A Farewell to Arms'' when Catherine de- scribes the restrictions on the nurses’ behavior at the hospital in Gorizia, only a mile from the front: “The Italians didn’t want women so near the front. So we’re all on very special behavior. We don’t go out.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969|p=25}} Though the rules are more relaxed at the American Red Cross Hospital in Milan, Frederic notes that “they would not let us go out together when I was off crutches because it was unseemly for a nurse to be seen unchaperoned with a patient who did not look as though he needed attendance.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1969|p=117-118}} Increased personal freedom resulted inevitably, however, in increased sexual freedom, as represented in the actions of Catherine Barkley and Brett Ashley; indeed, Clara Barton’s intimate relationship with the married Colonel John Elwell, quartermaster for the Department of the South, is illustrative in this regard.<ref group=Notes>For discussions of the relationship between Clara Barton and John Elwell, see Oates 148–58 and Pryor 112–17.</ref> Of course, the same point about increased sexual freedom might be made about male soldiers. But only the female nurses labored under moral opprobrium, whether external or introjected, as Hemingway represents. It is no accident that the name of the sexually promiscuous Brett rhymes with that {{pg|384|385}} of the prostitute Georgette, nor that Jake Barnes confuses their voices. Similarly, Catherine Barkley voices the internal anxiety surrounding the new female role of wartime nurse when she says, “I never felt like a whore before”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969|p=152}} to her patient-lover. Of course, he is more truly her impatient lover, whose return to the battle front results in her agreeing to a sexual encounter as atonement for her sexual refusal of her now-dead soldier-fiancé.

The type of position that Hemingway held with the American Red Cross as ambulance driver and canteen operator would be appropriated by women once America fully entered World War I. His volunteer service soon became an unwitting escape from the combatant role then urged upon healthy young American men; women were now encouraged to take on the non-combatant roles supervised by volunteer organizations like the Red Cross and YMCA, whose famous “doughnut dollies” operated canteens for the American doughboys fighting the war. By the end of the war, Hemingway’s Red Cross activities would have allied him more with the role of American women than men—hence, perhaps, his public exaggerations of his role on the Italian front and supposedly in the Italian army.

During the early twentieth century, another female figure publicly emerged at the battle front, one yet more troubling in terms of the prevailing paradigm since her activities could not be redefined as appropriately female because domestic: the female war correspondent. The first American woman to win accreditation from the War Department as an official war correspondent was Peggy Hull on 17 September 1918, but she was restricted from access to the battlefields of World War I (as were the few free-lance female correspondents); when the male correspondents realized the popularity of Hull’s stories about “the lives of the common soldier” away from battle, they “demanded her removal”{{sfn|Sorel|1999|p=xviii}} and she was “forced to spend the rest of the war in Paris.”{{sfn|Knightley|1975|p=127}} Some eighteen years later, the women who covered the Spanish Civil War were still small in number but free of official regulations governing their behavior. Outsiders in Spain creating a new professional role, they were little regulated as to dress or behavior (as were the later female correspondents of World War II, who were required to wear uniforms and forbidden access to the front lines,<ref group=Notes> Gellhorn wrote in 1944 “a formal letter of protest to the military authorities about the ‘curiously condescending’ treatment of women war correspondents which, she said, was as ridiculous as it was undignified, and was preventing professional woman [sic] reporters, with many years’ experience, from carrying out their responsibilities to their editors and to ‘millions of people in America who are desperately in need of seeing, but cannot see for themselves’” (Moorehead, ''Gellhorn'' 221). She wrote more pithily to a friend that “female journalists were now seen as lepers” (quoted by Moorehead, ''Gellhorn'' 221).</ref> though individual resourcefulness frequently overcame this official restriction). These female correspondents ranged as freely as their inclinations, abilities, and contacts enabled.

It would seem that ''The Fifth Column''’s Dorothy Bridges is a war corre- {{pg|385|386}} spondent—how else to explain her residence in Madrid’s Hotel Florida, the presence of a large military map and war poster and typewriter in her room, and her announcement late in the play that she has “sent away three articles?”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969|p=82}} But her lover Robert Preston, himself a war correspondent, calls her “a bored Vassar bitch”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969|p=4}}—a change from the 1937 Madrid typescript where she is identified with Martha Gellhorn’s own Bryn Mawr. Rather than protesting, Dorothy agrees that she doesn’t “understand anything that is happening here.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969|p=5}} Dorothy’s stereotypical characterization as a dumb blonde renders her presumed identity problematic. For example, Philip confusedly shouts, “Aren’t you a lady war correspondent or something? Get out of here and go write an article. This [the assassination of a Loyalist soldier in Philip’s room] is none of your business.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969|p=33}} Her role as war correspondent cannot stand alone, but must be delimited by the modifier “lady”—or better yet relegated to the unnameable “or something.” But if the assassination of a soldier is not the business of a “lady” war correspondent, then what is? Indeed, what is the appropriate material for the article Philip directs her to write while simultaneously identifying what is off limits to her? In this telling scene, Philip places Dorothy in an untenable position because her identity and her subject matter remain unsayable. She fits into neither of the historically accepted categories of women at the battle front, prostitute or rape victim, nor into that of the more recently accepted category of nurse. But there she is nonetheless, at the war front instead of the home front, practicing it would seem the male profession of war correspondent.

As soon as Philip falls in love with Dorothy, a romance that she boldly initiates, he demands that she “move out of this hotel and . . . go back to America.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969|p=31}} But Dorothy refuses to leave, calling him an “impudent, impertinent man.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969|p=31}} An independent woman, she need not comply with his demand that she return to the home front. That is, after all, the realm of wives, as evidenced by Preston’s wife, about whom he is “always going on,” according to Dorothy, who adds, “Let him go back to his wife and children if he’s so excited about them. I’ll bet he won’t.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969|p=25}}

Though Dorothy commits herself to remaining near the battle front, she has simultaneously worked to make her own room homey, and she makes over Philip’s adjoining room as well. In the context of the play, Dorothy’s redecoration of Philip’s room signals her desire to domesticate him, to lure him away from the war to the home front. Certainly that is how Philip interprets it. His ambivalence about this domestication is revealed by his dis- {{pg|386|387}} comfort in the redecorated room and by his conflicted responses to Dorothy. In the midst of the war, she has created a home front of sorts, a conflation that confuses Philip. He attempts to reestablish the division by associating nighttime with the home front and daytime with the war front, declaring during the night not only his love but more tellingly his desire to marry her, and repudiating these declarations during the day. Dorothy reacts to both nighttime and daytime pronouncements with equanimity, enjoying Philip’s nighttime fantasies which she also shares, yet recognizing them as such. When Philip rejects her at the end of the play, he does so because he fears he will be unable to withstand the temptation she represents to abandon the war front for the home front, a concern that his German comrade Max reinforces. But Philip’s rejection of Dorothy, however painful, does not result in her departure from Madrid.<ref group=Notes> In Benjamin Glazer’s adaptation of the play for production, the much-revised character of Dorothy ''does'' leave Madrid, hoping but not expecting Philip to follow her. Glazer’s Dorothy is more conventional than Hemingway’s, an attempt to make her more sympathetic to the audience. Notably, she is only pretending to be a war correspondent while she is actually searching for her lost brother who has joined the Lincoln Brigade. In Glazer’s adaptation she is, bizarrely, raped by Philip. She is thereby transformed from Hemingway’s female war correspondent into the conventional female rape victim of war. Despite the rape, Glazer’s Dorothy falls in love with Philip, a response that the audience is expected to approve. For a discussion of Glazer’s version as compared to Hemingway’s, see Fellner 5–30.</ref> Just as Philip has volunteered for the duration, so too, it would seem, has Dorothy. But she is better able to assimilate fantasy and reality, nighttime and daytime, home front and war front, into a complex whole. For Dorothy, the conversations about other places are “just ''playing'',”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969|p=62}} a kind of bedtime story ritual. Realist to his romantic, she accepts the constraints placed on them by their mutual presence at the war: “But can’t we just go on now, as long as we have each other, I mean if we aren’t going to always keep on, and be nice and enjoy what we have and not be bitter?”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969|p=63}}

In creating a home front at the war front, Dorothy does not split but compounds her loyalties, voluntarily remaining at home in war-torn Madrid. Gellhorn asserts in her 1959 Introduction to The Face of War: “War was our condition and our history, the place we had to live in.”{{sfn|Gelhorn|1978|p=viii}} In making the war front their home, women were thus making themselves at home in the public sphere of the world at large. In “The War in Spain” section of ''The Face of War'', Gellhorn specifies: “Thanks to ''Collier''’s I had the chance to see the life of my time, which was war For eight years, I could go where I
wanted, when I wanted, and write what I saw.”{{sfn|Gelhorn|1978|p=22}} In a 1945 ''Collier''’s article describing the end of World War II in Europe, “You’re on Your Way Home,” Gellhorn writes that “the war, the hated and perilous and mad, had been home for a long time too; everyone had learned how to live in it, everyone had something to do, something that looked necessary, and now we were back in this beautiful big safe place called home and what would become of us?”{{sfn|Sorel(qtd.)|1999|p=389}}

For women at the war front, now at home in the public sphere, what in {{pg|387|388}} fact was there to return to, since the home front was publicly defined by the presence of a waiting wife? Yet such a return was necessary if the balance between the male public sphere and the female private sphere was to be reestablished. Margaret Mead addressed this male anxiety, complaining about the “continuous harping on the theme: ‘Will the women be willing to return to the home?’’’ and noting the male self-interest involved in this particular skirmish between the sexes: “[This question was] repeated over and over again. . . by those to whose interest it will be to discharge women workers . . . as soon as the war is over.”{{sfn|Gilbert and Gubar(qtd.)|1988-1994|p=3:214}} The female war correspondent at the battle front was an extreme example of the millions of women who had entered the public sphere of war work, if most often on the home front.

Dorothy Bridges’ identity as female war correspondent is undermined not only by her characterization but by the very structure of the play, which rigidly confines her to the domestic sphere—a strategy that Hemingway later employed more subtly in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls''. Act One, where Dorothy is prominent, has three scenes, all set at the Hotel Florida. Act Two, where Dorothy is less prominent, has only one scene set at the Hotel Florida; the other two scenes are set at Seguridad headquarters, where two Loyalist soldiers are being interrogated for suspected treason, and at Chicote’s Bar, the hangout for International Brigade soldiers, prostitutes, and war correspondents. Act Three, where Dorothy is again less prominent, has two scenes set at the Hotel Florida; the other two scenes are set at Seguridad headquarters, and at a Republican artillery observation post that Philip and Max infiltrate. The active Philip’s scenes include not only those in his and Dorothy’s rooms at the Hotel Florida, but also those at Seguridad Headquarters, Chicote’s Bar, and the Republican observation post. In contrast, Dorothy is never presented outside of the Hotel Florida, almost always in her own room (only once entering Philip’s room). Indeed, she is most frequently seen in bed, for example “sleeping soundly” through Philip’s extended conversation with the hotel manager,{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=16}} “go[ing] back to sleep for just a little while longer” after waking for breakfast and conversation,{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=26}} pushed by Philip “toward the bed” in a protective gesture when the Loyalist soldier is shot in Philip’s room,{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=33}} eating breakfast in bed, reading in bed, lying in bed with Philip while she wears her new silver fox cape,<ref group=Notes> Dorothy’s silver fox cape is a fictionalized version of Gellhorn’s own. Reynolds asserts that this cape was “a gift [to Gellhorn] from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,”(270) but he provides no note for his source. Lincoln Brigade veterans Milton Wolff (the Brigade’s last commander) and Mo Fishman independently told me in telephone interviews in May 2001 that they considered this claim unlikely given the extremely low pay of the Brigade soldiers, most of which was donated to build orphanages, and the relative infrequency of contact with Gellhorn and her circle. Moorehead notes that in Gellhorn’s first few weeks in Spain, she “went shopping with [fellow war correspondent] Virginia Cowles, . . . priced silver foxes and got desperately greedy wanting them” (''Gellhorn'' 119–20). In The Fifth Column, Hemingway represents Dorothy’s fur as the morally dubious Black Market purchase of a self-centered woman, and in the context of the play he indicts Gellhorn as well. However, the reality is more complicated. Moorehead notes that “often, [Hemingway and Gellhorn] walked together around Madrid, buying silver and jewelry ‘like specula- tors’” (''Gellhorn ''136), and Kert notes that Hemingway’s sidekick Sidney Franklin not only scrounged food for Hemingway but also “found bargains in furs and perfumes” (297). Hemingway must have found Gellhorn’s fur acceptable, indeed attractive, since she wore it when ac- companying him in 1937 to the Second Congress of American Writers, where he previewed The Spanish Earth, showing an excerpt from it, and gave his famous speech, “Fascism is a Lie”; Gellhorn gave a speech the following day. In a 1937 radio broadcast from Madrid to the United States, Gellhorn “stressed for her radio listeners the composure of Madrid’s population,” noting the irony that “while various staples were scarce, it was possible to purchase ‘furs, fine silk stockings, and beautiful clothes, French perfume, victrolas, wrist watches, and every imaginable luxury’” (Rollyson 115). In order to make such broadcasts, she was required to “dash across the road to the Telefonica, where Madrid’s only radio studio was based, at the moment of peak evening shelling” (Moorehead, ''Gellhorn'' 139). But despite her radio broadcasts and her journalism, she upbraided herself during this same period, “fretting about her own idleness, her visits to the dressmaker and furrier ‘Stupid day, stupid woman. I am wasting everything’” (Moorehead, ''Gellhorn'' 138)
</ref> “asleep in bed” when Philip and Max discuss the initial failure of their counterespionage plan.{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=55}} Jeffrey Meyers de- {{pg|388|389}} scribes her with understandable hyperbole as “virtually narcoleptic” (318). The bed is Dorothy’s locus classicus, both defining and containing her.

In the second scene of the play, Dorothy easily switches her sexual loyalties from Preston to Philip, thereby introducing the motifs of loyalty and betrayal that suffuse the play. These motifs are appropriate given the complex politics of the Spanish Civil War, but also the complicated personal situation of Hemingway, who was emotionally torn between his wife and his lover. In an unlikely judgment, the prostitute Anita criticizes Dorothy for “tak[ing] a man just like you pick a flowers [sic]” (43). Dorothy casually rejects Preston, who makes bad puns and takes cover during shelling, in favor of Philip, who does not take cover but otherwise seems Preston’s inferior. A war correspondent who spends his time drinking and carousing rather than writing, he is certainly “''livel''[''y'']” (5), as Dorothy notes with approval, but not productive. On the other hand, she scorns Preston’s productivity since “he never goes to the front . . . [but] just writes about it” (20)—a scruple that suggests her own ethics concerning war correspondence. Of course, Dorothy does not know that Philip is deadly serious, his carousing a cover for counterespionage activities at which he is extraordinarily successful. In company with Max, he overcomes a Nationalist command post, kills multiple soldiers, captures a general and a political leader, and gains information that ultimately results in the capture of three hundred Fifth Columnists in Madrid. Petra the hotel maid explains that the Fifth Column is “the people who fight us from inside the city” (46). This term gained its historical currency from Nationalist General Mola who, “when asked by a group of foreign journalists which of his four columns he expected would take Madrid . .. replied, in words repeated incessantly during the . . . years of treachery and espionage since that time, that it would be that ‘Fifth Column’ of secret Nationalist supporters within the city” (Thomas 317)—a term that Hemingway’s play popularized. General Mola’s words unleashed in Madrid and elsewhere a charged atmosphere of mistrust and paranoia, which promoted a civil war within the civil war, given the uneasy coalition of political parties that eventually composed the Republic’s Popular Front.

That Philip, the seeming playboy-correspondent, is involved in something secret and serious is realized even by the idiot hotel manager, a point emphasized not in the 1937 Madrid typescript but in Hemingway’s 1938 Key West revision of the play. But dim Dorothy, who lives with Philip in adjoining rooms at the Hotel Florida, never suspects his other life, the resulting {{pg|389|390}} dramatic irony redounding always to Philip’s credit. Philip’s apologia for loving Dorothy sounds instead like an indictment: “Granted she’s lazy and spoiled, and rather stupid, and enormously on the make. Still she’s very beautiful, very friendly, and very charming and rather innocent—and quite brave” (44). While Dorothy is here damned by faint praise, Philip’s description calls his own values into question. Philip loves her because of her superficial qualities, only his appreciation of her bravery hinting at something deeper. In this sense, they are well matched, each largely drawn to the other because of physical size and sexual appeal. Dorothy is referred to as “that great big blonde” (41), and she is attracted by Philip’s sexual prowess,<ref group=Notes>Hemingway here engages in an ego-bolstering move, since Gellhorn “did not find [Hemingway] physically attractive” and sex with Hemingway “was never very good” (Moorehead, ''Gellhorn'' 114, 135). Moorehead notes that Gellhorn “told a friend [in a 1950 letter], [that] all through the months in Spain she went to bed with Hemingway ‘as little as she could manage’: My ‘whole memory of sex with Ernest is the invention of excuses and failing that, the hope it would soon be over’” (''Gellhorn'' 135–36). </ref> noting that “he made me happier than anyone has ever made me” (47). When he throws her over, asserting, “You’re uneducated, you’re useless, you’re a fool and you’re lazy,” she responds, “Maybe the others. But I’m not useless” (83). She here indirectly refers to her sexual utility, which Philip identifies as “a commodity you shouldn’t pay too high a price for” (83). Hurt and angry, Dorothy retaliates by asking Philip, “Did it ever occur to you that you’re a commodity, too? A commodity one shouldn’t pay too high a price for” (84). Philip is amused, never having had to think of himself as a sexual object, indeed a whore (“commodity” an economic term saturated with Marxist significance). But Dorothy does not have the luxury of Philip’s laughter. She is psychologically vulnerable to the charge, for “women who push the boundaries of gender are censured for such behaviors” in gender- specific ways (Herbert 2). Just as the ''milicianas'' were figured forth as whores to discourage their presence at the front lines and to render them a familiar female type if they stayed, so too is Dorothy when she will neither leave the war front for the home front nor deny the interrelationship of war front and home front that she herself has created and represents.

The correlation between Dorothy and the whore would thus seem to be historically inevitable, a correlation that develops from the play’s very first short scene, which exists solely to provide a gloss on the play. A whore sees the sign on the door to Dorothy’s room: “Working. Do Not Disturb” (3). When she asks her soldier-customer to read it to her, he responds with contempt: “So that’s what I’d draw. A literary one. The hell with it” (3). She responds—to the sign? to his contempt?—with “a dry high, hard laugh,” asserting, “I’ll get me a sign like that too” (3). The stage goes dark and the scene ends, these allegorical characters disappearing forever, having provided their implicit commentary on all that follows. {{pg|390|391}}

In the next scene Anita—“a Moorish tart” as the stage directions initially refer to her rather than by name—is brought by Philip to Dorothy’s room, where Anita objects to the sign because “all the time working, isn’t fair” (10). She insists that Dorothy give her the sign as a means of forestalling unfair competition. Anita is, in fact, in competition with Dorothy for Philip’s affections and his sexual favors. At one level, the play presents a choice between Dorothy and Anita. And the final scene of the play presents the high-minded Philip, having rejected Dorothy, initiating a sexual encounter with Anita. Sexuality without strings is preferable to the entanglements of love and marriage when one has committed oneself to fighting for the Cause, although this loveless encounter seems like torture to Max, who responds to it exactly as he does to an interrogation scene earlier (76, 85). In “Night Before Battle,” one of the Spanish Civil War stories that Hemingway blocked out while revising ''The Fifth Column'' in Key West, the only difference between “two American girls at the Florida [who are] newspaper correspondents” and two prostitutes is that a soldier must talk to the female war correspondents before sex, while he may simply pay the prostitutes for their sexual services (118). Max’s confused articulation of Dorothy Bridges’ name—“Britches?” (64)—reinforces her redefined identity as sexual object, indeed as whore.

In both characterization and structure, then, the play works against the recognition of Dorothy as a serious woman, a competent journalist, a war correspondent. Malcolm Cowley asserted in his review of the play that “if Philip hadn’t left her for the Spanish people, he might have traded her for a flask of Chanel No. 5 and still have had the best of the bargain”(qtd. in Trogdon 213), thereby wittily suggesting her triviality, decorative quality, and stereotypical femininity.

But just as Dorothy does not catch on to Philip’s secret life, perhaps neither does Philip catch on to Dorothy’s. Though she is never represented as writing, only once sitting down at her typewriter and then only for a moment (as though to emphasize her disengagement from it), she somehow writes three articles during the play’s time period, not merely the one article whose potential completion Preston doubts, saying, “You never do work anyway” (10). Philip shares this judgment, labeling her “lazy” (83). In the final scene of the play she is presented in the stage directions as returning “home” (81) to her room at the Hotel Florida—but from where? Her activ- {{pg|391|392}} ities outside the confines of her room, if occasionally referenced, are never dramatized like Philip’s.

Yet Dorothy clearly goes out on her own in besieged Madrid when no one (neither the playwright, nor the other characters, nor the audience) is “watching,” and her criticism of Preston for writing articles without visiting the battle front suggests one of her probable destinations. She tells Philip at one point, “You know I’m not as silly as I sound, or I wouldn’t be here”(57)— a claim that Philip himself could have made yet to which he does not react. Just as his career requires him to act silly, so too perhaps does hers, for it cannot have been easy to be one of only a few female correspondents in the male realm of war. Indeed, Philip’s cynical comments and bored manner find their corollary in Dorothy’s Vassar idiom and equally bored manner. Just as Philip’s manner masks his deadly seriousness as a counterespionage agent, so may Dorothy’s manner mask her own seriousness as a war correspondent.<ref group=Notes>For perhaps the only other interpretation that takes Dorothy seriously, offering a subtextual reading, see Nakjavani. His argument differs from mine, however, insofar as he focuses narrowly on ideology and politics, associating Dorothy with ideology (a positive value in Nakjavani’s argument) and Max with politics (a negative value).</ref> Though she earlier claimed that she didn’t “understand anything that is happening here,” she follows up by commenting, “I understand a little bit about University City, but not too much. The Casa del Campo is a complete puzzle to me. And Usera—and Carabanchel. They’re dreadful”(5). She cites four critical locations, neighborhoods and suburbs of Madrid where the Nationalist enemy had been dug in since November 1936, sites of horrific battles between Republican militias (soon supported by the International Brigades) and the Nationalist Army that determined whether Madrid would stand or fall. Madrid suffered mightily, but La Pasionaria’s cry "No Pasarán”—“They shall not pass”—became the city’s watchword. For the rest of the war, the Nationalists maintained their positions on the outskirts of Madrid, shelling the city and inhibiting the movement of supplies, while Madrid held fast despite terrible punishment until the very end. It was a “City of Anguish” as Edwin Rolfe titled one of his Spanish Civil War poems. These battle sites were indeed “dreadful,” as Dorothy asserts in her understated idiom (and as Robert Jordan recollects in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', having fought at Usera and Carabanchel himself). And she keeps her promise to write “just as soon as [she] understand[s] things the least bit better” (10).

Employing understatement like Philip’s own, Dorothy later comments to Philip in passing, “I work when you’re not around,” a claim that Philip could also make (57). Yet Philip has a history on which to draw to enact his role successfully, whereas Dorothy must create a new role without history’s support, {{pg|392|393}} rendering her circumspect as she defines this identity. Nancy Sorel notes of the women war correspondents who reported World War II—“fewer than a hundred in all” (xili)—that “every women felt vulnerable in regard to her professional status,” whether because of “discriminatory treatment by generals,” “denigrating remarks from hostile male reporters,” or unwanted romantic or sexual advances (xiv). Dorothy disguises her vulnerability at enacting her new role as war correspondent just as Philip does at enacting his role as counterespionage agent. But Dorothy has no one to talk to about her secret life, while Philip has Max, to whom he confides his doubts and fears, and even the hotel manager, to whom he confides information in a code they both understand. As Pilar tells Robert Jordan in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', “Everyone needs to talk to someone. Now for every one there should be some one to whom one can speak frankly, for all the valor one could have one becomes very alone”(89). And secretly valorous Dorothy is in this regard far more alone than Philip.

In one sense, of course, Dorothy’s secret life is that of Martha Gellhorn. Accomplished journalist and author of two books, the novel ''What Mad Pursuit'' (1934) and the much-lauded fiction collection ''The Trouble I’ve Seen'' (1936), Gellhorn had considered covering the Spanish Civil War before she met Hemingway, who had come to a similar decision. His longtime marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer breaking down, he and Gellhorn quickly followed up on their initial attraction in Key West once they arrived separately in Spain in March 1937. Their mutual commitment to the Republican cause, her long-time admiration for him as a writer, her newfound appreciation for his talents as a war correspondent (including a tactical understanding of war and great personal courage), his ease at living in Spain, his willingness to teach an apt and adoring pupil—all combined with the intensity of war such that their love affair ignited almost immediately. During their four stays in Spain, Gellhorn often followed Hemingway about, whether in Madrid, to the front, or on longer battlefield trips around Spain. She actively participated with Hemingway and Joris Ivens in the filming of ''The Spanish Earth'', a propaganda film for which Hemingway wrote the script and which he ultimately narrated. Because of her personal friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt, Gellhorn was able to arrange for the film to be viewed by the Roosevelts at the White House, with her and Hemingway and Ivens in attendance to plead the cause of the Spanish Republic.

But Gellhorn also spent many days in Spain on her own, learning Span- {{pg|393|394}} ish, visiting hospitals, talking with the common people, traveling to other battlefields. She was smart enough to know that she did not know much about being a war correspondent, but she learned quickly under Hemingway’s apt tutelage (and that of fellow correspondents Herbert Matthews of the ''New York Times'' and Sefton Delmer of the ''Daily Express''). In July 1937 she sent off her first article, under Hemingway’s prodding encouragement. Collier’s published it as “Only the Shells Whine,” a title that Gellhorn changed to “High Explosive for Everyone” in ''The Face of War''.

Far from wanting Gellhorn to leave the dangerous arena of war, Hemingway wanted her to stay, for it was the locus of their love affair. Only after their affair was firmly established did he once briefly forbid her from accompanying him, telling her in Paris to wait there with the wife of war correspondent Vincent Sheean, since "Spain’s no place for women,” then promising to “phone to say whether ‘the women’ might come” (quoted by Wyden 450). Gellhorn did not wait for his approval to join him in Barcelona, thereby again demonstrating her independence.

Like Dorothy’s first lover Preston, Hemingway had a wife and children on the home front, and his coverage of the Spanish Civil War provided him with a reason to be away from his family as well as with an environment of danger and intensity where a shared cause subsumed any other differences, encouraging the pleasures of a sexual liaison without thoughts of consequences. Indeed, a wife and children seemed to preclude consequences. Hemingway demonstrates a degree of masculine self-awareness when he has Dorothy say, “Those wife-and-children men at war . . . just use them as sort of an opening wedge to get into bed with some one and then immediately afterwards they club you with them” (25).

Gellhorn most valued her comradeship with Hemingway as they worked together (thereby reversing the priorities of Dorothy and Philip, whose sexual relationship is primary and comradeship a farce). Gellhorn was an apt pupil, and Hemingway loved the role of teacher. His tutelage, born of hard experience, demonstrably influenced Gellhorn, who learned fast and with a gusto that delighted Hemingway, as did her courage.

Yet once Gellhorn and Hemingway were able to live together outside the war zone (even before his divorce was finalized), Hemingway resented Gellhorn’s continuing career as war correspondent because it resulted in what he viewed as her abandonment of him—for example, when she left him in 1939 at Sun Valley in order to cover the Russo-Finnish War. In effect, she thereby {{pg|394|395}} relegated him to the role of home-front wife. Having experienced that role long before during World War I, he must have feared being jilted again as Agnes had jilted him when he returned to the home front of Oak Park while she remained in Italy, and as he had recently jilted Pauline, who had begged to accompany him to Spain but whom he had insisted remain on the home front in Key West.

Hemingway hoped to keep Gellhorn “away from war, pestilence, carnage and adventure” (''Letters'' 511). Nevertheless, shortly after their 1941 marriage she persuaded him to accompany her as a fellow war correspondent to the Far East (thereby reversing the power-relationship that had obtained between them in Spain), where she was to report for ''Collier’s'' on the China-Japan War as well as the defense of Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies. Though Gellhorn tolerated the difficulties of this trip less well than did Hemingway, that did not quench her thirst for such assignments. While Hemingway remained at the Finca Vigía on the home front of Cuba, she traveled the Caribbean on assignment for ''Collier’s'' in 1942, investigating the impact of submarine warfare on the islands; the lack of action perhaps caused her to underestimate Hemingway’s own later submarine-hunting activities off Cuba and Bimini.<ref group=Notes>For Gellhorn’s description of her trip to the Far East with Hemingway, see her ''Travels'' 19–63; for her description of her Caribbean trip, see her ''Travels'' 64–108.</ref>

When she left Hemingway in Cuba for the European theater of World War II in 1943, she begged him repeatedly to accompany her or to join her there, as in this letter of 9 December 1943: “I so wish you would come. I think it’s so vital for you to see everything; it’s as if it wouldn’t be entirely seen if you didn’t” (''Letters'' 156). The insistent tone of her letters reveals her desperate desire to recapture their best time together—in Spain, at the Hotel Florida, both comrades, both dedicated to the same cause, both writing.

But Hemingway was comfortable at the Finca and satisfied with his sub-hunting adventures (which incorporated the counterespionage activities that he had invested in Philip Rawlings). He resented Gellhorn’s demands, partly because he was no longer her teacher, but more importantly because she was now his wife instead of his lover. He cabled her, “Are you a war correspondent or wife in my bed”(quoted by Moorehead, ''Gellhorn'' 212), thereby drawing an absolute boundary between the war front and home front, and announcing that he would no longer tolerate her conflation of the two. He desperately wanted her to return to the home front and to him, but after her repeated refusals he determined to go to the war front in 1944 in order to defeat her in the battle of the sexes their marriage had become. He wrote to {{pg|395|396}} her, “Will organize the house, close down boat, go to N.Y., eat shit, get a journalism job, which hate worse than Joyce would, and be over. Excuse bitterness”; in a letter shortly thereafter he labeled her “unscrupulous” and wrote, “Maybe will see you soon maybe not” (qtd. in Moorehead, ''Gellhorn'' 212). In his eyes she had betrayed him, and as he wrote in “Treachery in Aragon,” an article about the Spanish Civil War, “When one has become involved in a war there is only one thing to do: win it” (26). Thus he purposely did not travel with Gellhorn, instead flying to Europe while she was relegated to a twenty-day voyage on a dynamite-laden ship traveling through mined waters. World War II became a nightmare version of Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War dream.

In a matter of days, Hemingway met Mary Welsh, Martha’s opposite in appearance, social class, and temperament. Taking Mary’s attentions from fellow war correspondent and novelist Irwin Shaw in what must have been an ego-bolstering move, Hemingway almost immediately asked this female war correspondent to marry him, in yet another example of the repetition compulsion that structured so much of his life. And soon, despite serious doubts, Mary agreed, taking a leave of absence from her job that became permanent. Before the war had officially ended and while Martha was still covering it, Hemingway and Mary were together in Cuba. The only journalism that Mary ever wrote again concerned life with Hemingway on the home front.

Hemingway’s attitude toward the female war correspondent was complex, reflecting that of the culture at large with regard to women “at-home” in the public sphere. He knew a number of such New Women, among them Josephine Herbst (a longtime friend from 1920s Paris) and Virginia Cowles in the Spanish Civil War, and Helen Kirkpatrick and Lee Carson in World War II, along with Martha Gellhorn and Mary Welsh—women venturing into the heretofore male realm of war, venturing yet further into it than had the female nurses he had come to know during World War I. He admired their sexual independence and also their courage, since grace under pressure was an ideal appropriate for women as well as for men, and war provided the ultimate pressure-cooker in which grace could be measured. He married two female war correspondents.

Yet Hemingway came to resent the very qualities that had attracted him because he was fearful, not without reason, that these women would refuse to return permanently to the home front upon becoming his wife—an iden- {{pg|396|397}} tity to his mind that subsumed all others. When angry at Mary in later years, he called her a “camp-follower” (quoted by Kert 455), saying, “I haven’t fucked generals to get my information” (quoted by Whiting 20)—a sexually demeaning remark that redefined her war-front identity from war correspondent to whore while simultaneously signaling his uneasy sense of professional rivalry. In calling Mary “you goddamn smirking, useless female war correspondent” (quoted by Lynn 515), he indicted all female war correspondents because the adjective “female” is joined in this list by uniformly pejorative adjectives. And Hemingway’s indictment of Mary was an indictment of Martha Gellhorn, whose war correspondence he chose to criticize at one of their last meetings, knowing exactly how to hurt her. Indeed, it was an indictment of all those women whose positions at the home front had been compromised by their experiences at the war front, which were among the most exaggerated of the public-sphere activities in which modern women were involved. Such activities rendered them simultaneously more fascinating and more terrifyingly unpredictable to modern men.

Hemingway wrote a self-justifying letter to his adolescent son Patrick, explaining the breakdown of his marriage to Gellhorn while also preparing Patrick for his new relationship with Mary Welsh: “We want some straight work, not be alone and not have to go to war to see one’s wife and then have wife want to be in different war theatre in order that stories not compete. Going to get me somebody who wants to stick around with me and let me be the writer of the family” (''Letters'' 576). He wrote similarly to his eldest son John, “[I] would swap her for two non beautiful [sic] wives I might occasionally have the opportunity to go to bed with”(Moorehead, ''Gellhorn'' 228). While Hemingway had gone to war to see his lover quite willingly, the change in Gellhorn’s identity from lover to wife was a sea-change that Hemingway could not get past because, by definition, wives were for the home front. Husbands might go to war as an act of self-realization, but wives should not, as he made very sure Mary understood. In his 1950 novel ''Across the River and into the Trees'', he provides a thinly veiled attack on Martha that doubles as a warning to Mary: “You mean she went away, from ambition, when you only were away from duty,” Renata says to Colonel Cantwell about his former wife, adding, “You couldn’t have married a woman journalist that kept on being that” (212).

Martha Gellhorn came to recognize the dilemma that inevitably resulted when modern men were attracted to modern women for qualities that they {{pg|397|398}} would abjure in a wife, playing it for comedy in the 1945 play she and Virginia Cowles wrote, ''Love Goes to Press'' (originally titled ''Men Must Weep'' and then, with wonderful ambiguity, ''Take My Love Away''). The two female protagonists, Annabelle Jones (based on Gellhorn) and Jane Mason (based on Cowles), are successful war correspondents who report from the front lines of World War II, when “any decent woman would stay at home” according to Philip, the British Public Relations Officer and Jane’s love interest (10). Joe Rogers, war correspondent and Annabelle’s ex-husband, “says war’s no place for a woman” according to his new fiancée, actress Daphne Ruther- ford (14). She is entertaining the troops rather nearer to the front line than she had expected, and he promises to “bundle [her] up and send [her] straight off to America where it’s safe” (14).

While the male correspondents are satisfied to rewrite military communiques, Annabelle and Jane show remarkable ingenuity in finding ways to get to the front so as to report the action firsthand. However, their efforts are denigrated, Joe Rogers repeatedly complaining, to the widespread agreement of the other men, that they “run this lousy war on sex-appeal” (45, 49). As Sandra Spanier notes in her Afterword to the play:

<blockquote> The fact is, of course, that being female is a definite occupational handicap for a war correspondent, and both Jane and Annabelle know it. But because their womanhood is something that they have never been allowed to forget, they have great fun flaunting it. With a perfect understanding of the currency of power, they turn a handicap to their own advantage in repeated acts of subversion that the authors exploit to comic effect. (82–83)</blockquote>

In considering the likely outbreak of World War II, Gellhorn had noted of her own plan to once again take up the profession of war correspondence, “It is going to be a serious drawback to be a woman, it always has been but probably worse now than ever” (''Letters'' 90).

Jane and Annabelle find it a minor irritant that everyone assumes they must inevitably be nurses. “No, I’m not a nurse,” Jane patiently repeats (16). But this correction implies criticism of the stereotype alone, not the role itself. Indeed, Jane forgoes a scoop in order to render medical aid to a wounded officer on the battlefield, just as Gellhorn helped the medical staff with the wounded on the hospital transport ship where she had stowed away {{pg|398|399}} in the toilet so as to get to Normandy to report on the D-Day landing. Even the “repugnant” Daphne is recuperated (36). When Philip criticizes Daphne because “all she can think about is her dreadful career,” Jane responds with exquisite irony that “it isn’t the career that’s silly,” and she notes with admiration that Daphne “certainly knows what she wants” (63).

Jane briefly thinks that what she herself wants is marriage to Philip, who suddenly expresses admiration for her independence and professionalism as a war correspondent. But soon he says, “I can’t have you going to the front any more. . . [because] you’re mine now”(60). He sabotages her work by arranging for her to sleep through an attack she is to report, and he makes plans to send her to his family home in England. This last is too much for Jane. She is appalled by his description of the life his mother and sister lead there—notably, not because she finds it trivial, but rather because the riding and hunting, the bee-keeping and cow-tending, the war committees and the uniformed “land army” all require a different sort of courage and a different set of talents than she possesses (76). She is horrified to discover, for example, that there are no “field dressing station[s]” at fox hunts, and she bewails the fact that “there’s no one to pick up the wounded” (69, 64). Imagining a future where she will be “kicked by horses and stung by bees and finally die of mastitis from a cow,” she envies Annabelle whom she envisions “in a lovely dry dug-out somewhere” (73, 69). Jane changes her mind about marrying Philip and lights out for the territory—to Burma, in fact, with Annabelle, to report on the war front there.

Annabelle does indeed plan to continue her war correspondence, but she hopes to do so with Joe Rogers, who has proclaimed not only his continuing love for her but also a new attitude of respect for her work: “No other girl would have dared to fly that mission You’re everything. You’re pretty and funny and brave. I think being so brave is one of the things I’m proudest of” (67). He promises never again to steal her stories as he did during their brief marriage. “He said he did it because he loved me so much he couldn’t bear to have me in danger,” Annabelle tells Jane, but “it turned out he married me to silence the opposition” (19). Joe now asserts, “Nothing means anything without you,” and he promises never to interfere in her work again (67). Annabelle imagines a future with this “beautiful, funny, fascinating man” in which they will cover wars together in happy comradeship (20), having learned that marriage is “too dangerous” and that “you risk ruining everything with marriage” (69). But Annabelle discovers that Joe has not {{pg|399|400}} changed when he steals her trip to Poland. The theft is bad enough, but his condescending explanation is still more infuriating: “Hawkins sent for you, but it’s too dangerous. I love you too much. It doesn’t matter for a man. P.S. Back tomorrow” (73). Annabelle’s earlier comment, “If there’s anything I really loathe, it’s a woman protector,” resonates for she senses personal motivations beneath this seemingly generous sentiment (25). Moreover, the same sentiment is expressed by Philip, as one of the male correspondents tells her: “You’ve got to be more tolerant, Annabelle. The poor guy’s been away from England for three years, fighting to protect womankind from the horrors of war. And then the womankind walks in on him. He might as well have spared himself the trouble. You can see it would upset him for a while” (25).

Annabelle is terribly hurt by Joe’s betrayal, but she vows not “to let any worthless man ruin [her] job”(74), and she is cheered at the prospect of covering the war in Burma: “It sounds too terrible. Those poor men, and no one to tell what they’re doing. Forgotten Army. How dare people treat them like that” (75). Annabelle proves herself “still out to save the world,” as Jane had earlier described her, claiming, “We have to write, Jane. The people who fight can’t. It’s our job. Our duty, really” (19, 18). So Annabelle and Jane go off to yet another war front, finding it “lovely to be at the same war” but regretting that the men they love cannot somehow tolerate sharing the ex- perience with them (23). Hemingway’s Philip Rawlings had criticized Dorothy, saying that “the first thing an American woman does is try to get the man she’s interested in to give up something” (24), but in ''Love Goes to Press'' it is the men who try to change the women. As Sandra Spanier notes in her Afterword, ''"Love Goes to Press'' portrays men and women in love and at war from a distinctly female point of view, a lens through which we rarely have had the opportunity in American literature to view any war. And in this wartime drama, the European Theater of Operations is literally that— the stage set for the main action: the War between the Sexes” (82).

In ''The Fifth Column'', Hemingway also portrays what he called “the great unending battle between men and women” (Baker 481-82), though he plays it for tragedy rather than comedy. His biting portrait of Dorothy Bridges, Philip Rawlings’ potential wife, provided a cautionary example that Hemingway proceeded to ignore, as so many critics have pointed out, and as Philip seems to know when he famously confesses, “I’m afraid that’s the whole trouble. I want to make an absolutely colossal mistake” (42). But in order to render evident this colossal mistake, which Philip actually avoids, {{pg|400|401}} Hemingway is reduced to caricaturing Martha in the role of Dorothy—in point of fact, underplaying those characteristics that he found most attractive in Martha and also most disconcerting. But the play didn’t work, critics citing most often as its primary flaw the unbelievable characterization of Dorothy. And so he easily ignored his own warning, as Martha also apparently did, though her fictional counterpart quite rightly says of Philip, “You’re a very serious problem for any woman” (24). These two willful, talented, independent people came together in the heat of battle, then waged their own personal war, from which Martha emerged an accomplished war correspondent and Hemingway emerged as husband to a woman whom he had persuaded to abandon war correspondence—not a pocket Reubens, as he affectionately termed her, but a pocket female war correspondent whom he packed up for the home front once he decided he wanted to leave the war behind. But given the modernist merging of home front and war front, Hemingway should not have been surprised to discover that in moving Mary into Martha’s room at the Finca Vigía, he had not emerged as victor in the war between the sexes but had merely shifted the battlelines.

==Notes==
{{Notelist}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist}}

==Works Cited==
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book|last=Baker|first=Carlos |date= |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story|url= |location=New York |publisher=Avon, 1969 |pages= |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book|last=Beevor|first=Antony |date= |title=The Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Peter Bedrick Books, 1983 |pages= |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Brome|first=Vincent |date= |title=The International Brigades: Spain 1936-1939|url= |location=New York|publisher=William Morrow, 1966 |pages= |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Bullard |first=F. Lauriston |date= |title=Famous War Correspondents|url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown, 1914|pages= |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Coleman |first=Catherine |date= |chapter=Women in the Civil War |title=Heart of Spain: Robert Capa's Photographs of the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Aperture, 1999 |pages=43-51 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fellner |first=Harriet |date= |title=Hemingway as Playwright: ''The Fifth Column'' |url= |location=Ann Arbor |publisher=UMI Research P, 1986 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite interview |last=Fishman |first=Mo |title=Telephone interview |date=May 2001 }}
* {{cite book |last=Fraser |first=Ronald |date= |title=Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Pantheon, 1979 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Garrison |first=Nancy Scripture |date= |title=With Courage and Delicacy, Civil War on the Peninsula: Women and the U.S. Sanitary Commission |url= |location=Mason City, Iowa |publisher=Savas, 1999 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Gavin |first=Lettie |date= |title=American Women in World War I: They Also Served |url= |location=Niwot, CO |publisher=UP of Colorado, 1997 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Gellhorn |first=Martha |date= |title=The Face of War |url= |location=New York |magazine=Atlantic Monthly P, 1986 |edition=3rd|pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Gellorn |first=Martha |author-mask=1 |date= |title=Travels with Myself and Another |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin, 1978 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last1=Gellhorn |first1=Martha |last2=Cowles |first2=Virginia |date=1946 |title=Love Goes to Press |editor-last=Spanier |editor-first=Sandra |location=Lincoln |publisher=U of Nebraska P, 1995 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last1=Gellhorn |first1=Martha |author-mask=1|last2=Cowles |first2=Virginia |title=Love Goes to Press |editor-last=Spanier |editor-first=Sandra |script-title=Afterword |location=Lincoln |publisher=U of Nebraska P, 1995 |pages=79-90 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last1=Gilbert |first1=Sandra M. |last2=Gubar |first2=Susan |date= |title=No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century |url= |location=New Haven |publisher=Yale UP, 1988-1994, 3 vols |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date= |title=The Wound in the Heart: America and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Macmillan, 1962
|pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hawks |first=Esther Hill |date= |title=A Woman Doctor's Civil War: Esther Hill Hawks' Diary |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Carolina, 1984 |pages= |editor-last=Schwartz |editor-first=Gerald |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1950 |title=Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 1978 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1 |date= |title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961 |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 1981 |editor-last=Baker |editor-first=Carlos |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1 |title=A Farewell to Arms |year=1929 |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 1969 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1 |title=The Fifth Column |chapter=The Fifth Column ''and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War'' |year= |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 1969 |pages=3-85 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1 |title=For Whom the Bell Tolls |year=1940 |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 1968 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1 |title=Green Hills of Africa |year=1935 |location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 1963 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |script-title="A New Kind of War" |year= |location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 1967 |pages=262-67 |editor-last=White |editor-first=William |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1 |date= |title=''The Fifth Column'' and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War |chapter=Night Before Battle |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 1969 |pages=110-139 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1937 |title=A Play |url= |location=Box 1, Folder 3, Typescript carbon, Ernest Hemingway Manuscripts Collection. U of Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware |publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1926 |title=The Sun Also Rises |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 1970 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=30 June 1938 |title=Ken |chapter=Treachery in Aragon |url= |location=1.7 |publisher= |pages=26 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=9-10 June 1943 |title=Unpublished Letter to Martha Gellhorn |chapter=Outgoing Correspondence, 1943-1948 |url= |location=Box 45, Folder EH 1943 June. Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA. |publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1 |date= |chapter=A Very Short Story |title=The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 1966 |pages=141-142
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Herbert |first=Melissa S. |date= |title=Camouflage Isn't Only for Combat: Gender, Sexuality, and Women in the Military |url= |location=New York |publisher=New York UP, 1998 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Kert |first=Bernice |date= |title=The Hemingway Women |url= |location=New York |publisher=Norton, 1983 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Knightley |first=Phillip |date= |title=The First Casualty, From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker |url= |location=New York |publisher=Harcourt, 1975 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Leonard |first=Elizabeth D. |date= |title=All the Daring of the Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies |url= |location=New York |publisher=Norton, 1999 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lynn |first=Kenneth |date= |title=Hemingway |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Harvard UP, 1987 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Maher |first=Sister Mary Denis |date= |title=To Bind Up the Wounds: Catholic Sister Nurses in the U.S. Civil War |url= |location=Baton Rouge |publisher=Louisiana State UP, 1989 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mathews |first=Joseph J |date= |title=Reporting the Wars |url= |location=Minneapolis |publisher=U of Minnesota P, 1957 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mayer |first=Holly A |date= |title=Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community during the American Revolution |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Carolina P, 1996 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last1=Merriman |first1=Marion |last2=Lerude |first2=Warren |date= |title=American Commander in Spain: Robert Hale Merriman and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade |url= |location=Reno |publisher=U of Nevada P, 1986 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Meyers |first=Jeffrey |date= |title=Hemingway: A Biography |url= |location=New York |publisher=Harper, 1985 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Moon |first=Katharine H.S. |script-title="Military Prostitutes and the Hypersexualization of Militarized Women" |title=Gender Camouflage: Women and the Military |url= |location=New York |publisher=New York UP, 1999 |pages=209-222 |editor-last1=D'Amico |editor-first1=Francine |editor-last2=Weinstein |editor-first2=Laurie |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Moorehead |first=Carolyn |date= |title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life |url= |location=New York |publisher=Holt, 2003 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Moorehead |first=Carolyn |author-mask=1 |date= |title=Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn |url= |editor-last=Moorehead |editor-first=Carolyn |location=New York |publisher=Holt, 2006 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Moreland |first=Kim |date= |title=A Farewell to Arms: Teaching Hemingway's ''A Farewell to Arms.'' ''World War I, and the 'stockyards at Chicago''' |url= |location=Kent |publisher=Kent State UP, 2008 |editor-last=Tyler |editor-first=Lisa |pages=85-97 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Moreland |first=Kim |author-mask=1 |date= |title=The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature: Twain, Adams, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway |url= |location=Charlottesville |publisher=UP of Virginia, 1996 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Nakjavani |first=Erik |date= |title=''Hemingway's'' The Fifth Column ''and the Question of Ideology'' |url= |location=North Dakota |publisher=Quarterly 60.2, 1992 |pages=159-184 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Oates |first=Stephen B. |title=A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War |location=New York |publisher=Macmillan, 1994 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Orwell |first=George |date=1938 |title=Homage to Catalonia |url= |location=New York |publisher=Harvest P, 1980 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Prago |first=Albert |date= |title=Our Fight: Writings by Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Spain 1936-1939 |script-title="Women in Franco's Prisons" |url= |location=New York |publisher=Monthly Review P, 1987 |editor-last1=Bessie |editor-first1=Alvah |editor-last2=Prago |editor-first2=Albert |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Pryor |first=Elizabeth Brown |date= |title=Clara Barton: Professional Angel |url= |location=Philadelphia |publisher=U of Pennsylvania P, 1987 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Reeves |first=Connie L. |date= |title=Gender Camouflage: Women and the Military |script-title="Invisible Soldiers: Military Nurses" |url= |location=New York |publisher=New York UP, 1999 |editor-last1=D'Amico |editor-first1=Francine |editor-last2=Weinstein |editor-first2=Laurie |pages=15-30 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date= |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |url= |location=New York |publisher=Norton, 1997 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Rolfe |first=Edwin |date= |title=Edwin Rolfe: Collected Poems |url= |location=Urbana |publisher=U of Illinois P |editor-last1=Nelson |editor-first1=Cary |editor-last2=Hendricks |editor-first2=Jefferson |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Rollyson |first=Carl |date= |title=Nothing Ever Happens to the Brave: The Story of Martha Gellhorn |url= |location=New York |publisher=St. Martin's, 1990 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Sorel |first=Nancy Caldwell |date= |title=The Women Who Wrote the War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Arcade, 1999 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Spanier |first=Sandra, ed |title=Love Goes to Press. ''By Martha Gellhorn and Virginia Cowles'' |chapter=Afterword |location=Lincoln |publisher=U of Nebraska P, 1995 |pages=79-90 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stein |first=M. L. |title=Under Fire: The Story of American War Correspondents |location=New York |publisher=Simon & Schuster, 1968 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Thomas |first=Hugh |date= |title=The Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Harper, 1961 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Toral |first=Maria Teresa |date= |title=Our Fight: Writings by Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Spain 1936-1939 |script-title="A Long Night" |url= |location=New York |translator-last=Prago |translator-first=Albert |editor-last1=Bessie |editor-first1=Alvah |editor-last2=Prago |editor-first2=Albert |publisher=Monthly Review P, 1987 |pages=305-309 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Trogdon |first=Robert, ed |date= |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |url= |location=New York |publisher=Carroll and Graf, 1999 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last1=Villard |first1=Henry S. |last2=Nagel |first2=James |title=Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes Von Kurowsky |location=New York |publisher=Hyperion, 1989 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Weitz |first=Margaret Collins |date= |title=Sisters in the Resistance: How Women Fought to Free France, 1940-1945 |url= |location=New York |publisher=John Wiley & Sons, 1995 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Whiting |first=Charles |date= |title=Papa Goes to War: Ernest Hemingway in Europe, 1944-1945 |url= |location=Phoeniz Mill, UK |publisher=Sutton, 1999 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite interview |last=Wolff |first=Milton |title=Telephone interview |date=May 2001 }}
* {{cite book |last=Wormeley |first=Katharine Prescott |date=1889 |title=The Other Side of War: On the Hospital Transports with the Army of the Potomac |url= |location=Gansevoort, New York |publisher=Comer House Historical Publications, 1998 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Wyden |first=Peter |date= |title=The Passionate War: The Narrative History of the Spanish War, 1936-1939 |url= |location=New York |publisher=Simon and Schuster, 1983 |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hemingway and Women at the Front: Blowing Bridges in The Fifth Column, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Other Works}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volunteer/Remediating Articles

2025-04-10T15:41:40Z

Jules Carry: /* Book Reviews */ Added senetnce.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Large|A Guide for Volunteer Digital Editors}}
{{shortcut|PM:RA}}
{{Byline|align=right|last=Lucas|first=Gerald R.|abstract=A digital editor’s guide for remediating print articles to digital for ''{{MR}}''. |url=http://prmlr.us/remediate}}
{{TOC right}}
Welcome, volunteer, or Assistant Digital Editor. We’re glad you decided to lend your expertise and time in helping to grow our Digital Humanities project. This guide is written specifically for volunteer digital editors who want to help in moving, or “remediating,” our print version of ''{{MR}}'' to the digital version here on Project Mailer. Please read this document in for specific directions on remediating your article to be used on the screen.

We use the word “[[w:Mediation (Marxist theory and media studies)#Remediation|remediating]]” here to emphasize that reading on paper is a different activity than reading on the screen. In fact, we might say that we don’t really ''read'' articles on the screen at all: we ''use'' them. So, how do we ''remediate'' a document from a medium that emphasizes a sit-back, passive activity to one that promotes a lean-forward, active one? Documents meant to be used on the screen should have different qualities than paper documents. This guide breaks down the qualities we should consider when creating a digital document on this site. We try to cover most items, but being a digital editor often requires us to make it up as we go along.

When we remediate, we should always keep this question in mind: '''what is the most logical way to make this document fit the expectations of those who will be using it?''' Let’s try to detail our current approach.{{efn|Like with any other digital document, there are no strict rules for what makes the best digital document. We are still in an incunabular stage when it comes to the digital. So think of these as guidelines on how we might approach our work here. There may be a better way. If so, we may change our approach. But for now, this is how we do it.}}

I will try to include everything you need on this document, but I will often link to Wikipedia for more detailed explanations of certain concepts and procedures. I hope that you will not need these additional resources, but they are there for further clarification if necessary. I recommend opening links in tabs, so you don’t get lost, and you can keep certain tabs open for reference.

{{notice|All questions and discussion of this article should be posted on the [[Talk:The Mailer Review/Volunteer/Remediating Articles|talk page]]. I am always here to help, too. You can get my attention when posting to any talk page by using <code><nowiki>{{reply to|Grlucas}}</nowiki></code> at the beginning of your question. You may also ask me questions on [[User talk:Grlucas|my talk page]].}}

== Get Started ==
The first order of business is to request an account and get your first article for editing. These are both accomplished by sending an email to '''{{nospam|editor|projectmailer.net}}'''; they both could be done in the same email.

If you’re brand new to MediaWiki, the software that runs this web site, you should take a couple of tutorials to familiarize yourself with some of the basics. Begin with Wikipedia’s [[w:Help:Introduction|Help:Introduction]] which will take you through a series of tutorials designed to familiarize you with the essentials.{{efn|This will suggest you make a Wikipedia account to continue, if you do not already have one. This step is optional, but recommended.}} Take the tutorials on the '''source editor''' (not the visual) which uses wiki markup, as that is the only available editor on PM.

=== Get Your Account ===
First off, you need to request an account (see below under Get Your Article). If you have a particular user name in mind, let me know. Mine is '''Grlucas''', but yours can be anything you’d like. I will create an account for you with a temporary password using the email address you sent the request with. You will need to confirm your account, log in, and change your password. Then, you’re ready to edit. You might take a few minutes to created your user page by clicking your user name in the upper right, and adding a brief professional biography. If you are a student, this will likely be a requirement at some point.

=== Get Your Article ===
Begin your journey by requesting an article from the editor; you can request an account with the same email. Send an email to '''{{nospam|editor|projectmailer.net}}''' and ask for the next article, or request a red link article (meaning it needs to be added) from any [[{{ROOTPAGENAME}}|volume available]], being sure to give the volume number.{{efn|If you are editing as part of a class assignment, you likely will be assigned an article. Please see your syllabus for alternate directions.}} I will send you the article as a PDF from the above email address (be sure you whitelist it or check your spam folder if you do not receive it), including an abstract (if it has one) and writer biography.{{efn|PDF is how I get the final digital form of the journal, which is made for print, so it always contains digital errors. Part of our job is to be sure we catch and correct these errors.}}

== Before Editing ==
[[File:Mr-editor.jpg|thumb|400px|'''Fig 1'''. The editor.]]
An obvious way to approach this task would be to look at an example article to see how another digital editor remediated it, like [[Andrew M. Gordon]]’s “[[Mailer’s Use of Wilhelm Reich]],” or really any of the other available texts. If you go to the article (open it it in a new tab by pressing {{Key press|CMD|click}} on a Mac and {{Key press|CTL|click}} on a PC), you can click the “Edit” tab to get to the editor and review all of the wiki coding that presents the usable text (see '''Fig 1''').

The rest of this document breaks down each of the common elements that every article will use. You should keep your example article open in a tab so you can refer to it, if necessary.

Finally, go to the [[{{ROOTPAGENAME}}|volume]] your article is in, and click on the title’s red link. This will bring up the editor for the new article. Now you may begin adding the article’s content. See [[mediawikiwiki:Help:Starting a new page|Help:Starting a new page]] for more details.

=== Subpages ===
We have recently switched to using [[w:Wikipedia:Subpages|subpages]] for articles, so they fall into a hierarchical structure under the appropriate volumes. This should not really be an issue in your editing, but I just wanted to mention it in case you saw older articles that did not follow the same naming scheme. All articles assigned to volunteer editors will use the subpage structure.

=== Preview and Save ===
As you make changes, get into the habit of pushing the “Show preview” button at the bottom of your editor. You should '''not''' save every little edit, as this taxes the system: '''every single saved edit''' is stored in the article’s history, so we want to keep these to a minimum. Once you have added a significant amount—maybe a couple of paragraphs or so—you can hit the blue “Save changes” button if the preview looks good. Before you save, make a note in the “Summary” box explaining your additions or edits. This can be helpful to other editors if they have to fix or find something. Uncheck the “This is a minor edit” (checked by default) if you did more than fix a typo or change a couple of smaller items.

== Title ==
If you clicked on the red link to begin creating the article, the title has been chosen for you. However, we want to tweak the display title, so we have to use a code called <code><nowiki>{{DISPLAYTITLE}}</nowiki></code>. With this element, you can insert necessary text formatting, like [[w:MOS:ITALIC|italics]]:

<code><nowiki>{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}</nowiki></code>

The <code><nowiki></nowiki></code> tag shrinks the root page names to highlight the title of the page. The code above will work for most article titles. However, if the title contains italicized elements, like the title of a novel, you must replace <code><nowiki>{{SUBPAGENAME}}</nowiki></code> with the actual title, so you can include the italics. For example:

<code><nowiki>{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''An American Dream'': The Singular Nightmare}}</nowiki></code>

Putting two apostrophes (<code><nowiki>''</nowiki></code>) on both sides of <code><nowiki>An American Dream</nowiki></code> will italicize the novel’s name in the published document (see [[mediawikiwiki:Help:Formatting|Help:Formatting]]); check out the [[The Mailer Review/Volume 1, 2007/An American Dream: The Singular Nightmare|published article]]. Once you’ve entered your title, click the “Show preview” button under the editor window to see the results.{{efn|Get into the habit of clicking this button with every bit that you add to the article. It allows you to quickly see if you’ve made a mistake, so you can fix it before saving.}} Note that the title must otherwise be exactly the same, or the system will ignore the code and spit out an error. If it does, just review your code carefully and fix what’s needed.

== Working Banner ==
While you’re working on your article, you should let users know by adding the {{tl|Working}} banner. On the next line after <code><nowiki>{{DISPLAYTITLE}}</nowiki></code>, add <code><nowiki>{{Working}}</nowiki></code> to insert this banner; no need to add anything else, as the template fills in the pertinent information, like the article’s name.

{{Working}}

When you make your final edit, let me know by posting a message to my [[User talk:Grlucas|talk page]], and I will remove the banner to signify the completion of the remediation process.

== Header ==
Next, you need to insert the proper header for the volume, in the form of <code><nowiki>{{MRxx}}</nowiki></code> where “xx” is the two-number volume. For example, volume 12 would be <code><nowiki>{{MR12}}</nowiki></code> and volume 2 would be <code><nowiki>{{MR02}}</nowiki></code>.

Anything surrounded with double brackets calls a [[w:Help:A quick guide to templates|template]] to be [[w:Wikipedia:Transclusion|transcluded]]. Basically, templates are bits of code or boilerplate that can be used on multiple pages. This saves us from having to repeat the same information on multiple pages.

This header should appear on the top of all ''Review'' content, just under the display title. The header will also insert the correct volume category in at the bottom of the page (See '''Fig. 2''').

== Byline ==
[[File:Mr-cat.jpg|thumb|400px|'''Fig 2'''. Byline inserts the correct category.]]
The byline template <code>{{tl|byline}}</code> should come next. It will include the writer’s or editor’s name, an abstract (if applicable), a note(s) (if applicable), and a short url. Here’s an example of the <code>byline</code> code:

<code><nowiki>{{Byline|last=Dickstein|first=Morris|url=https://prmlr.us/mr07dick|abstract=Mailer has been . . . uniform edition.|note=This paper served . . . me to participate.}}</nowiki></code>

For an explanation of all the variables, see <code>{{tl|byline}}</code>. You needn’t worry about the “abstract,” “note,” or “url” variables; I’ll fill those in later, if necessary.

Once you’ve entered the code, check it by previewing. The author’s name should be in blue, showing that the link leads to his or her biography. If it’s red, check your spelling. I have entered all authors and editors, so this should be working correctly. Next, scroll to the bottom of the document. You should see the correct category listed (see '''Fig 2'''); we’ll discuss more categories below. This will either be “Written by First Last” or “Edited by First Last.” This link, too, should be blue.

=== Book Reviews ===
Editors remediating '''book reviews''' should use the {{tl|BookReview}} template instead of the more general {{tl|Byline}} template, as it is specifically designed to capture and display essential bibliographic details about the book under review. Unlike {{tl|Byline}}, which only identifies the author of the review, {{tl|BookReview}} provides a standardized format for citing the book’s title, author, publisher, publication date, format, and price, along with the reviewer’s name and links to purchase the book or read the full review. This helps ensure consistency across entries and improves usability for readers seeking publication information at a glance. See {{tl|BookReview}} for instructions on this template’s use.

=== Author Bio ===
As I mentioned above, the <code>{{tl|byline}}</code> connects with the author’s bio. As of this writing, all bios should be posted, so there is no need to do anything further.

{{Quote box|width=100%|align=center|title=Using Your Sandbox for Remediation|
The rest of the steps below could (should?) happen in your sandbox. This is a space where you can remediate (make edits and errors) without publishing to the main space. This way, you avoid unwanted attention until you are ready to transfer your article to it proper place. You can access your personal sandbox by clicking “Sandbox” on the top-right of this (and every) page. Put <code><nowiki>{{user sandbox|plain=yes}}</nowiki></code> at the top of your sandbox. This will put a banner on the top of your page notifying other users they are looking at your draft space.

I recommend this approach. Incomplete articles in the main space are fine; articles with errors should ''never'' appear there. A solid approach would be to edit (clean up typos, add references, tweak formatting, etc.) in your sandbox, then transfer each paragraph to the main space. After each paragraph, preview your article to see that you did not inadvertently introduce any errors. After a few paragraphs, save your work. With this approach, you can save a lot of time and potential headaches. For example, if you transfer an entire article from your sandbox, you might get a reference error. Tracking this down becomes much more difficult. If transfer by paragraph, then errors become much easier to identify and fix.
}}

== Body ==
[[File:Mr-orig.jpg|thumb|400px|'''Fig 3'''. Original PDF. Copy the paragraph.]] [[File:Mr-errors.jpg|thumb|400px|'''Fig 4'''. Errors indicated.]] [[File:Mr-corrected.jpg|thumb|400px|'''Fig 5'''. Errors Fixed.]]
Here is where you remediate from PDF (essentially the printed page) to the wiki. Adding the body of the article will take the most effort and attention to detail, as many typos are introduced into the digital text as part of the PDF creation process. I recommend proceeding paragraph by paragraph, as pasting the whole essay into the article and then trying to edit it will just be overwhelming. Take this a step at a time to maximize your attention to perfection.

Open the PDF, highlight and copy a paragraph, paste the paragraph into the editing window, and proofread for errors (see '''Figs. 3–5'''; click the images to enlarge). Common errors include hyphenated words (these will be broken words with a hypen and space), numbers, lack of necessary text decoration like italics, missing spaces, and superfluous print information like page numbers. All of these must be corrected. Use the original PDF as your guide. All text needs to be verbatim and look as much like the original document as possible.

Once the paragraph is finished, hit return twice (skip a line between paragraphs) and start the next one. Repeat this process until the end of the document.

{{notice|Most articles that cite sources will do so using MLA style, so parenthetical citations will appear in the text. These must be remediated to the format we use for the web version. See [[#Sourcing|Sourcing]] below for instructions on using shortened footnotes. For instructions on inserting explanatory endnotes, see [[#End Notes|Endnotes]].}}

=== Block Quotations ===
Many articles use block quotation when quoting longer passages of primary texts. Just paste in the quotation like you would a paragraph, then surround it with the <code><nowiki><blockqoute> . . . </blockquote></nowiki></code> tags, for example:

<code><nowiki><blockquote>To the savage, dread was the natural result of any invasion of the supernatural: if man wished to steal the secrets of the gods, it was only to be supposed that the gods would defend themselves and destroy whichever man came too close. By this logic, civilization is the successful if imperfect theft of some cluster of these secrets, and the price we have paid is to accelerate our private sense of some enormous if not quite definable disaster which awaits us.{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=159}}</blockquote></nowiki></code>

Note this quotation contains a citation—as all quotations should; see [[#Sourcing|Sourcing]] below for an explanation.

=== Images ===
Most articles will not contain images. However, for those that do, see [[The Mailer Review/Volunteer/Advanced Editing|Advanced Editing]].

=== Page Numbers ===
In order to aid researchers who still rely on the conventions of print culture, we will insert page numbers on our articles as they appear in the print version. For this use the <code>{{tl|pg}}</code> template, like:

<code><nowiki>{{pg|first page #|next page #}}</nowiki></code>

For example, indicating a page break after page 203 would look like:

<code><nowiki>{{pg|203|204}}</nowiki></code>

This code can be inserted directly in a paragraph. See [[The Mailer Review/Volume 1, 2007/An American Dream: The Singular Nightmare|this article]] for an example.

== Endnotes ==
This section houses an author’s explanatory endnotes or footnotes, like the “Notes” section at the bottom of this page. Notes may be inserted in the body of the text, using <code>{{tl|efn}}</code>, for example:

<code><nowiki>. . .opportunity with a "lady's magazine",{{efn|In ''Double Life'', Lennon explains that Pearl Kazin, an editor at ''Harper's Bazaar'' had invited Mailer to write something for the magazine, to which Mailer replied: "I'm still too young and too arrogant to care to write the kind of high-grade horseshit you print in ''Harper's Bazaar''" (142–43).}} Mailer conceived . . .</nowiki></code>

This note will be indicated by a superscript, small letter, like [a] —except it will be a hyperlink. Now, you must have place for these notes to be listed near the end of the document, just above the Citations section:

<code><nowiki>=== Notes ===</nowiki> 
<nowiki>{{notelist}}</nowiki></code>

See [[The Mailer Review/Volume 9, 2015/“Up to the Nostrils in Anguish”: Mailer and Bellow on Masculine Anxiety and Violent Catharsis|this article]] for another, more complex example. For a more thorough discussion of this function, see [[w:Template:Efn|Template:Efn]] on Wikipedia.

This code is only used for notes, not citations. For citations, read on.

== Sourcing ==
There are two approaches to sourcing, depending on the complexity of the author’s citations. If the article has just a handful of sources that are cited sparingly, you might just include them in the body of the article and just use a “Citations” section at the end of the document. If there are '''many sources''' that are '''cited multiple times''', you should have a “Citations” section and a “Works Cited” section and use the '''shortened footnotes''' approach. Most articles will use the latter approach.

Please note: some articles, particularly creative pieces, transcripts, and some essays will not cite any secondary sources. If this is the case, then this section on sourcing may be skipped.

=== Works Cited ===
A list of works cited should be the last section in the document. It is sorted alphabetically by author’s last name and uses [[w:Wikipedia:Citation templates|citation templates]]. This is easier for two reasons: (1) you only need to list the reference '''once''' in the article, and (2) it cleans up your body text of much of the confusing code. This section is created like this:

<code><nowiki>===Works Cited===</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>{{Refbegin}}</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>* {{cite book |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |location= |publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>* {{cite journal |last= |first= |title= |url= |journal= |volume= |issue= |date= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>* {{cite magazine |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>* {{cite news |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>* {{cite web |url= |title= |last= |first= |date= |website= |publisher= |access-date= |quote= |ref=harv }}</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>{{Refend}}</nowiki></code> 

This might look a bit confusing, but I’ll go through it. The first line adds a new section to the article. All references should appear between <code><nowiki>{{Refbegin}}</nowiki></code> and <code><nowiki>{{Refend}}</nowiki></code> in a bulleted list (notice each reference is on its own line and begins with <code><nowiki>*</nowiki></code>.

These codes are for the main types of references you will likely need (these links go to expanded instructions on Wikipedia): [[w:Template:Cite book|book]], [[w:Template:Cite journal|journal]], [[w:Template:Cite magazine|magazine]], [[w:Template:Cite news|news]], and [[w:Template:Cite web|web]].{{efn|All citation codes and explanation for the variables may be found on “[[w:Wikipedia:Citation templates|Citation Templates]].”}} Notice many of the codes contain similar elements, but one in particular '''must be used''' for our shortened footnotes technique to work: <code><nowiki>ref=harv</nowiki></code> — I usually put this at the end. This code for the [[w:Template:Harvard citation|Harvard citation]] and points a shortened footnote to the detailed bibliographic entry.

Feel free to copy and paste these codes from above into your article. Just fill in the details.

=== In-text Citations ===
For in-text citations, what will usually appear as MLA-style parenthetical, we use [[w:Template:Sfn|shortened footnotes]] <code><nowiki>{{sfn}}</nowiki></code>. First, add a section where your citations will appear, just above your works cited section:

<code><nowiki>===Citations===</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>{{Reflist}}</nowiki></code>

Here’s an example of the shortened footnote at work in the body of the article:

<code><nowiki>. . . first published in ''New Short Novels 2'', 1956.{{sfn|Lennon|2018|p=25}}</nowiki></code>

This is a Wikipedia template. “Sfn” calls the template in the code; the author’s last name follows the first pipe (this must correspond with the name that follows <code><nowiki>|last=</nowiki></code> in the detailed citation in your works cited list); the year of the publication follows the next (exactly the same as <code><nowiki>|date=</nowiki></code> in the citation); and the page number(s) are put last. This will insert a footnote in the text; when a user clicks it, she is taken to the citation and if she clicks the citation, she is taken to the longer works cited entry. Rendered on the page, it will look like:

. . . first published in ''New Short Novels 2'', 1956.{{sfn|Lennon|2018|p=25}}

Notice its placement of the footnote code: '''right up against the period with no space in between'''. Footnote indications should always come ''after'' punctuation; never before. Try it on the example article I linked above. Simple and elegant.

See the [[w:Template:Sfn|Template:Sfn]] on Wikipedia for more options and explanation.

== Footer ==
Add the ''Review'' footer with the code <code>{{tl|Review}}</code> on a line by itself. This will insert the volume navigation information box.

== Sort ==
Since all of the ''Review'' articles are located on subpages, we have to tell the system how to sort them. This is done using the <code><nowiki>{{DEFAULTSORT:xx}}</nowiki></code> code. Copy the code into the bottom of the article just above the categories (see below) and replace <code><nowiki>xx</nowiki></code> with the name of the article ''excluding'' journal name, volume information, and any beginning articles. For example, if the full article was named <code><nowiki>The Mailer Review/Volume 10, 2016/The Curious Story of Norman Mailer’s Engagement with Short Fiction</nowiki></code>, you would just use <code><nowiki>The Curious Story of Norman Mailer’s Engagement with Short Fiction</nowiki></code> and put the <code><nowiki>The</nowiki></code> on the end, like: <code><nowiki>{{DEFAULTSORT:Curious Story of Norman Mailer’s Engagement with Short Fiction, The}}</nowiki></code>. This instructs the system to sort this article under C in category indexes.

For more information, see [[w:Template:DEFAULTSORT|Template:DEFAULTSORT]] on Wikipedia.

== Categories ==
Article categories are classified as follows. Choose the most appropriate for the article you’re remediating:

* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Articles (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
** <code><nowiki>[[Category:Classic Interpretations (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Biographies (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Interviews (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Book Reviews (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Bibliographies (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Tributes (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Creative Works (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
** <code><nowiki>[[Category:Short Stories (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
** <code><nowiki>[[Category:Poetry (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
** <code><nowiki>[[Category:Plays (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
** <code><nowiki>[[Category:Excerpts (MR)]]</nowiki></code>

Most of the time, you will only select '''one''' category for your article. The indented categories are subcategories of the those above them. For more information on categories, see [[w:Help:Category|Help:Category]] and [[w:Wikipedia:Categorization|Wikipedia:Categorization]] on Wikipedia.

== Finish Up ==
When you complete your remediation, post a message to my [[User talk:Grlucas|talk page]] for final review. Be sure to include a link to the article. When I have checked it, I will remove the {{tl|Working}} banner and remain forever grateful for your assistance in making Project Mailer better.

== Notes ==
{{notelist}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Remediating Articles}}
[[Category:For Editors]]

The Mailer Review/Volunteer/Remediating Articles

2025-04-10T15:38:23Z

Jules Carry: /* Byline */ Added book reviews.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Large|A Guide for Volunteer Digital Editors}}
{{shortcut|PM:RA}}
{{Byline|align=right|last=Lucas|first=Gerald R.|abstract=A digital editor’s guide for remediating print articles to digital for ''{{MR}}''. |url=http://prmlr.us/remediate}}
{{TOC right}}
Welcome, volunteer, or Assistant Digital Editor. We’re glad you decided to lend your expertise and time in helping to grow our Digital Humanities project. This guide is written specifically for volunteer digital editors who want to help in moving, or “remediating,” our print version of ''{{MR}}'' to the digital version here on Project Mailer. Please read this document in for specific directions on remediating your article to be used on the screen.

We use the word “[[w:Mediation (Marxist theory and media studies)#Remediation|remediating]]” here to emphasize that reading on paper is a different activity than reading on the screen. In fact, we might say that we don’t really ''read'' articles on the screen at all: we ''use'' them. So, how do we ''remediate'' a document from a medium that emphasizes a sit-back, passive activity to one that promotes a lean-forward, active one? Documents meant to be used on the screen should have different qualities than paper documents. This guide breaks down the qualities we should consider when creating a digital document on this site. We try to cover most items, but being a digital editor often requires us to make it up as we go along.

When we remediate, we should always keep this question in mind: '''what is the most logical way to make this document fit the expectations of those who will be using it?''' Let’s try to detail our current approach.{{efn|Like with any other digital document, there are no strict rules for what makes the best digital document. We are still in an incunabular stage when it comes to the digital. So think of these as guidelines on how we might approach our work here. There may be a better way. If so, we may change our approach. But for now, this is how we do it.}}

I will try to include everything you need on this document, but I will often link to Wikipedia for more detailed explanations of certain concepts and procedures. I hope that you will not need these additional resources, but they are there for further clarification if necessary. I recommend opening links in tabs, so you don’t get lost, and you can keep certain tabs open for reference.

{{notice|All questions and discussion of this article should be posted on the [[Talk:The Mailer Review/Volunteer/Remediating Articles|talk page]]. I am always here to help, too. You can get my attention when posting to any talk page by using <code><nowiki>{{reply to|Grlucas}}</nowiki></code> at the beginning of your question. You may also ask me questions on [[User talk:Grlucas|my talk page]].}}

== Get Started ==
The first order of business is to request an account and get your first article for editing. These are both accomplished by sending an email to '''{{nospam|editor|projectmailer.net}}'''; they both could be done in the same email.

If you’re brand new to MediaWiki, the software that runs this web site, you should take a couple of tutorials to familiarize yourself with some of the basics. Begin with Wikipedia’s [[w:Help:Introduction|Help:Introduction]] which will take you through a series of tutorials designed to familiarize you with the essentials.{{efn|This will suggest you make a Wikipedia account to continue, if you do not already have one. This step is optional, but recommended.}} Take the tutorials on the '''source editor''' (not the visual) which uses wiki markup, as that is the only available editor on PM.

=== Get Your Account ===
First off, you need to request an account (see below under Get Your Article). If you have a particular user name in mind, let me know. Mine is '''Grlucas''', but yours can be anything you’d like. I will create an account for you with a temporary password using the email address you sent the request with. You will need to confirm your account, log in, and change your password. Then, you’re ready to edit. You might take a few minutes to created your user page by clicking your user name in the upper right, and adding a brief professional biography. If you are a student, this will likely be a requirement at some point.

=== Get Your Article ===
Begin your journey by requesting an article from the editor; you can request an account with the same email. Send an email to '''{{nospam|editor|projectmailer.net}}''' and ask for the next article, or request a red link article (meaning it needs to be added) from any [[{{ROOTPAGENAME}}|volume available]], being sure to give the volume number.{{efn|If you are editing as part of a class assignment, you likely will be assigned an article. Please see your syllabus for alternate directions.}} I will send you the article as a PDF from the above email address (be sure you whitelist it or check your spam folder if you do not receive it), including an abstract (if it has one) and writer biography.{{efn|PDF is how I get the final digital form of the journal, which is made for print, so it always contains digital errors. Part of our job is to be sure we catch and correct these errors.}}

== Before Editing ==
[[File:Mr-editor.jpg|thumb|400px|'''Fig 1'''. The editor.]]
An obvious way to approach this task would be to look at an example article to see how another digital editor remediated it, like [[Andrew M. Gordon]]’s “[[Mailer’s Use of Wilhelm Reich]],” or really any of the other available texts. If you go to the article (open it it in a new tab by pressing {{Key press|CMD|click}} on a Mac and {{Key press|CTL|click}} on a PC), you can click the “Edit” tab to get to the editor and review all of the wiki coding that presents the usable text (see '''Fig 1''').

The rest of this document breaks down each of the common elements that every article will use. You should keep your example article open in a tab so you can refer to it, if necessary.

Finally, go to the [[{{ROOTPAGENAME}}|volume]] your article is in, and click on the title’s red link. This will bring up the editor for the new article. Now you may begin adding the article’s content. See [[mediawikiwiki:Help:Starting a new page|Help:Starting a new page]] for more details.

=== Subpages ===
We have recently switched to using [[w:Wikipedia:Subpages|subpages]] for articles, so they fall into a hierarchical structure under the appropriate volumes. This should not really be an issue in your editing, but I just wanted to mention it in case you saw older articles that did not follow the same naming scheme. All articles assigned to volunteer editors will use the subpage structure.

=== Preview and Save ===
As you make changes, get into the habit of pushing the “Show preview” button at the bottom of your editor. You should '''not''' save every little edit, as this taxes the system: '''every single saved edit''' is stored in the article’s history, so we want to keep these to a minimum. Once you have added a significant amount—maybe a couple of paragraphs or so—you can hit the blue “Save changes” button if the preview looks good. Before you save, make a note in the “Summary” box explaining your additions or edits. This can be helpful to other editors if they have to fix or find something. Uncheck the “This is a minor edit” (checked by default) if you did more than fix a typo or change a couple of smaller items.

== Title ==
If you clicked on the red link to begin creating the article, the title has been chosen for you. However, we want to tweak the display title, so we have to use a code called <code><nowiki>{{DISPLAYTITLE}}</nowiki></code>. With this element, you can insert necessary text formatting, like [[w:MOS:ITALIC|italics]]:

<code><nowiki>{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}</nowiki></code>

The <code><nowiki></nowiki></code> tag shrinks the root page names to highlight the title of the page. The code above will work for most article titles. However, if the title contains italicized elements, like the title of a novel, you must replace <code><nowiki>{{SUBPAGENAME}}</nowiki></code> with the actual title, so you can include the italics. For example:

<code><nowiki>{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''An American Dream'': The Singular Nightmare}}</nowiki></code>

Putting two apostrophes (<code><nowiki>''</nowiki></code>) on both sides of <code><nowiki>An American Dream</nowiki></code> will italicize the novel’s name in the published document (see [[mediawikiwiki:Help:Formatting|Help:Formatting]]); check out the [[The Mailer Review/Volume 1, 2007/An American Dream: The Singular Nightmare|published article]]. Once you’ve entered your title, click the “Show preview” button under the editor window to see the results.{{efn|Get into the habit of clicking this button with every bit that you add to the article. It allows you to quickly see if you’ve made a mistake, so you can fix it before saving.}} Note that the title must otherwise be exactly the same, or the system will ignore the code and spit out an error. If it does, just review your code carefully and fix what’s needed.

== Working Banner ==
While you’re working on your article, you should let users know by adding the {{tl|Working}} banner. On the next line after <code><nowiki>{{DISPLAYTITLE}}</nowiki></code>, add <code><nowiki>{{Working}}</nowiki></code> to insert this banner; no need to add anything else, as the template fills in the pertinent information, like the article’s name.

{{Working}}

When you make your final edit, let me know by posting a message to my [[User talk:Grlucas|talk page]], and I will remove the banner to signify the completion of the remediation process.

== Header ==
Next, you need to insert the proper header for the volume, in the form of <code><nowiki>{{MRxx}}</nowiki></code> where “xx” is the two-number volume. For example, volume 12 would be <code><nowiki>{{MR12}}</nowiki></code> and volume 2 would be <code><nowiki>{{MR02}}</nowiki></code>.

Anything surrounded with double brackets calls a [[w:Help:A quick guide to templates|template]] to be [[w:Wikipedia:Transclusion|transcluded]]. Basically, templates are bits of code or boilerplate that can be used on multiple pages. This saves us from having to repeat the same information on multiple pages.

This header should appear on the top of all ''Review'' content, just under the display title. The header will also insert the correct volume category in at the bottom of the page (See '''Fig. 2''').

== Byline ==
[[File:Mr-cat.jpg|thumb|400px|'''Fig 2'''. Byline inserts the correct category.]]
The byline template <code>{{tl|byline}}</code> should come next. It will include the writer’s or editor’s name, an abstract (if applicable), a note(s) (if applicable), and a short url. Here’s an example of the <code>byline</code> code:

<code><nowiki>{{Byline|last=Dickstein|first=Morris|url=https://prmlr.us/mr07dick|abstract=Mailer has been . . . uniform edition.|note=This paper served . . . me to participate.}}</nowiki></code>

For an explanation of all the variables, see <code>{{tl|byline}}</code>. You needn’t worry about the “abstract,” “note,” or “url” variables; I’ll fill those in later, if necessary.

Once you’ve entered the code, check it by previewing. The author’s name should be in blue, showing that the link leads to his or her biography. If it’s red, check your spelling. I have entered all authors and editors, so this should be working correctly. Next, scroll to the bottom of the document. You should see the correct category listed (see '''Fig 2'''); we’ll discuss more categories below. This will either be “Written by First Last” or “Edited by First Last.” This link, too, should be blue.

=== Book Reviews ===
Editors writing book reviews should use the {{tl|BookReview}} template instead of the more general {{tl|Byline}} template, as it is specifically designed to capture and display essential bibliographic details about the book under review. Unlike {{tl|Byline}}, which only identifies the author of the review, {{tl|BookReview}} provides a standardized format for citing the book’s title, author, publisher, publication date, format, and price, along with the reviewer’s name and links to purchase the book or read the full review. This helps ensure consistency across entries and improves usability for readers seeking publication information at a glance. See {{tl|BookReview}} for instructions on this template’s use.

=== Author Bio ===
As I mentioned above, the <code>{{tl|byline}}</code> connects with the author’s bio. As of this writing, all bios should be posted, so there is no need to do anything further.

{{Quote box|width=100%|align=center|title=Using Your Sandbox for Remediation|
The rest of the steps below could (should?) happen in your sandbox. This is a space where you can remediate (make edits and errors) without publishing to the main space. This way, you avoid unwanted attention until you are ready to transfer your article to it proper place. You can access your personal sandbox by clicking “Sandbox” on the top-right of this (and every) page. Put <code><nowiki>{{user sandbox|plain=yes}}</nowiki></code> at the top of your sandbox. This will put a banner on the top of your page notifying other users they are looking at your draft space.

I recommend this approach. Incomplete articles in the main space are fine; articles with errors should ''never'' appear there. A solid approach would be to edit (clean up typos, add references, tweak formatting, etc.) in your sandbox, then transfer each paragraph to the main space. After each paragraph, preview your article to see that you did not inadvertently introduce any errors. After a few paragraphs, save your work. With this approach, you can save a lot of time and potential headaches. For example, if you transfer an entire article from your sandbox, you might get a reference error. Tracking this down becomes much more difficult. If transfer by paragraph, then errors become much easier to identify and fix.
}}

== Body ==
[[File:Mr-orig.jpg|thumb|400px|'''Fig 3'''. Original PDF. Copy the paragraph.]] [[File:Mr-errors.jpg|thumb|400px|'''Fig 4'''. Errors indicated.]] [[File:Mr-corrected.jpg|thumb|400px|'''Fig 5'''. Errors Fixed.]]
Here is where you remediate from PDF (essentially the printed page) to the wiki. Adding the body of the article will take the most effort and attention to detail, as many typos are introduced into the digital text as part of the PDF creation process. I recommend proceeding paragraph by paragraph, as pasting the whole essay into the article and then trying to edit it will just be overwhelming. Take this a step at a time to maximize your attention to perfection.

Open the PDF, highlight and copy a paragraph, paste the paragraph into the editing window, and proofread for errors (see '''Figs. 3–5'''; click the images to enlarge). Common errors include hyphenated words (these will be broken words with a hypen and space), numbers, lack of necessary text decoration like italics, missing spaces, and superfluous print information like page numbers. All of these must be corrected. Use the original PDF as your guide. All text needs to be verbatim and look as much like the original document as possible.

Once the paragraph is finished, hit return twice (skip a line between paragraphs) and start the next one. Repeat this process until the end of the document.

{{notice|Most articles that cite sources will do so using MLA style, so parenthetical citations will appear in the text. These must be remediated to the format we use for the web version. See [[#Sourcing|Sourcing]] below for instructions on using shortened footnotes. For instructions on inserting explanatory endnotes, see [[#End Notes|Endnotes]].}}

=== Block Quotations ===
Many articles use block quotation when quoting longer passages of primary texts. Just paste in the quotation like you would a paragraph, then surround it with the <code><nowiki><blockqoute> . . . </blockquote></nowiki></code> tags, for example:

<code><nowiki><blockquote>To the savage, dread was the natural result of any invasion of the supernatural: if man wished to steal the secrets of the gods, it was only to be supposed that the gods would defend themselves and destroy whichever man came too close. By this logic, civilization is the successful if imperfect theft of some cluster of these secrets, and the price we have paid is to accelerate our private sense of some enormous if not quite definable disaster which awaits us.{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=159}}</blockquote></nowiki></code>

Note this quotation contains a citation—as all quotations should; see [[#Sourcing|Sourcing]] below for an explanation.

=== Images ===
Most articles will not contain images. However, for those that do, see [[The Mailer Review/Volunteer/Advanced Editing|Advanced Editing]].

=== Page Numbers ===
In order to aid researchers who still rely on the conventions of print culture, we will insert page numbers on our articles as they appear in the print version. For this use the <code>{{tl|pg}}</code> template, like:

<code><nowiki>{{pg|first page #|next page #}}</nowiki></code>

For example, indicating a page break after page 203 would look like:

<code><nowiki>{{pg|203|204}}</nowiki></code>

This code can be inserted directly in a paragraph. See [[The Mailer Review/Volume 1, 2007/An American Dream: The Singular Nightmare|this article]] for an example.

== Endnotes ==
This section houses an author’s explanatory endnotes or footnotes, like the “Notes” section at the bottom of this page. Notes may be inserted in the body of the text, using <code>{{tl|efn}}</code>, for example:

<code><nowiki>. . .opportunity with a "lady's magazine",{{efn|In ''Double Life'', Lennon explains that Pearl Kazin, an editor at ''Harper's Bazaar'' had invited Mailer to write something for the magazine, to which Mailer replied: "I'm still too young and too arrogant to care to write the kind of high-grade horseshit you print in ''Harper's Bazaar''" (142–43).}} Mailer conceived . . .</nowiki></code>

This note will be indicated by a superscript, small letter, like [a] —except it will be a hyperlink. Now, you must have place for these notes to be listed near the end of the document, just above the Citations section:

<code><nowiki>=== Notes ===</nowiki> 
<nowiki>{{notelist}}</nowiki></code>

See [[The Mailer Review/Volume 9, 2015/“Up to the Nostrils in Anguish”: Mailer and Bellow on Masculine Anxiety and Violent Catharsis|this article]] for another, more complex example. For a more thorough discussion of this function, see [[w:Template:Efn|Template:Efn]] on Wikipedia.

This code is only used for notes, not citations. For citations, read on.

== Sourcing ==
There are two approaches to sourcing, depending on the complexity of the author’s citations. If the article has just a handful of sources that are cited sparingly, you might just include them in the body of the article and just use a “Citations” section at the end of the document. If there are '''many sources''' that are '''cited multiple times''', you should have a “Citations” section and a “Works Cited” section and use the '''shortened footnotes''' approach. Most articles will use the latter approach.

Please note: some articles, particularly creative pieces, transcripts, and some essays will not cite any secondary sources. If this is the case, then this section on sourcing may be skipped.

=== Works Cited ===
A list of works cited should be the last section in the document. It is sorted alphabetically by author’s last name and uses [[w:Wikipedia:Citation templates|citation templates]]. This is easier for two reasons: (1) you only need to list the reference '''once''' in the article, and (2) it cleans up your body text of much of the confusing code. This section is created like this:

<code><nowiki>===Works Cited===</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>{{Refbegin}}</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>* {{cite book |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |location= |publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>* {{cite journal |last= |first= |title= |url= |journal= |volume= |issue= |date= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>* {{cite magazine |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>* {{cite news |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>* {{cite web |url= |title= |last= |first= |date= |website= |publisher= |access-date= |quote= |ref=harv }}</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>{{Refend}}</nowiki></code> 

This might look a bit confusing, but I’ll go through it. The first line adds a new section to the article. All references should appear between <code><nowiki>{{Refbegin}}</nowiki></code> and <code><nowiki>{{Refend}}</nowiki></code> in a bulleted list (notice each reference is on its own line and begins with <code><nowiki>*</nowiki></code>.

These codes are for the main types of references you will likely need (these links go to expanded instructions on Wikipedia): [[w:Template:Cite book|book]], [[w:Template:Cite journal|journal]], [[w:Template:Cite magazine|magazine]], [[w:Template:Cite news|news]], and [[w:Template:Cite web|web]].{{efn|All citation codes and explanation for the variables may be found on “[[w:Wikipedia:Citation templates|Citation Templates]].”}} Notice many of the codes contain similar elements, but one in particular '''must be used''' for our shortened footnotes technique to work: <code><nowiki>ref=harv</nowiki></code> — I usually put this at the end. This code for the [[w:Template:Harvard citation|Harvard citation]] and points a shortened footnote to the detailed bibliographic entry.

Feel free to copy and paste these codes from above into your article. Just fill in the details.

=== In-text Citations ===
For in-text citations, what will usually appear as MLA-style parenthetical, we use [[w:Template:Sfn|shortened footnotes]] <code><nowiki>{{sfn}}</nowiki></code>. First, add a section where your citations will appear, just above your works cited section:

<code><nowiki>===Citations===</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>{{Reflist}}</nowiki></code>

Here’s an example of the shortened footnote at work in the body of the article:

<code><nowiki>. . . first published in ''New Short Novels 2'', 1956.{{sfn|Lennon|2018|p=25}}</nowiki></code>

This is a Wikipedia template. “Sfn” calls the template in the code; the author’s last name follows the first pipe (this must correspond with the name that follows <code><nowiki>|last=</nowiki></code> in the detailed citation in your works cited list); the year of the publication follows the next (exactly the same as <code><nowiki>|date=</nowiki></code> in the citation); and the page number(s) are put last. This will insert a footnote in the text; when a user clicks it, she is taken to the citation and if she clicks the citation, she is taken to the longer works cited entry. Rendered on the page, it will look like:

. . . first published in ''New Short Novels 2'', 1956.{{sfn|Lennon|2018|p=25}}

Notice its placement of the footnote code: '''right up against the period with no space in between'''. Footnote indications should always come ''after'' punctuation; never before. Try it on the example article I linked above. Simple and elegant.

See the [[w:Template:Sfn|Template:Sfn]] on Wikipedia for more options and explanation.

== Footer ==
Add the ''Review'' footer with the code <code>{{tl|Review}}</code> on a line by itself. This will insert the volume navigation information box.

== Sort ==
Since all of the ''Review'' articles are located on subpages, we have to tell the system how to sort them. This is done using the <code><nowiki>{{DEFAULTSORT:xx}}</nowiki></code> code. Copy the code into the bottom of the article just above the categories (see below) and replace <code><nowiki>xx</nowiki></code> with the name of the article ''excluding'' journal name, volume information, and any beginning articles. For example, if the full article was named <code><nowiki>The Mailer Review/Volume 10, 2016/The Curious Story of Norman Mailer’s Engagement with Short Fiction</nowiki></code>, you would just use <code><nowiki>The Curious Story of Norman Mailer’s Engagement with Short Fiction</nowiki></code> and put the <code><nowiki>The</nowiki></code> on the end, like: <code><nowiki>{{DEFAULTSORT:Curious Story of Norman Mailer’s Engagement with Short Fiction, The}}</nowiki></code>. This instructs the system to sort this article under C in category indexes.

For more information, see [[w:Template:DEFAULTSORT|Template:DEFAULTSORT]] on Wikipedia.

== Categories ==
Article categories are classified as follows. Choose the most appropriate for the article you’re remediating:

* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Articles (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
** <code><nowiki>[[Category:Classic Interpretations (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Biographies (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Interviews (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Book Reviews (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Bibliographies (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Tributes (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Creative Works (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
** <code><nowiki>[[Category:Short Stories (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
** <code><nowiki>[[Category:Poetry (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
** <code><nowiki>[[Category:Plays (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
** <code><nowiki>[[Category:Excerpts (MR)]]</nowiki></code>

Most of the time, you will only select '''one''' category for your article. The indented categories are subcategories of the those above them. For more information on categories, see [[w:Help:Category|Help:Category]] and [[w:Wikipedia:Categorization|Wikipedia:Categorization]] on Wikipedia.

== Finish Up ==
When you complete your remediation, post a message to my [[User talk:Grlucas|talk page]] for final review. Be sure to include a link to the article. When I have checked it, I will remove the {{tl|Working}} banner and remain forever grateful for your assistance in making Project Mailer better.

== Notes ==
{{notelist}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Remediating Articles}}
[[Category:For Editors]]

The Mailer Review/Volunteer/Remediating Articles

2025-04-10T15:34:08Z

Jules Carry: /* Categories */ Updated look.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Large|A Guide for Volunteer Digital Editors}}
{{shortcut|PM:RA}}
{{Byline|align=right|last=Lucas|first=Gerald R.|abstract=A digital editor’s guide for remediating print articles to digital for ''{{MR}}''. |url=http://prmlr.us/remediate}}
{{TOC right}}
Welcome, volunteer, or Assistant Digital Editor. We’re glad you decided to lend your expertise and time in helping to grow our Digital Humanities project. This guide is written specifically for volunteer digital editors who want to help in moving, or “remediating,” our print version of ''{{MR}}'' to the digital version here on Project Mailer. Please read this document in for specific directions on remediating your article to be used on the screen.

We use the word “[[w:Mediation (Marxist theory and media studies)#Remediation|remediating]]” here to emphasize that reading on paper is a different activity than reading on the screen. In fact, we might say that we don’t really ''read'' articles on the screen at all: we ''use'' them. So, how do we ''remediate'' a document from a medium that emphasizes a sit-back, passive activity to one that promotes a lean-forward, active one? Documents meant to be used on the screen should have different qualities than paper documents. This guide breaks down the qualities we should consider when creating a digital document on this site. We try to cover most items, but being a digital editor often requires us to make it up as we go along.

When we remediate, we should always keep this question in mind: '''what is the most logical way to make this document fit the expectations of those who will be using it?''' Let’s try to detail our current approach.{{efn|Like with any other digital document, there are no strict rules for what makes the best digital document. We are still in an incunabular stage when it comes to the digital. So think of these as guidelines on how we might approach our work here. There may be a better way. If so, we may change our approach. But for now, this is how we do it.}}

I will try to include everything you need on this document, but I will often link to Wikipedia for more detailed explanations of certain concepts and procedures. I hope that you will not need these additional resources, but they are there for further clarification if necessary. I recommend opening links in tabs, so you don’t get lost, and you can keep certain tabs open for reference.

{{notice|All questions and discussion of this article should be posted on the [[Talk:The Mailer Review/Volunteer/Remediating Articles|talk page]]. I am always here to help, too. You can get my attention when posting to any talk page by using <code><nowiki>{{reply to|Grlucas}}</nowiki></code> at the beginning of your question. You may also ask me questions on [[User talk:Grlucas|my talk page]].}}

== Get Started ==
The first order of business is to request an account and get your first article for editing. These are both accomplished by sending an email to '''{{nospam|editor|projectmailer.net}}'''; they both could be done in the same email.

If you’re brand new to MediaWiki, the software that runs this web site, you should take a couple of tutorials to familiarize yourself with some of the basics. Begin with Wikipedia’s [[w:Help:Introduction|Help:Introduction]] which will take you through a series of tutorials designed to familiarize you with the essentials.{{efn|This will suggest you make a Wikipedia account to continue, if you do not already have one. This step is optional, but recommended.}} Take the tutorials on the '''source editor''' (not the visual) which uses wiki markup, as that is the only available editor on PM.

=== Get Your Account ===
First off, you need to request an account (see below under Get Your Article). If you have a particular user name in mind, let me know. Mine is '''Grlucas''', but yours can be anything you’d like. I will create an account for you with a temporary password using the email address you sent the request with. You will need to confirm your account, log in, and change your password. Then, you’re ready to edit. You might take a few minutes to created your user page by clicking your user name in the upper right, and adding a brief professional biography. If you are a student, this will likely be a requirement at some point.

=== Get Your Article ===
Begin your journey by requesting an article from the editor; you can request an account with the same email. Send an email to '''{{nospam|editor|projectmailer.net}}''' and ask for the next article, or request a red link article (meaning it needs to be added) from any [[{{ROOTPAGENAME}}|volume available]], being sure to give the volume number.{{efn|If you are editing as part of a class assignment, you likely will be assigned an article. Please see your syllabus for alternate directions.}} I will send you the article as a PDF from the above email address (be sure you whitelist it or check your spam folder if you do not receive it), including an abstract (if it has one) and writer biography.{{efn|PDF is how I get the final digital form of the journal, which is made for print, so it always contains digital errors. Part of our job is to be sure we catch and correct these errors.}}

== Before Editing ==
[[File:Mr-editor.jpg|thumb|400px|'''Fig 1'''. The editor.]]
An obvious way to approach this task would be to look at an example article to see how another digital editor remediated it, like [[Andrew M. Gordon]]’s “[[Mailer’s Use of Wilhelm Reich]],” or really any of the other available texts. If you go to the article (open it it in a new tab by pressing {{Key press|CMD|click}} on a Mac and {{Key press|CTL|click}} on a PC), you can click the “Edit” tab to get to the editor and review all of the wiki coding that presents the usable text (see '''Fig 1''').

The rest of this document breaks down each of the common elements that every article will use. You should keep your example article open in a tab so you can refer to it, if necessary.

Finally, go to the [[{{ROOTPAGENAME}}|volume]] your article is in, and click on the title’s red link. This will bring up the editor for the new article. Now you may begin adding the article’s content. See [[mediawikiwiki:Help:Starting a new page|Help:Starting a new page]] for more details.

=== Subpages ===
We have recently switched to using [[w:Wikipedia:Subpages|subpages]] for articles, so they fall into a hierarchical structure under the appropriate volumes. This should not really be an issue in your editing, but I just wanted to mention it in case you saw older articles that did not follow the same naming scheme. All articles assigned to volunteer editors will use the subpage structure.

=== Preview and Save ===
As you make changes, get into the habit of pushing the “Show preview” button at the bottom of your editor. You should '''not''' save every little edit, as this taxes the system: '''every single saved edit''' is stored in the article’s history, so we want to keep these to a minimum. Once you have added a significant amount—maybe a couple of paragraphs or so—you can hit the blue “Save changes” button if the preview looks good. Before you save, make a note in the “Summary” box explaining your additions or edits. This can be helpful to other editors if they have to fix or find something. Uncheck the “This is a minor edit” (checked by default) if you did more than fix a typo or change a couple of smaller items.

== Title ==
If you clicked on the red link to begin creating the article, the title has been chosen for you. However, we want to tweak the display title, so we have to use a code called <code><nowiki>{{DISPLAYTITLE}}</nowiki></code>. With this element, you can insert necessary text formatting, like [[w:MOS:ITALIC|italics]]:

<code><nowiki>{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}</nowiki></code>

The <code><nowiki></nowiki></code> tag shrinks the root page names to highlight the title of the page. The code above will work for most article titles. However, if the title contains italicized elements, like the title of a novel, you must replace <code><nowiki>{{SUBPAGENAME}}</nowiki></code> with the actual title, so you can include the italics. For example:

<code><nowiki>{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''An American Dream'': The Singular Nightmare}}</nowiki></code>

Putting two apostrophes (<code><nowiki>''</nowiki></code>) on both sides of <code><nowiki>An American Dream</nowiki></code> will italicize the novel’s name in the published document (see [[mediawikiwiki:Help:Formatting|Help:Formatting]]); check out the [[The Mailer Review/Volume 1, 2007/An American Dream: The Singular Nightmare|published article]]. Once you’ve entered your title, click the “Show preview” button under the editor window to see the results.{{efn|Get into the habit of clicking this button with every bit that you add to the article. It allows you to quickly see if you’ve made a mistake, so you can fix it before saving.}} Note that the title must otherwise be exactly the same, or the system will ignore the code and spit out an error. If it does, just review your code carefully and fix what’s needed.

== Working Banner ==
While you’re working on your article, you should let users know by adding the {{tl|Working}} banner. On the next line after <code><nowiki>{{DISPLAYTITLE}}</nowiki></code>, add <code><nowiki>{{Working}}</nowiki></code> to insert this banner; no need to add anything else, as the template fills in the pertinent information, like the article’s name.

{{Working}}

When you make your final edit, let me know by posting a message to my [[User talk:Grlucas|talk page]], and I will remove the banner to signify the completion of the remediation process.

== Header ==
Next, you need to insert the proper header for the volume, in the form of <code><nowiki>{{MRxx}}</nowiki></code> where “xx” is the two-number volume. For example, volume 12 would be <code><nowiki>{{MR12}}</nowiki></code> and volume 2 would be <code><nowiki>{{MR02}}</nowiki></code>.

Anything surrounded with double brackets calls a [[w:Help:A quick guide to templates|template]] to be [[w:Wikipedia:Transclusion|transcluded]]. Basically, templates are bits of code or boilerplate that can be used on multiple pages. This saves us from having to repeat the same information on multiple pages.

This header should appear on the top of all ''Review'' content, just under the display title. The header will also insert the correct volume category in at the bottom of the page (See '''Fig. 2''').

== Byline ==
[[File:Mr-cat.jpg|thumb|400px|'''Fig 2'''. Byline inserts the correct category.]]
The byline template <code>{{tl|byline}}</code> should come next. It will include the writer’s or editor’s name, an abstract (if applicable), a note(s) (if applicable), and a short url. Here’s an example of the <code>byline</code> code:

<code><nowiki>{{Byline|last=Dickstein|first=Morris|url=https://prmlr.us/mr07dick|abstract=Mailer has been . . . uniform edition.|note=This paper served . . . me to participate.}}</nowiki></code>

For an explanation of all the variables, see <code>{{tl|byline}}</code>. You needn’t worry about the “abstract,” “note,” or “url” variables; I’ll fill those in later, if necessary.

Once you’ve entered the code, check it by previewing. The author’s name should be in blue, showing that the link leads to his or her biography. If it’s red, check your spelling. I have entered all authors and editors, so this should be working correctly. Next, scroll to the bottom of the document. You should see the correct category listed (see '''Fig 2'''); we’ll discuss more categories below. This will either be “Written by First Last” or “Edited by First Last.” This link, too, should be blue.

=== Author Bio ===
As I mentioned above, the <code>{{tl|byline}}</code> connects with the author’s bio. As of this writing, all bios should be posted, so there is no need to do anything further.

{{Quote box|width=100%|align=center|title=Using Your Sandbox for Remediation|
The rest of the steps below could (should?) happen in your sandbox. This is a space where you can remediate (make edits and errors) without publishing to the main space. This way, you avoid unwanted attention until you are ready to transfer your article to it proper place. You can access your personal sandbox by clicking “Sandbox” on the top-right of this (and every) page. Put <code><nowiki>{{user sandbox|plain=yes}}</nowiki></code> at the top of your sandbox. This will put a banner on the top of your page notifying other users they are looking at your draft space.

I recommend this approach. Incomplete articles in the main space are fine; articles with errors should ''never'' appear there. A solid approach would be to edit (clean up typos, add references, tweak formatting, etc.) in your sandbox, then transfer each paragraph to the main space. After each paragraph, preview your article to see that you did not inadvertently introduce any errors. After a few paragraphs, save your work. With this approach, you can save a lot of time and potential headaches. For example, if you transfer an entire article from your sandbox, you might get a reference error. Tracking this down becomes much more difficult. If transfer by paragraph, then errors become much easier to identify and fix.
}}

== Body ==
[[File:Mr-orig.jpg|thumb|400px|'''Fig 3'''. Original PDF. Copy the paragraph.]] [[File:Mr-errors.jpg|thumb|400px|'''Fig 4'''. Errors indicated.]] [[File:Mr-corrected.jpg|thumb|400px|'''Fig 5'''. Errors Fixed.]]
Here is where you remediate from PDF (essentially the printed page) to the wiki. Adding the body of the article will take the most effort and attention to detail, as many typos are introduced into the digital text as part of the PDF creation process. I recommend proceeding paragraph by paragraph, as pasting the whole essay into the article and then trying to edit it will just be overwhelming. Take this a step at a time to maximize your attention to perfection.

Open the PDF, highlight and copy a paragraph, paste the paragraph into the editing window, and proofread for errors (see '''Figs. 3–5'''; click the images to enlarge). Common errors include hyphenated words (these will be broken words with a hypen and space), numbers, lack of necessary text decoration like italics, missing spaces, and superfluous print information like page numbers. All of these must be corrected. Use the original PDF as your guide. All text needs to be verbatim and look as much like the original document as possible.

Once the paragraph is finished, hit return twice (skip a line between paragraphs) and start the next one. Repeat this process until the end of the document.

{{notice|Most articles that cite sources will do so using MLA style, so parenthetical citations will appear in the text. These must be remediated to the format we use for the web version. See [[#Sourcing|Sourcing]] below for instructions on using shortened footnotes. For instructions on inserting explanatory endnotes, see [[#End Notes|Endnotes]].}}

=== Block Quotations ===
Many articles use block quotation when quoting longer passages of primary texts. Just paste in the quotation like you would a paragraph, then surround it with the <code><nowiki><blockqoute> . . . </blockquote></nowiki></code> tags, for example:

<code><nowiki><blockquote>To the savage, dread was the natural result of any invasion of the supernatural: if man wished to steal the secrets of the gods, it was only to be supposed that the gods would defend themselves and destroy whichever man came too close. By this logic, civilization is the successful if imperfect theft of some cluster of these secrets, and the price we have paid is to accelerate our private sense of some enormous if not quite definable disaster which awaits us.{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=159}}</blockquote></nowiki></code>

Note this quotation contains a citation—as all quotations should; see [[#Sourcing|Sourcing]] below for an explanation.

=== Images ===
Most articles will not contain images. However, for those that do, see [[The Mailer Review/Volunteer/Advanced Editing|Advanced Editing]].

=== Page Numbers ===
In order to aid researchers who still rely on the conventions of print culture, we will insert page numbers on our articles as they appear in the print version. For this use the <code>{{tl|pg}}</code> template, like:

<code><nowiki>{{pg|first page #|next page #}}</nowiki></code>

For example, indicating a page break after page 203 would look like:

<code><nowiki>{{pg|203|204}}</nowiki></code>

This code can be inserted directly in a paragraph. See [[The Mailer Review/Volume 1, 2007/An American Dream: The Singular Nightmare|this article]] for an example.

== Endnotes ==
This section houses an author’s explanatory endnotes or footnotes, like the “Notes” section at the bottom of this page. Notes may be inserted in the body of the text, using <code>{{tl|efn}}</code>, for example:

<code><nowiki>. . .opportunity with a "lady's magazine",{{efn|In ''Double Life'', Lennon explains that Pearl Kazin, an editor at ''Harper's Bazaar'' had invited Mailer to write something for the magazine, to which Mailer replied: "I'm still too young and too arrogant to care to write the kind of high-grade horseshit you print in ''Harper's Bazaar''" (142–43).}} Mailer conceived . . .</nowiki></code>

This note will be indicated by a superscript, small letter, like [a] —except it will be a hyperlink. Now, you must have place for these notes to be listed near the end of the document, just above the Citations section:

<code><nowiki>=== Notes ===</nowiki> 
<nowiki>{{notelist}}</nowiki></code>

See [[The Mailer Review/Volume 9, 2015/“Up to the Nostrils in Anguish”: Mailer and Bellow on Masculine Anxiety and Violent Catharsis|this article]] for another, more complex example. For a more thorough discussion of this function, see [[w:Template:Efn|Template:Efn]] on Wikipedia.

This code is only used for notes, not citations. For citations, read on.

== Sourcing ==
There are two approaches to sourcing, depending on the complexity of the author’s citations. If the article has just a handful of sources that are cited sparingly, you might just include them in the body of the article and just use a “Citations” section at the end of the document. If there are '''many sources''' that are '''cited multiple times''', you should have a “Citations” section and a “Works Cited” section and use the '''shortened footnotes''' approach. Most articles will use the latter approach.

Please note: some articles, particularly creative pieces, transcripts, and some essays will not cite any secondary sources. If this is the case, then this section on sourcing may be skipped.

=== Works Cited ===
A list of works cited should be the last section in the document. It is sorted alphabetically by author’s last name and uses [[w:Wikipedia:Citation templates|citation templates]]. This is easier for two reasons: (1) you only need to list the reference '''once''' in the article, and (2) it cleans up your body text of much of the confusing code. This section is created like this:

<code><nowiki>===Works Cited===</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>{{Refbegin}}</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>* {{cite book |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |location= |publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>* {{cite journal |last= |first= |title= |url= |journal= |volume= |issue= |date= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>* {{cite magazine |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>* {{cite news |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>* {{cite web |url= |title= |last= |first= |date= |website= |publisher= |access-date= |quote= |ref=harv }}</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>{{Refend}}</nowiki></code> 

This might look a bit confusing, but I’ll go through it. The first line adds a new section to the article. All references should appear between <code><nowiki>{{Refbegin}}</nowiki></code> and <code><nowiki>{{Refend}}</nowiki></code> in a bulleted list (notice each reference is on its own line and begins with <code><nowiki>*</nowiki></code>.

These codes are for the main types of references you will likely need (these links go to expanded instructions on Wikipedia): [[w:Template:Cite book|book]], [[w:Template:Cite journal|journal]], [[w:Template:Cite magazine|magazine]], [[w:Template:Cite news|news]], and [[w:Template:Cite web|web]].{{efn|All citation codes and explanation for the variables may be found on “[[w:Wikipedia:Citation templates|Citation Templates]].”}} Notice many of the codes contain similar elements, but one in particular '''must be used''' for our shortened footnotes technique to work: <code><nowiki>ref=harv</nowiki></code> — I usually put this at the end. This code for the [[w:Template:Harvard citation|Harvard citation]] and points a shortened footnote to the detailed bibliographic entry.

Feel free to copy and paste these codes from above into your article. Just fill in the details.

=== In-text Citations ===
For in-text citations, what will usually appear as MLA-style parenthetical, we use [[w:Template:Sfn|shortened footnotes]] <code><nowiki>{{sfn}}</nowiki></code>. First, add a section where your citations will appear, just above your works cited section:

<code><nowiki>===Citations===</nowiki></code> 
<code><nowiki>{{Reflist}}</nowiki></code>

Here’s an example of the shortened footnote at work in the body of the article:

<code><nowiki>. . . first published in ''New Short Novels 2'', 1956.{{sfn|Lennon|2018|p=25}}</nowiki></code>

This is a Wikipedia template. “Sfn” calls the template in the code; the author’s last name follows the first pipe (this must correspond with the name that follows <code><nowiki>|last=</nowiki></code> in the detailed citation in your works cited list); the year of the publication follows the next (exactly the same as <code><nowiki>|date=</nowiki></code> in the citation); and the page number(s) are put last. This will insert a footnote in the text; when a user clicks it, she is taken to the citation and if she clicks the citation, she is taken to the longer works cited entry. Rendered on the page, it will look like:

. . . first published in ''New Short Novels 2'', 1956.{{sfn|Lennon|2018|p=25}}

Notice its placement of the footnote code: '''right up against the period with no space in between'''. Footnote indications should always come ''after'' punctuation; never before. Try it on the example article I linked above. Simple and elegant.

See the [[w:Template:Sfn|Template:Sfn]] on Wikipedia for more options and explanation.

== Footer ==
Add the ''Review'' footer with the code <code>{{tl|Review}}</code> on a line by itself. This will insert the volume navigation information box.

== Sort ==
Since all of the ''Review'' articles are located on subpages, we have to tell the system how to sort them. This is done using the <code><nowiki>{{DEFAULTSORT:xx}}</nowiki></code> code. Copy the code into the bottom of the article just above the categories (see below) and replace <code><nowiki>xx</nowiki></code> with the name of the article ''excluding'' journal name, volume information, and any beginning articles. For example, if the full article was named <code><nowiki>The Mailer Review/Volume 10, 2016/The Curious Story of Norman Mailer’s Engagement with Short Fiction</nowiki></code>, you would just use <code><nowiki>The Curious Story of Norman Mailer’s Engagement with Short Fiction</nowiki></code> and put the <code><nowiki>The</nowiki></code> on the end, like: <code><nowiki>{{DEFAULTSORT:Curious Story of Norman Mailer’s Engagement with Short Fiction, The}}</nowiki></code>. This instructs the system to sort this article under C in category indexes.

For more information, see [[w:Template:DEFAULTSORT|Template:DEFAULTSORT]] on Wikipedia.

== Categories ==
Article categories are classified as follows. Choose the most appropriate for the article you’re remediating:

* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Articles (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
** <code><nowiki>[[Category:Classic Interpretations (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Biographies (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Interviews (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Book Reviews (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Bibliographies (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Tributes (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Creative Works (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
** <code><nowiki>[[Category:Short Stories (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
** <code><nowiki>[[Category:Poetry (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
** <code><nowiki>[[Category:Plays (MR)]]</nowiki></code>
** <code><nowiki>[[Category:Excerpts (MR)]]</nowiki></code>

Most of the time, you will only select '''one''' category for your article. The indented categories are subcategories of the those above them. For more information on categories, see [[w:Help:Category|Help:Category]] and [[w:Wikipedia:Categorization|Wikipedia:Categorization]] on Wikipedia.

== Finish Up ==
When you complete your remediation, post a message to my [[User talk:Grlucas|talk page]] for final review. Be sure to include a link to the article. When I have checked it, I will remove the {{tl|Working}} banner and remain forever grateful for your assistance in making Project Mailer better.

== Notes ==
{{notelist}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Remediating Articles}}
[[Category:For Editors]]

Template:BookReview/doc

2025-04-10T15:30:17Z

Jules Carry: Created page with "This template formats bibliographic and reviewer information for a book under review. It is designed for use in review pages or entries and floats a metadata box on the right-hand side. === Usage === Place the following code on your review page and fill in the appropriate fields: <pre> {{BookReviewBox | title = The Metaphysical Club | author = Louis Menand | location= New York | pub = Farrar, Straus and Giroux | date = 2001 | pages = 546 pp. | type..."

This template formats bibliographic and reviewer information for a book under review. It is designed for use in review pages or entries and floats a metadata box on the right-hand side.

=== Usage ===
Place the following code on your review page and fill in the appropriate fields:

<pre>
{{BookReviewBox
| title = The Metaphysical Club
| author = Louis Menand
| location= New York
| pub = Farrar, Straus and Giroux
| date = 2001
| pages = 546 pp.
| type = Hardback
| price = 27.00
| note = Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
| first = Jane
| last = Doe
| link = https://example.com/purchase
| url = https://example.com/full-review
}}
</pre>

=== Parameters ===
; <code>title</code> : ''(required)'' The title of the book, which will be italicized.
; <code>author</code> : ''(required)'' Full name of the author of the book being reviewed.
; <code>location</code> : ''(required)'' City of publication.
; <code>pub</code> : ''(required)'' Publisher's name.
; <code>date</code> : ''(required)'' Year of publication.
; <code>pages</code> : ''(required)'' Total number of pages, e.g., "320 pp."
; <code>type</code> : ''(required)'' Book format (e.g., Paperback, Hardback, Cloth).
; <code>price</code> : ''(required)'' Book price, entered as a number (e.g., "24.95").
; <code>note</code> : ''(optional)'' Any additional note (e.g., awards, notable facts).
; <code>first</code> : ''(required)'' First name of the reviewer.
; <code>last</code> : ''(required)'' Last name of the reviewer.
; <code>link</code> : ''(optional)'' URL for purchasing the book. Displayed as "Link for purchase."
; <code>url</code> : ''(optional)'' URL to the full review. Displayed as "Full review."

=== Category Added ===
This template automatically categorizes the review page in the following ways:
* <code><nowiki>[[Category:Written by FIRST LAST]]</nowiki></code>

These help organize reviews for browsing and indexing by author, publisher, year, and reviewer.

=== Notes ===
* If no optional fields are filled in, they will not appear.
* The reviewer name is automatically linked to a page titled "First Last."

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine Heavyweight

2025-04-07T14:31:45Z

Jules Carry: /* Works Cited */ You needn't format titles when using templates.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Norman Mailer: ''Playboy Magazine'' Heavyweight}}
{{Working}}
{{MR05}}

{{byline|last=Mitchell|first=Taylor Joy|abstract= Essay by Taylor Joy Mitchell about Norman Mailer's role as a ''Playboy'' Magazine Heavyweight}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine Heavyweight}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

ALTHOUGH SOMETIMES PURCHASED BECAUSE OF A PLAYMATE’ S ALLURE, most ''Playboy'' magazines get read cover-to-cover, confirming the quip “I buy it for the articles.” Because less than ten percent of each issue contains nudity, the majority of monthly pages are well-known editorial features, such as the ''Playboy'' Advisor or the ''Playboy'' Interview, advice columns, cultural commentary, humor and literary selections. Using ''Esquire'' as a model, Hugh Hefner published fiction to position ''Playboy'' as more than a mere “skin-magazine.” Hefner juxtaposed the nude pictorials with literature because he believed that, for proper stimulation, both the mind and body should be addressed. The quantity of fiction published in ''Playboy'' is astonishing, making fiction the single largest component of the magazine. In just its first year of publication, from December 1953 to 1954, ''Playboy'' devoted 168 pages to literary selections, over thirty percent of its content.{{sfn|Lambkin|1999|p=12}} In the 1960s the magazine maintained over 200-page issues and published elite critics and authors such as Alfred Kazin, William F. Buckley, Leslie Fiedler, Ray Bradbury, James Baldwin, and Vladimir Nabokov. Most of ''Playboy’s'' fiction is either written by popular, contemporary authors or can be classified as a parody by an unknown author of a famous story. The cultural currency of contemporary authors or familiar narratives helped sell copies—by 1973, ''Playboy’s'' paid circulation peaked at seven million per month.{{sfn|Pitzulo|2011|p=12}} ''Playboy'' editors particularly sought out authors or fictional selections that would help them re-masculinize the act of reading in the midst of the Cold War gender debates. To fulfill this objective, editors first looked to Ernest Hemingway because the Hemingway code hero exemplifies the quintessential Playboy qualities—strong, adventuresome, educated, and womanizing {{pg|199|200}}

Then, after his death in 1961, Playboy used Hemingway’s obvious successor— Norman Mailer.

In 1956, Hefner hired ''Playboy’s'' first renowned literary editor, Auguste Comte Spectorsky, an up-and-coming journalist, for the express purpose of elevating the magazine’s literary content. Hefner considered Spectorsky “a real heavyweight” because of his literary talents and East Coast connections. Spectorsky’s ''The Exurbanites'' had recently reached the Best Sellers list, and he had the literary connections needed to “upgrade” ''Playboy’s'' fiction.{{sfn|Fraterrigo|2009|p=32}} Once on the editorial board, Spectorsky began recruiting personal friends to contribute the magazine. He solicited fiction and non-fiction pieces from Ken Purdy, Philip Wylie, Vance Packard, and John Steinbeck. Even if Hefner and Spectorsky did not always agree on lifestyle choices, they were both committed to producing a virile, high-culture publication. Hefner’s vision was to embellish and surround sex with the trappings of high culture. Spectorsky, on the other hand, wanted to “reinvent sophisticated culture itself by bracketing it with heterosexual desire.”{{sfn|Gilbert|2005|p=207}} Combining nude pictorials with good writing and sophisticated advertising allowed ''Playboy'' the opportunity to re-masculinize both reading and consumerism, two activities that were supposedly feminized during the post-war era.

Spectorsky viewed ''Playboy'' as his platform to “redefine male readers as ‘whole men’.”{{sfn|Gilbert|2005|p=207}} He wrote:

<blockquote> Each issue is a tacit statement to [readers] that they are responsive to fine fiction and to pretty girls; to Lucullan dining and drinking and to serious articles and interviews that bear directly or philosophically on today’s serious issues; to sports cars and classical music, jazz, fashion, the struggle for civil rights, bachelor high-life, and the world of business and finance.{{sfn|Gilbert|2005|p=207}} </blockquote>

Spectorsky sincerely believed that ''Playboy'' was a viable vehicle from which to “preach” his literary tastes. For Spectorsky, the literary selections would provide readers an outlet for discussing the pertinent issues of the day, affording them the knowledge needed for sophisticated conversations.

It was important to Spectorsky to devise clear guidelines to ensure that the literature of ''Playboy'' would celebrate a particular kind of masculinity. These {{pg|200|201}}

literary guidelines suggest that Hefner and Spectorsky believed that literary selections were a crucial component of the ethos of ''Playboy.'' Spectorsky instructed his fiction staff to discard any “castration-defeat-doom stories” in favor of “Hemingway heroes . . . who deal with the world instead of cringing and having high-tone failures.”{{sfn|Gilbert|2005|p=208}} Spectorsky also based much of his criteria for quality fiction on Hemingway’s writing style—clear, economical prose, machismo or womanizing, rich imagery, and simple, albeit vigorous, word choice. Using Hemingway, the author and the man, to advertise the magazine’s commitment to masculinity, Spectorsky helped resurrect the masculine, intellectual man during the 1950s gender debates.

In order to promote ''Playboy’s'' macho literary persona and maintain a heavy dose of Hemingway, Spectorsky commissioned Norman Mailer for various publications. For instance, the January 1963 issue contains a special portfolio on “man’s politics and sport, his business and pleasure, his competition and credo” that couples Hemingway’s “A Man’s Credo” with Mailer’s debate on right-wing American politics. And, in the laudatory introduction to the ''Playboy'' Interview with Norman Mailer, the editors claim that “Mailer is as colorful and publicized as any writer since Ernest Hemingway” (69, Jan. 1968). Featuring Hemingway first, followed by Mailer, ''Playboy'' editors could assure readers that elite literature would not negate readers’ masculinity. Spectorsky could easily use Mailer in this capacity because of the multiple themes and concerns connecting these literary giants, including their iconoclastic status.

As articles in the 2010 issue of the ''Norman Mailer Review'' illustrate, the connections between Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer range from bullfights to multiple wives. Erik Nakjavani argues that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer was so acute that the younger author “came to ''embody'' Hemingway’s influence, identifying with him” and developing affinities with him.{{sfn|Nakjavani|2010|p=161–191}} Scholars such as J. Michael Lennon, James Meredith, Mark Cirino, and Barry Leeds prove that themes of boxing, war, violence, and firearms unite two of the most famous twentieth-century century writers. Constructing female characters as objects also links them. In “Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman,” Mimi Gladstein chronicles how both authors became “favorite whipping boys for feminist critics” for creating a “certain kind of fantasy woman, a projection of autoerotic impulses, by which they allow themselves, imaginatively, privileges that they did not have in life.”{{sfn|Gladstein|2010|p=288-289}} And, in “Hemingway, Mailer, {{pg|201|202}}

and the ‘Reds’,” Victor Peppard rightly asserts that their common interests are “no secret.” Both authors were preoccupied with “macho tests of manhood.” Hemingway’s interests included hunting big game, boxing, and bullfights, and while Mailer was “more of a boxer than a bullfighter . . . he was always a battler whatever the arena.”{{sfn|Peppard|2010|p=227}} Tests of manhood often appear in their respective works and they both became controversial cultural figures in their personal lives. Both continue to loom over the American cultural landscape because of their notoriety and literary achievements.

Hemingway’s literary presence dictated much of ''Playboy’s'' editorial content, even though his words appeared minimally in the magazine. According to Thomas Weyr’s ''Reaching for Paradise'', Hefner desperately wanted to include a Hemingway original in the inaugural 1953 issue.{{sfn|Weyr|1978|p=10}} Yet due to the magazine’s content and budgetary restraints—''Playboy’s'' first issue’s editorial content only cost $2,000—Hefner could not obtain the Hemingway, John O’Hara, or James Thurber pieces he so desired.{{sfn|Weyr|1978|p=10}} ''The New Yorker'' “haughtily” refused to sell Hefner reprint rights for a Thurber piece and Hemingway’s publisher rejected Hefner’s request “because his magazine had not ‘demonstrated its character.’”{{sfn|Miller|1985|p=35}} It would take three years and over 300,000 subscribers until Hefner and Spectorsky could include Hemingway’s presence in the magazine. They commissioned Jed Kiley for his unauthorized Hemingway biography, which was serialized over eight issues. Beginning with the first installment of Kiley’s “Hemingway: A Title Bout in Ten Rounds,” Hefner and Spectorsky added to the myths of Papa. In the September 1956 “Playbill,” editors proclaimed Hemingway as a man of “unimpeachable morals” and possibly the “greatest writer in the world”(4). Editors reminded readers that Hemingway has, for many years, “hit the bottle, tum- bled wenches” and “enjoyed such organized carnage as war and bullfighting” (2). Quick to dismiss his actions as neither immoral nor sinful, editors described Hemingway as a cheater of death who became “a scarred and bearded American legend, a Great White Hunter, a husband of four wives, a winner of Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes” (2). They quoted Kazin’s praise of Hemingway as “the bronze god of the whole contemporary literary experience in America” (2). But what seems most important about the Hemingway myth is that he hails from a Midwest, middle-class family—the same family history as Hefner and many ''Playboy'' readers. His roots and eventual fame make Hemingway the quintessential ''Playboy'' author: growing out of middle- class America and a devoutly Christian home, Hemingway became “the {{pg|202|203}}

hard-drinking, death-happy . . . swaggering, irresponsible author of bestselling Hollywood fodder” (2). This image of Hemingway, a Midwestern everyman turned courageous, financially successful, and intellectual, sup- ports the grand narrative ''Playboy'' presented for its readers—every male has the potential to get the woman of his choice if he works hard, participates in capitalism, and reads quality fiction.

''Playboy'' editors amplified the Hemingway myth throughout the 1960s. In January 1961, ''Playboy'' published “Hemingway Speaks his Mind,” quotations from a variety of Hemingway’s collected works. Editors thoroughly searched Hemingway’s works for scraps of prose that would suggest that his life style mimics those of a Playboy. Introduced as “a philosophy of life,” ''Playboy'' used this four-page feature to present Hemingway as an honorary Playboy (95, Jan. 1961). There are quoted topics range from musings on Cuban women to his many cats, but the myth of the man that emerges is one of strength and smarts. For instance, Hemingway’s observations about war, being hit with a mortar shell, drinking, boxing, bullfighting, cooking a lion steak, deep-sea fishing, gate-crashing, and cursing remind readers of his masculine persona. His ruminations on hunting are particularly insightful: “You must be calm inside, as if you were in church, when a lion or a rhino is coming at you” (96, Jan. 1961). Hemingway’s use of the second person oddly addresses ''Playboy'' readers, in the comforts of their suburban homes or urban bachelor pads.

Hemingway’s quotations concerning sexual relationships also support the ''Playboy'' lifestyle. In “On Love,” for example, Hemingway writes that love is “an old word, and each man takes it new and wears it out himself” (96, Jan. 1961). This musing suggests that each man observes relationships differently—those Playboys that reject the monogamous life of the nuclear family can still find their own kind of love. In this passage, Hemingway blesses male readers to wear out their own version of love. Even in his dreams, Hemingway was the spitting image of a Playboy: “In my nocturnal wanderings I am always between twenty-five and thirty years old and am irresistible to women, dogs, and on one occasion, to a very beautiful lioness, who subsequently became my fiancée” (96, Jan. 1961). As tamers of women, dogs, and wild cats, readers could model their behavior on Hemingway’s actions in order to obtain their next catch. The things Hemingway deemed good are equivalent to what ''Playboy'' readers should want: wine, bread, bed, early mornings, the sea, women, love, and honor (97). In this list, Hemingway {{pg|203|204}}

conflates necessities, like food and sleep, with amenities like women and early mornings. Much of ''Playboy’s'' editorial content, like its monthly Playmate, promoted similar notions—sex and honor were both necessary and attainable.

After the success of “Hemingway Speaks his Mind,” ''Playboy'' continued to use the myth of Hemingway to advance its literary selections and grand narrative. Editors even applied parodies of Hemingway’s famous titles to pictorials and satire pieces. For example, in the July 1961 issue editors published Barry Spacks’s “For Whom the Booth Tolls.” Editors meticulously labeled Spacks’s work “outrageous” in its “attention getting (and moneymaking) device” (5). Unlike satires and parodies of other authors, editors were careful to honor Hemingway. Later that same year, Spectorsky serialized Hemingway’s first authorized biography. Spectorsky paid a reported $25,000—approximately equivalent to $160,000 in current U.S. dollars— for the serialization rights.{{sfn|Hale|n.d.}} Beginning in December 1961, Leicester Hemingway’s “My Brother Ernest,” spanned four issues and over sixty pages. Published only eight months after Hemingway’s suicide, “My Brother Ernest” received favorable reviews from ''Playboy'' readers. The text was later expanded, published by Pineapple Press, and reached the ''New York Times'' list of 100 outstanding books for summer reading in 1962. ''Playboy'' continued the Hemingway trend with “Papa and the Playwright,” a review of Hemingway and Tennessee Williams, Evgeny Evtushenko’s “Meeting with Hemingway,” Patrick Hemingway’s “My Papa, Papa” and Hemingway’s only play, ''“The Fifth Column.”''

Readers responded so well to the Hemingway material that Spectorsky published Hemingway’s “Advice to Young Men” in 1964. Consisting of previously unpublished observations on some of the ground rules of life and literature, this piece is eerily similar to the earlier “Hemingway Speaks His Mind,” sans the heavy dose of observation on traditional masculine activities like boxing, big-game hunting, and fishing. The main focus of “Advice to a Young Man” was on the art of writing and responding to critics. In this piece, Hemingway shared his wisdom on other topics, most notably education, achieving success, happiness, living with honor, prejudice, death, faith, and the future. The feature concludes with a Hemingway quotation that reinforces ''Playboy’s'' call for its readers: “All the glory of life, all the romance of living, all the deep and true joys of the world, all the splendor and the mystery are within our reach” (225, Jan. 1965). Hemingway’s posthumous advice {{pg|204|205}}

echoes the ''Playboy'' stance on working hard to enjoy the products of capital- ism with a female companion.
Relying so heavily on Hemingway allowed Spectorsky to “advertise the magazine’s commitment to masculinity.” {{sfn|Gilbert|2005|p=209}} His “reputation as a literary tough guy” had been well established in the 1930s.{{sfn|Osgerby|2001|p=45}} ''Esquire'' proudly featured Hemingway for his “rough-hewn machismo,” even offering him one thousand shares of stock in 1937.{{sfn|Osgerby|2001|p=47}} Due to Hefner’s relationship with ''Esquire'' and Spectorsky’s desire to remasculinize readers, Hemingway became the obvious “godfather” for the journal during the early Cold War. Rather than publish what Spectorsky deemed literature of “morass incense and butterflies and Spanish moss, of ''précieuse'' style and hyperfine imagery,” ''Playboy'' published what it considered to be elite, although accessible, fiction for its masculine audience (2, Sept. 1956). It did not want any writers too busy “exploring stylistic jungles”; instead, it wanted Hemingway, “perhaps because he has trekked many a real jungle in his life” (4, Sept. 1956). Spectorsky claimed that he wanted to veer away from stories likely published by ''The New Yorker'', stories that reflected what he called a “womanized,” “neurotic,” and “castrating world.”{{sfn|Gilbert|2005|p=208}} He promoted Hemingway’s attributes because he knew that ''Playboy'' “was surely” to “get literally hundreds of ‘fine’ stories a month which are intricate embroidery on the motto: The Sensitive Misfit is a More Interesting Man and a worthier Topic than the The Man Who Fulfils His Masculine Destiny.”{{sfn|Gilbert|2005|p=208}} Instead of wasting time reviewing stories about sensitive misfits or mutilated heroes, Spectorsky wanted Hemingway heroes.

And yet, ironically, Hemingway’s heroes are often castrated in one way or another. While many of Hemingway’s characters are “real” men on the battlefield or on the hunting grounds, they could also be classified as androgynous in terms of their sexuality. In ''Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism'', Richard Fantina reappraises the foundations of the old Hemingway myth of machismo and argues that his fiction’s “greatest legacy” may be the “embodiment of diverse models of masculinity.”{{sfn|Fantina|2005|p=3}} Well before Hemingway scholars revised perceptions of him as the ultimate American macho man in the 1990s, ''Playboy'' editors subtly address misgivings about Heming- way’s sexuality. In the same “Playbill” that praises him in comparison to other contemporary writers as a “standing out like a rugged oak in a field of delicate pansies,” editors call Hemingway “sexually insecure.”{{sfn|Fantina|2005|p=2}} Why would ''Playboy'' editors admit this in the same announcement that begins over a {{pg|205|206}}

decade of Hemingway contributions? Why would a magazine, striving to push its heterosexual agenda on middle-class American men, place such precedence on a sexually insecure author? Quite possibly, Spectorsky assumed his readership would miss the subtle classification. Maybe Spectorsky only published Hemingway non-fiction to avoid the obvious contradictions. Or, and more likely, the myth of the man and the Hemingway code looms larger than fiction.

Similar to its heralding of Hemingway, ''Playboy'' relied on the cultural myths surrounding Mailer. Beyond his combative prose, controversial comments, and wife stabbing, Mailer presides over American literature “longer and larger than any writer of his generation.”{{sfn|McGrath|2007}} The “most transparently ambitious author of his era,” Mailer was a prolific author, social commentator, and cultural provocateur.{{sfn|McGrath|2007}} He cofounded ''The Village Voice'', won the Pulitzer Prize twice, ran for New York City Mayor, married six different women, fathered eight children (and adopted a ninth), directed films, appeared on talk-shows, and participated in many interviews, making the Mailer name a household one. In short, Mailer’s ever-present, masculine persona, ambition, and the immense quantity of his work make him an appropriate Playboy contributor. Like Hemingway in the 1930s, Mailer had already established his tough-guy persona by the end of the 1950s. The violence in his war novel, ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948), and the obscenity in ''The Deer Park'' (1959) set the stage for Mailer’s 1959 ''Advertisements for Myself'': “a tough-guy writer’s apologia for his literary life.”{{sfn|Castronovo|2003|p=180}} In his life and literature, Mailer can stand in as a Hemingway hero, especially because Mailer lacked Hemingway’s ambiguous sexuality. Mailer consistently conducted himself with grace under pressure through the various tumults in his career. Thus, ''Playboy'' editors, from Spectorsky to Christine Hefner, frequently published Mailer to connect with their male readers. When reviewed as a body of work, Mailer’s multiple Playboy contributions reflect the historical shifts in post-war masculinity constructions, the same changes ''Playboy’s'' editorials depict. As a popular author with staggering amounts of testosterone present in his best-selling fiction, Mailer’s virile image fits comfortably into ''Playboy’s'' agenda. Beginning with an “After Hours” Book Review reference to ''The Deer Park'' in January 1958, and lasting to the publication of his conversation with Michael Lennon, “On the Authority of the Senses,” in December 2007, Mailer contributed directly to ''Playboy'' on seventeen occasions. Mailer’s numerous appearances in the magazine {{pg|206|207}}

range from panelist to cultural critic. ''Playboy'' paid him $5,000 to reprint his debate with William F. Buckley and, in 1967, Mailer offered ''Playboy'' his essay on bullfighting. Then, in 1975, he wrote over 28,000 words on the prizefight between Ali and Foreman, which ''Playboy'' published in two installments (with rare illustrations). He continued to offer the magazine selections on sports and politics at the turn of the century. In 2004 ''Playboy'' published Mailer’s “Immodest Proposals,” a call to American voters to review the government’s handling of war, welfare, imprisonment, abortion, gay-marriage, and foreign policy. ''Playboy'' posthumously published “A Man of Letters” in January 2009 to honor Mailer. The byline to the feature reads, “A literary giant’s correspondence on Hollywood, celebrity, and society shows him to be a critic and crusader, pugilist and poet” (70, Jan. 2007). The simple eulogy for a poetic boxer sums up why ''Playboy'' continued to rely on Mailer for his nonfiction and fiction contributions: Mailer’s persona represented ''Playboy’s'' commitment to masculinity and intellect.

Although an apropos ''Playboy'' author, Mailer’s relationship with ''Playboy'' involved lawsuits coupled with considerable praise. After ''Playboy'' editors paid Mailer for the essay report on the Buckley’s debates, Mailer sued ''Playboy'' on the grounds that his essay was worth more than the paid sum.{{sfn|Buckley|2010}} Mailer also wrote to the editors, denouncing them for labeling him a liberal: “I don’t care if people call me a radical, a red, a revolutionary, an outsider, an outlaw, a Bolshevik, an anarchist, a nihilist or even a left conservative, but please don’t ever call me a liberal” (8, April 1963). And later, in 1975, Elmo Henderson sued ‘’Playboy’’ for publishing “The Fight,” in which Mailer created the factoid that Henderson had been in an insane asylum.{{sfn|Manso|2008|p=560}} But according to one of ''Playboy’s'' executive editors, Arthur Kretchmer, Mailer was “a long-run investment.”{{sfn|Manso|2008|p=561}} In an excerpt from Peter Manso’s ''Mailer: His Life and Times’’, Kretchmer explains how ''Playboy'' did not “function on pornography or ''Enquirer''-like sensationalism. It functioned on the fact that people who read ''Playboy'' have a certain sense of upscale events, and Norman’s part of that psychology.”{{sfn|Manso|2008|p=561}} By distancing ''Playboy from Enquirer'', Kretchmer suggests that ''Playboy'' readers are much more sophisticated than those that read either sensational or pornographic media. Mailer’s contributions, then, are used to elevate the magazine’s content. In the 1970s, Kretchmer wanted to publish a magazine that {{pg|207|208}}

<blockquote>reflect[s] what’s going on in America … and that magazine has to have Norman because it’s a different world without Norman. ''Playboy'' with Norman is a magazine of the moment, of impact. Powerfully, incontestably, Norman has tried to express our era. He looks through infinity and says, ‘Who are we? What have we done? What can be done?’ {{sfn|Manso|2008|p=561}} </blockquote>

Kretchmer’s insights implies that both ''Playboy'' and Mailer worked to articulate America’s cultural concerns, and because of that shared objective, ''Playboy'' editors dismissed the legal trouble in favor of a working relationship with Mailer.

Kretchmer seems beguiled by Mailer, but other magazine editors, like William Phillips of the ''Partisan Review'' and Gordon Lish from ''Esquire'', also solicited work from Mailer. Based on his growing fame, ''Esquire'' accepted Mailer’s offer to write a monthly column, “The Big Bite,” which ran from November 1962 to December 1963.{{sfn|Dearborn|2001|p=179}} Clay Felker, ''Esquire'' editor, claimed that he assigned Mailer to write about Jackie Kennedy because “at ''Esquire'' we loved to start fights” and hiring Mailer to write about the First Lady immediately after he had stabbed his wife was “obvious.”{{sfn|Manso|2008|p=353}} The enthusiasm surrounding Mailer as a magazine contributor was only reinforced when his “The Prisoner of Sex” (1971) sold more copies of ''Harper’s'' than any other issue in the magazine’s history.{{sfn|Manso|2008|p=462}}

Like Kretchmer’s praise for the author, Mailer’s praise for the ''Playboy'' empire and its founding editor seemed equally enthusiastic. When covering the Liston-Patterson fights, Mailer stayed at the ''Playboy'' mansion and recorded his first impressions of an after-hours ''Playboy'' party. After detailing the mansion’s exaggerated dimensions, Mailer compared Hefner to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s archetypal, white, male American hero: “one never saw one’s host except for once or twice in some odd hour of the night. He had a quality not unlike Jay Gatsby, he looked and talked like a lean, rather modest cowboy of middle size; there was something of a mustang about Hefner.”{{sfn|Miller|1985|p=130}} Mailer claimed that Hefner was “not the kind of man one would have expected to see as the publisher of his magazine, or the owner of the Playboy Club, nor certainly as the undemanding host of his exceptional establishment.”{{sfn|Miller|1985|p=130}} Here, Mailer hints at Hefner’s subtle allure. His unassuming demeanor makes him a surprising candidate for the head of the {{pg|208|209}}

flamboyant ''Playboy'' empire and this exchange of praise reveals how integral cultural myths can be for the success of a mass produced, glossy magazine. ''Playboy'' commissioned Mailer to support its agenda as a with-the-times magazine and to “further gentrif[y]” its heterosexual perception.{{sfn|Schuchardt|2005}} In the first ''Playboy'' “Panel” on “Censorship in Literature and the Arts,” editors introduced Mailer as “among the forefront of individualistic, iconoclastically outspoken American author” (27, July 1961). Throughout the panel exchanges, Mailer lived up to that introduction: he “polemicized against masturbation and argued that open labeling of pornographic literature as such was vital for ‘the health and life of the republic,’ but that pleading its socially redeeming values was not.”{{sfn|Weyr|1978|p=92}} Mailer’s insights on censorship shine amidst the jumbled thinking presented by the other panelists and he was asked to return for the next year’s panel on “The Womanization of America” (June 1962). The panel, which was Spectorsky’s idea, was intended to respond to Philip Wylie’s scathing arguments regarding a supposed power shift between the genders—and Mailer’s career and personal life made him well-suited for the discussion. By 1962 Mailer had published three bestsellers and married three different women.

In the introduction to the seventeen-page panel, ''Playboy'' editors once again refer to Mailer’s iconoclastic status and, throughout the panel discussion, Mailer endorsed Spectorsky’s claim that men are in need of re-masculination. Mailer contended that “women are becoming more selfish, more greedy, less romantic, less warm, more lusty, and more filled with hate” (44, June 1962). However, Mailer did go on to state that male collaboration needed to be accounted for in the gender-role demise. Pinpointing the Cold War as the “certain historical phenomenon” that “allowed penis envy to develop,” Mailer eloquently stated that during these “renaissance” moments in history, there is a tendency for “this coming together of sexes” (134, 139, June 1962). Aware of his audience and the magazine’s heterosexual bias, Mailer immediately reaffirmed his heterosexuality by stating that the increasing numbers of homosexuals during the Cold War can be attributed to a “general loss of faith in the country, faith in the notion of one’s self as a man” (142). Mailer had obviously not lost any faith in himself as a man, so his sexuality and commitment to phallocentric concerns remained intact.

After Mailer’s discerning comments on gender and sexuality, the conversation degraded until Mailer, once again, culturally contextualized the issues. According to Carrie Pitzulo’s study, ''Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual'' {{pg|209|210}}

''Politics of Playboy'', panelists “primarily fixated on inane debates.”{{sfn|Pitzulo|2011|p=31}} For example, in response to ''Playboy’s'' concerns about some females refusing to complete household chores, three of the panelists debate the cost of aprons and the difference between drying and washing dishes. Mailer then stated that “there’s been a shift in the social and biological function of the woman, where she expected . . . not so much to create a home as she is to be an aide-de-camp or staff general to an ambitious opportunist” (49, June 1962). Mailer’s comments, regarding the change in duties for postwar women, hints at the supposed mid-century masculinity crisis—being a blue-collar worker was no longer sufficient for most men. Rather, the stresses of the Cold War and the evolving capitalistic economy forced men to adapt to domineering images of hyper-masculinity. Readers’ responses to the panel, as published in the “Dear ''Playboy''” letters, suggest that Mailer’s statements eclipsed the other panelists. Out of the four published “Dear ''Playboy''” letters that mention the womanization panel, three praise Mailer and the letter from John T. Gosset exclaims that Mailer’s insights “astounded” him (9, September 1962).

At the panel’s conclusion, Mailer reminded ''Playboy'' readers that “masculinity is not something one is born with, but something one gains. And one gains it by winning small battles with honor” (142, June 1962). He warned those American men who fear the destruction of their masculinity to be wary of mass media because it gives an unrealistic view of life. Mailer claimed that the majority of mass media is out to “destroy virility slowly and steadily” (142, June 1962). This argument directly reinforced Spectorsky’s thoughts on the fundamental malaise about masculinity in America, as well as supported his argument that ''Playboy'' is a necessity for American males. American men needed magazines like ''Playboy'' to help combat the insipid depictions of masculinity in the mass media. And ''Playboy'' needed Mailer’s contributions to do so. Mailer’s presence on both panels reinforced his machismo status and added to ''Playboy’s'' cultural currency.

Mailer’s machismo reputation further aligned the author with the ''Playboy'' empire, especially during the battle of the sexes. Both Mailer and the ''Playboy'' enterprise received intense criticism from second-wave feminists. Mailer’s fiction often sparked deserved critique for its objectification of female characters or depiction of sexual violence. In the classic ''Sexual Politics'', Kate Millet analyzes Mailer’s fiction and claims that he was long ago designated a “prisoner of the virility cult.” Mailer’s response to her literary {{pg|210|211}}

criticism, “The Prisoner of Sex,” sparked acrimonious debates, like the very public, 1971 Town Hall debate with feminists Germaine Greer and Jill Johnston. And at the 1986 birthday celebration of the Feminist Writers Guild, attendants played “Pin the Tail on Norman Mailer” in “satiric protest against what they consider his antifeminist writings.”{{sfn|Blades|1986}} In a similar vein, ''Playboy'' has dealt with its own share of feminist critique for the past five decades. From its inception, critics have lambasted the magazine for its centerfold: “it fetishized busty, young bodies for straight male consumption.”{{sfn|Pitzulo|2011|p=35}} ''Playboy'' garnered backlash from feminists, such as Betty Friedan, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Gloria Steinem, as well as anti-pornography activists Gail Dines and Catharine MacKinnon. Steinem published her damning exposé on working conditions at the ''Playboy'' clubs in ''Show'' magazine and faced-off with Hefner for ''McCall’s'' magazine in a lengthy interview in 1970. Copies of ''Playboy'' were tossed into a “freedom trashcan” as part of the 1968 Miss America Pageant protest and ''Playboy'' confronted the feminist movement with its article “Up Against the Wall, Male Chauvinist Pig” (May 1970). Hefner intended the piece to criticize radical feminists, but his condemnation of the militants solidified his—and ''Playboy''’s—reputation as anti-feminist.

''Playboy'' editors balanced the negative attention from Steinem’s experience as a ''Playboy'' Bunny with Mailer’s appreciation of the clubs. Mailer’s presence at the ''Playboy'' clubs and mansion “lent” them “literary and symbolic cachet they have won from few other public personalities.”{{sfn|Weyr|1978|p=78}} In “Ten Thousand Words a Minute,” Mailer does not censure the guests’ egregious behavior toward the female employees, nor does he disapprove of the Bunnies’ attire. Instead, Mailer matter-of-factly states that the club “looked about the way one thought it would look” with corporate executive patrons and Bunnies in all colors.{{sfn|Weyr|1978|p=78}} Whereas Steinem claimed the boning in her bunny costume would have made “Scarlett O’Hara blanch and the entire construction tended to push all available flesh up to the bosom,” Mailer complimented the outfits: the Bunny costume “exaggerated their hips, bound their waist in a ceinture and lifted them into phallic brassiere.”{{sfn|Steinem|1995|p=39}}{{sfn|Weyr|1978|p=78}} In his ''Presidential Papers'', Mailer compares a Bunny’s breasts to the “big bullet[s] on the front bumper of a Cadillac.”{{sfn|Mailer|1963|p=23}} Mailer’s approval of the costume, like his comparison of Hefner to Fitzgerald, captured how editors wanted the culture to view ''Playboy''—as an American icon.

While superficial, his praise for the Bunnies and their uniforms reinforced the growing ''Playboy'' brand, compelling editors to also publish Mailer’s fiction {{pg|211|212}}

Kretchmer classified ''Playboy’''s “dynamics” with Mailer as “interesting” because ''Playboy'' did not publish his fiction “for direct sales.”{{sfn|Manso|2008|p=561}} Unlike other writers, such as Ian Fleming or Joseph Heller, who were understood as more commercial, ''Playboy'' published Mailer “simply” because he is “the most interesting writer, a writer you want to publish if you’re editing a magazine, and whether or not all of ''Playboy''’s readers are going to line up eagerly to buy the issue doesn’t really come into play.”{{sfn|Manso|2008|p=561}} Therefore, including Mailer in the magazine was more about building the ''Playboy'' brand than selling copies. Editors commissioned Mailer, like Hemingway, for his cultural status rather than his literature.

''Playboy'' published only three true fiction selections from Mailer: “Trial of the Warlock” (Dec. 1976), excerpts from ''Ancient Evenings'' (April and May 1983), and “The Changing of the Guard,” (Dec. 1988). Out of these three pieces, ''Ancient Evenings'' is the only work to have received critical attention, much of it mixed. Scholars have often overlooked the “Trial” and “The Changing of the Guard” but ''Playboy'' praised them both as quality, literary selections, even offering the “Trial” the annual $1,000 prize for Best Fiction for 1976 and later republishing the story in its anthology—Playboy ''Stories: The Best of Forty Years of Short Fiction'', edited by Alice K. Turner. And because his machismo fueled much of his fiction, Mailer’s fiction appear to fit Spectorsky’s stringent guidelines for ''Playboy''’s literary selections—masculine, Hemingway heroes, and clear, intellectual prose.

Mailer’s third literary contribution to ''Playboy'', “The Changing of the Guard,” complements all of Spectorsky’s original criteria for quality, virile fiction. The five-page feature represents intellectual machismo at its best: with lines like “it would have blasted her panties clear off her pubes” mingled with literary allusions to Hawthorne, Chaucer, and Fitzgerald, the narrator presents himself as an intellectual who enjoys “getting it on” with his mistress as well as cunnilingus with his wife (197, Dec. 1988). The simple plot, a nameless, first person narrator driving to his wife’s bed after a tryst with his mistress, allows for commentary on word choice, the Cold War, class, love, sex, masculinity, and ethics. The narrator constantly relays his relationship to certain words such as backside (for back of the shore), incest (his wife is his distant cousin), and distinguished (his wife, Kittredge, is “beautiful” in comparison to his “cheerful,” “common” mistress, Chloe). He even clarifies with a parenthetical aside that the “Yankee inn” in which he met his mistress is really “(Let us say: a Yankee-inn-type restaurant run by a Greek)” {{pg|212|213}}

(196, Dec. 1988). This close attention to detail helps develop Mailer’s narrator as an intelligent main character and his occupation, as a spy for the CIA during the intensity of the Cold War, heightens his virility.

In between vulgar recollections of sexual intercourse, Mailer exposes his narrator’s perspicacity with philosophical asides, most notably his diatribe on masculinity. After explaining failed plots to assassinate Fidel Castro, the narrator describes Hugh Tremont Montague, his boss and “guru in ''machismo''” (196, Dec. 1988, emphasis original). Hugh’s hyper-masculinity reflects the “only spiritual art that American men and boys practice dependably”; the narrator claims that “we do not hope to peer into the pond of revelation so much as to pass through the iron gate of virility” (196, Dec. 1988). Hugh also happened to be married to Kittredge. When the narrator began his affair with Kittredge, he felt “like a hermit crab just moved into a more impressive carapace, and waiting to be dislodged” (196, Dec. 1988). Very high echelon in the CIA, Hugh worked with double and triple agents and participated in athletic activities. Hugh was a vision of virility until the narrator witnessed him “stove in at the waist,” after a rock-climbing accident (196, Dec. 1988). Seeing the man that gave him “life courses in grace under pressure” weakened and crying caused an “abrasion on the flesh of memory” (196, Dec. 1988). The narrator reacted to his boss’s demise by forcing his relationship with Kittredge to “climb from the dungeon of its inception” (196, Dec. 1988). The crippling of the narrator’s masculinity model “sentenced” him to maintain their relationship and drove him “spend hours slopping and sliding” on Chloe’s “overfriendly breasts” (197, Dec. 1988). Interspersing Hugh’s crumbling hypermasculinity with explicit sex scenes and intellectual commentary turns the narrator into a Hemingway code hero.

In order to maintain a sense of coherence within the narrator’s stream-of-consciousness, Mailer consistently returns to the icy road metaphor, making the short piece allegorical in nature. For the narrator, the dangers of driving on “a night as terrible as this—with sleet on the cusp of freezing” become inextricably linked with the dangers of monogamy (197, Dec. 1988). Toward the end of the story, the narrator “suddenly” realizes what he had been missing in his marriage: “a wife who could allow you to live not only with herself but with ten other women she could remind you of” (198, Dec. 1988). Mailer abruptly ends the piece with the narrator remembering his pledge of honesty to his wife. The narrator’s unknown plight must have left ''Playboy'' readers questioning the validity of taking a vow, as well as the {{pg|214|215}}

slippery nature of conducting an affair. The story and its ending leave readers with a model of masculinity akin to ''Playboy''’s model of an upwardly mobile, educated, heterosexual man.

In comparison to some of Hemingway’s fiction in which castrated heroes do not always abide by the code, Mailer’s ''Playboy'' fiction offers a range of masculinity models for readers. According to Robert Caserio’s editorial introduction to the ''Journal of Modern Literature'', Mailer’s later fiction represents a “‘queering’ of his picture of masculinity,” and the novel ''Ancient Evenings'', in particular, suggests a “surrender and uncoupling” of Mailer’s ideas about masculinity and moral bravery.{{sfn|Caserio|2006|p=v, vi}} In comparison to his 1960s works, like ''An American Dream and Why are We in Vietnam?, Ancient Evenings'' deals with homosexuality in “tolerant and even erotic fashion.”{{sfn|Dearborn|2001|p=121}} The novel’s protagonist narrator, a eunuch in a large harem, is anally penetrated and the most politically powerful man in the novel “gave Himself up to the little queens as if He were a woman” (124, April 1983). In an interview with John Whalen-Bridge regarding his later works, Mailer admits that, until ''Ancient Evenings'', he did not recognize homosexuality as “an element in all men” and has since come to understand homosexuality as “a bigger theme than [he] ever gave it credit for being” (vi). This change in views regarding sexuality suggests that Mailer revised his masculinist ideal in his later fiction and the ''Playboy'' excerpt of ''Ancient Evenings'' illustrates this revision. Magazine readers might have expected selections from the 700-page-plus novel to be more in line with ''Playboy''’s heterosexual agenda, but Mailer chose to include scenes that deal with “a spectrum of male motivation leading from homosexuality to machismo.”{{sfn|Lennon|1988|p=331}} Within the ''Playboy'' excerpts of ''Ancient Evenings'', Mailer explores power relationships between men and depicts various masculinity models.

Similar to the excerpts from ''Ancient Evenings'', Mailer’s “Trial of the War- lock” deviates slightly from the model of masculinity presented in ''Playboy''’s strictly heterosexual editorial features. The story offers a “readable” “screen treatment” of J. K. Huysmans’s ''La Bas'.'{{sfn|Turner|1995|p=333}} Mailer appropriates the novel’s protagonist, Durtal, to revisit the 1891 fictional account of how Gilles de Rais transitions from being Joan of Arc’s second-in-command to a documented serial killer and practitioner of Satanism. The story seems to contain all of ''Playboy''’s necessary criteria: the hero is not castrated; he has no problem with blood or Satan—so he is obviously courageous. After swearing off sexual relations for religious reasons, Durtal becomes involved in a {{pg|215|216}}

tumultuous affair with a married woman, so his sexuality is not ambiguous. And he is an intellectual, deeply entrenched in his research about the first serial documented serial killer. However, the focus of Durtal’s research is a man who “cannot speak of the thoughts I have when young boys pass before [his] eyes.” {{sfn|Turner|1995|p=333}} De Rais moves beyond the fifteenth-century acceptance of fornicating with young boys and begins to abduct, rape, and brutally murder them. Once dead, de Rais uses their bodies in unheard of ways for sexual pleasure. De Rais’ acts of necrophilia and pedophilia seem wildly extreme when compared to the tameness of gazing at a carefully posed centerfold. But the erotic nature of “Trial” and Mailer’s return to this century-old French novel about Satan in medieval Europe represent deviations from the literary selections of ''Playboy'' that may leave readers questioning things. Why would editors pay for and publish fiction that undermines its stated heterosexual objectives? Mailer’s tripartite role as novelist, journalist, and historian explains the fascination with the historical content, but the story’s form and style are extremely peculiar. Why a screen treatment? Why the use of the second person point of view? The original protagonist was a thinly veiled caricature of the original author, so what kind of layer does a new author offer? The panoply of unanswered questions, especially why ''Playboy'' would award it an annual prize when it has received scant criticism, proves that ''Playboy'' editors were willing to publish fiction based on an author’s cultural status. The “Trial” and ''Ancient Evenings'' might have undermined ''Playboy''’s grand narrative of heterosexuality, but because they were written by Norman Mailer, editors, like Kretchmer, wanted to include them.

Besides Mailer’s work, ''Playboy''’s relationship with literature is exceedingly complex. Recognized for publishing the century’s greatest writers, ''Playboy'' introduced its readers to serious literature, fiction that most would likely have never have been read if it were not sandwiched between pictorials or garish cartoons. Produced as a guidebook for young, urban men, it is surprising that much of ''Playboy''’s fiction destabilizes its grand narrative. Most of ''Playboy''’s 1960s fiction could be classified as Gothic romance, which often includes narratives of traditional marriage. English and American Literature Gothic scholar Marilyn Michaud analyzes why ''Playboy''’s early fiction “paradoxically” encouraged readers to become husbands. She questions “What does Gothic romance fiction teach the aspiring playboy? How does an aesthetically middle-brow publication with images of wholesome, semi-clad young women sit comfortably beside tales of horror and distress?” Exposing {{pg|216|217}}

the magazine’s internal contradictions, Michaud argues it is “not surprising” to find traditional narratives in ''Playboy'' “given the gender politics and the national anxiety over masculinity in the postwar period.” Michaud concludes that the gothic stories, while seemingly paradoxical to Hefner’s agenda, reflect postwar culture because they focus on marriage and family. According to Michaud, teaching bachelors to be heroic rescuers of distraught females will teach them to be good husbands.{{sfn|Michaud|2010}}

Therefore, it seems plausible that while ''Playboy'' editors sought to publish approachable, entertaining fiction with masculine heroes, they would also publish works based on reputations or cultural myths regardless of the story’s content. In his ''Playboy'' interview, Mailer endorses this cultural concept when he says that “if Hemingway had been a pimply-faced kid instead of the man he was, his books wouldn’t have had the audience they commanded” (84, Jan. 1968). For Mailer, Hemingway had a “clear image” because the work and the man “bore a certain resemblance to each other” (84, Jan. 1968). Mailer goes on to say that this clear image is often necessary: “Americans like answers, not enigmas” (84, Jan. 1968). During his life, Hemingway used his solid, masculine persona to boost book sales and ''Playboy'' still uses that same sales model. And while Mailer confesses his “public personality probably hurts his sales” because it is much “more surrealistic” than Hemingway’s, ''Playboy'' editors continued to rely on him as a contributor (84, Jan. 1968).

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

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

* {{cite news |last=Blades |first=John |date=10 July 1986 |title=Feminists Tap Mailer as Guest of Dishonor |url= |work=Chicago Tribune |location=Chicago |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Buckley |first=William |date=1 April 2010 |title=Norman Mailer, R.I.P. |url= |magazine=National Review Online |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Caserio |first=Robert |title=Editor’s Introduction. |url= |journal= Journal of Modern Literature |volume= |issue=30.1 |date=2006 |pages= v–viii |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last= Castronovo |first=David |title=Norman Mailer As Midcentury Advertisement |url= |journal=New England Review |volume=24.4 |issue= |date=2003 |pages=179-186 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dearborn |first=Mary |date=2001 |title=Mailer: A Biography |url= |location=Boston |publisher= Houghton Mifflin |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fantina |first=Richard |date=2005 |title=Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism |url= |location=New York |publisher= Palgrave |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last= Fraterrigo |first=Elizabeth |date=2009 |title=Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America |url= |location=Oxford |publisher=Oxford UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Gilbert |first=James |date=2005 |title=Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s |url= |location=Chicago |publisher=Chicago UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Gladstein |first=Mimi |title=Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman. |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume= |issue=4.1 |date=2010 |pages=288–302 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hale |first=Russell |date=n.d. |title= Contents of a Country: Leicester Hemingway’s Republic of New Atlantis |url= |location= |publisher=Harry Ransom Center U of Texas |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lambkin |first=David John |date=1999 |title= Playboy’s First Year: A Rhetorical Construction of Masculine Sexuality |url= |location= |publisher=Dissertations and Thesis: A&I ProQuest Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first= Michael |date=1988 |title= Conversations with Norman Mailer |url= |location=Jackson |publisher= UP of Mississippi |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1963 |title=Presidential Papers |url= |location=New York |publisher=Putnam |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Manso |first=Peter |date=2008 |title=Mailer: His Life and Times |url= |location=New York |publisher= Washington Square |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=McGrath |first=Charles |date=10 November 2007 |title=Norman Mailer, Towering Writer with Matching Ego, Dies at 84. |url= |magazine=New York Times New York Times Books |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Michaud |first=Marilyn |date=25 March 2010 |title=Playboy Magazine: Romance Fiction for Men. |url= |magazine=Romance Fiction @ Suite 101 |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Miller |first=Russell |date=1985 |title=Bunny: The Real Story of Playboy |url= |location= New York |publisher= Holt, Rinehart and Winston |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last= Nakjavani |first=Eric |title=A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditation on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume= |issue=4.1 |date=2010 |pages=161–191 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last= Osgerby |first=Bill |date=2001 |title=Playboys in Paradise : Masculinity, Youth and Leisure-Style in Modern America |url= |location=Oxford |publisher=Berg |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last= Peppard |first=Victor |title=Hemingway, Mailer, and the ‘Reds’. |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume= |issue=4.1 |date=2010 |pages=227–240 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Pitzulo |first=Carrie |date=2011 |title=Bachelors and Bunnies: the Sexual Politics of Playboy |url= |location=Chicago |publisher=U of Chicago |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last= Schuchardt |first= Mercer |date=13 Nov 2005 |title= The Cultural Victory of Hugh Hefner |url= |location= |publisher=Orthodoxy Today.org |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last= Steinem |first=Gloria |date=1995 |title=Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions |url= |location=New York |publisher=Henry Hold |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Turner |first=Alice |date=1995 |title=Playboy Stories: The Best of Forty Years of Short Fiction |url= |location=New York |publisher=Plume |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Weyr |first=Thomas |date=1978 |title=Reaching for Paradise: The Playboy Vision of America |url= |location=New York |publisher= New York Times Books |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{refend}}

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2025-04-02T11:31:30Z

Jules Carry: Removed Twitter.

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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway

2025-03-31T15:41:59Z

Jules Carry: Added a bit of info.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''Harlot's Ghost'', ''Bildungsroman'', Masculinity and Hemingway}}
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{{Review}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

Talk:The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010

2025-03-31T15:39:50Z

Jules Carry: Added Hicks.

===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]] || {{cross}}
|-
| 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]] || {{cross}}
|-
| 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]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Justice || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation]] || [[User:APKnight25]] || {{cross}}
|-
| 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]] || {{cross}}
|-
| 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:TClark]] || {{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]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Gordon || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Encounters with Mailer|Encounters with Mailer]] || [[User:Priley1984]] || {{cross}}
|-
| 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]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Sinclair || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman Mailer: An Expected Encounter in an Unexpected Place|An Expected Encounter]] || [[User:Wverna]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Klavan || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/On Reading Mailer Too Young|On Reading Mailer Too Young]] || [[User:Essence903m]] || {{cross}}
|-
| 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]] || ? || {{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]] || {{cross}}
|-
| 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]] || ? || {{cross}}
|}

Talk:The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010

2025-03-28T11:21:56Z

Jules Carry: Added user.

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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

2025-03-27T13:25:42Z

Jules Carry: Minor fixes.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Hemingway and Women at the Front: Blowing Bridges in ''The Fifth Column'', ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', and Other Works}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| type = Written
| last = Moreland
| first = Kim
| abstract = An exploration of Hemingway’s interest in the topic of love and war in a number of his important works.
| notes = publication or editor's notes (if applicable)
| url = the short link to the article using prmlr.us (this link will be filled in by the editor)}}
{{dc|dc=O|ne of the central issues on which critics}} of ''A Farewell to Arms'' focus is the vexed relationship between love and war, a response Hemingway invites with his punningly ambiguous title. Certainly Frederic Henry rejects the arms of war in his “separate peace” (243), an act of desertion validated by the confused and murderous actions of the Italian officers in the army he serves. Yet Frederic is also pulled from the arms of war by the arms of love in the person of Catherine Barkley. The two flee the war arena—she abandoning her post as nurse in the American Red Cross Hospital in Milan—for a safe retreat in neutral Switzerland, an idyllic haven that protects them from wartime reality. That Frederic must ultimately say farewell to the arms of love when Catherine dies in childbirth is tragedy of a different order from his first farewell—existential or perhaps ontological tragedy, the tragedy of life itself, not the sociopolitical tragedy of war.

Some nine years later Hemingway revisits this same vexed relationship in his 1938 play ''The Fifth Column'', whose setting is the Spanish Civil War. Whereas Frederic Henry ultimately chooses love over war, Philip Rawlings chooses war over love, declaring, “We’re in for fifty years of undeclared wars and I’ve signed up for the duration” (80). He rejects his lover Dorothy Bridges, along with her fantasy of sharing “a long, happy, quiet life at some {{pg|370|371}} place like Saint-Tropez or, you know, some place like Saint-Tropez ''was''” (23)—that is, an idyllic haven outside of time. Instead, he embraces the wartime reality, declaiming, “Where I go now, I go alone, or with others who go there for the same reason I go” (83). Loyalty to his comrades in arms supersedes loyalty to his lover, whom he pointedly stops calling “comrade” in a politically and emotionally significant act. Not a separate peace but voluntary enlistment “for the duration” is the fate Philip Rawlings chooses.

Why love over war in the novel and war over love in the play? Independent critical discussions of the two works point to several explanations, including differing composition circumstances, differing perceptions of the wars’ meanings, and differing characterizations of the female protagonists. These three reasons deserve brief discussion here because they point to an additional issue that has not been discussed in this context, that of the increasing breakdown of the boundary between the foundational western categories of “home front” and “war front.” This breakdown had two causes. One cause was the increasing penetration of the home front by so-called total war, which was enabled by changing military technology and a concomitant changing ethic of war. Another cause was the increasing penetration of the war front by women in various professional roles—a change less abstract, more personalized, than the first. As home front and war front became increasingly difficult to distinguish, confusion and anger inevitably resulted.

Hemingway’s significance as a cultural icon reveals itself in his own confusion at this breakdown of boundaries. On the one hand, he repeatedly expressed anger at the impersonal forces of technology that characterize the “strange new kind of war” represented in all his war fiction <ref> For an extended discussion of Hemingway’s attitude toward the transformation of traditional
warfare by modern technology, see my ''Medievalist Impulse'' 163–83. </ref> (“New Kind” 267). On the other hand, he also expressed anger at the strange new kind of woman who was invading the male war front, displacing his anger onto the personal behavior of individual women and expressing it dramatically by his characterization of his female protagonists. He thereby transformed geopolitical war into what he called “the great unending battle between men and women” (Baker 481–82). As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar brilliantly explore in their ''No Man’s Land'' trilogy, the sexual struggle initiated by the suffrage movement of the mid-nineteenth century became “a key theme in late Victorian literature and ultimately a shaping element in modernist and post-modernist literature. . . [such that] writers increasingly represented women’s unprecedented invasion of the public sphere as a battle of the sexes”{{pg|371|372}}(1:4). Hemingway thus valorizes in ''Farewell'' the war nurse who abandons her military hospital for life as a wife at home in neutral Switzerland, whereas he repudiates in ''Fifth Column'' the female war correspondent who refuses to leave the war front of Madrid when her lover directs her to do so. Not one war but two—the geopolitical and the sexual—are thus fought in the pages of Hemingway’s works.

The composition circumstances of the novel and play are markedly different. Hemingway wrote ''Farewell'' some ten years after World War I had ended in victory for the Allies. The years between the war’s conclusion and the novel’s composition provided time for reflection on the war’s meaning. Hemingway’s post-war novel offered the opportunity to call the war itself into question—in effect, to argue against the war while not endangering the chance of victory. In contrast, Hemingway wrote ''Fifth Column'' while living in war-ravaged Madrid at the Hotel Florida, some fifteen blocks from the front. Ronald Fraser sums up many first-person accounts in his oral history by noting that Madrid was “the only city where you could go to the front by tram” (455), citing an interview subject as remembering that conductors called out “To the front—five céntimos”(265). Peter Wyden notes that secret-police chief Alexander Orlov once told war correspondent Louis Fischer of ''The Nation'', “There is no front. Madrid is the front” (202). The Hotel Florida was shelled over thirty times in the fall of 1937 while Hemingway was drafting his play, during the second and longest of his four wartime visits to Spain (completing a clean typescript manuscript titled ''A Play'' in Madrid on 23 November 1937, and revising the manuscript in Key West in the summer of 1938, between his third and fourth visits to Spain). Published in October 1938, the play was largely a propaganda vehicle designed to encourage American sympathy for the Republican cause, which might result in a change in American policy that would allow the sale of war material to Republican Spain. It was thus necessary that Philip Rawlings choose war over love, else the play would have seemed to support the American neutrality policy.

Perceptions about World War I and the Spanish Civil War were also markedly different. The causes of World War I were murky, the conduct of the war disconcerting because traditional ways of battle had been rendered obsolete, and the meaning of the Allied victory in this war of attrition was unclear. The only hope was that this was the war to end all wars—ironic, given that the Treaty of Versailles in effect set up the circumstances that led to World War II. Speaking for an entire generation, Hemingway’s Frederic {{pg|372|373}} Henry famously says, “I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it” (185)—in short, a slaughter without meaning or higher purpose.<ref> Hemingway draws an equivalent relationship between the Chicago slaughterhouse and World War I, and then between the Spanish bullfight and the knightly tournament. He deconstructs the seeming equality of these sets of terms, revealing the hierarchical relationship that always already obtains, the first set of terms being subordinated to the second set of terms. For an argument as to the central significance of these terms to an interpretation of ''Farewell'', see my “World War I.” </ref> As such, Frederic Henry is justified in making his famous “separate peace” (243).

In contrast, the Spanish Civil War was “a most passionate war” (Thomas 616), indeed a cause célèbre perceived as a fight for the soul of Spain and ultimately that of the world. Those who sympathized with the democratically elected Republican government of Spain regarded the war as a conflict between freedom and tyranny, offering an opportunity to stop fascism (most immediately in the person of General Franco and the rebellious Spanish Army, which was supported with material and men by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy). A war to determine who would govern Spain—in this regard “a conflict small enough to be comprehensible to individuals” (Thomas 616)—it was more largely an ideological war, a war of competing belief systems. The Loyalists who supported the Republican government included a complicated coalition of Spanish and foreign communists, socialists, syndicalists, anarchists, and democratic liberals, ultimately subsumed into the Popular Front.<ref> For a detailed analysis of the ideological positions of these various groups, and also for an analysis of the political in-fighting among them, see Orwell 46–71.</ref> Moreover, both sides regarded the war as important not only in itself and for what it represented, but also for what it presaged—either the containment of fascism, or its expansion and a resultant world war. Everyone involved knew that the war’s outcome would profoundly matter to the course of history. To make a “separate peace” from the Spanish Civil War, as indeed England and France in effect had done via the Non-Intervention Pact and America via a revision of the Neutrality Act, would unwittingly encourage the triumph of fascism, the destruction unleashed by another world war, and the possible end of political freedom and self-determination in the modern world. In these terms, it is unthinkable that Philip Rawlings not commit himself to the fight “for the duration.”

The attributes of the female protagonists of Hemingway’s two works also differ significantly, especially insofar as they reflect Hemingway’s attitudes toward the actual women on whom they were based. Catherine Barkley is based on Agnes von Kurowsky, Hemingway’s first love, a World War I nurse he asked to marry him during his convalescence under her care, who jilted him for an Italian artillery officer after Hemingway’s return to the American home front. The lyric passages of ''A Farewell to Arms'', especially in Switzer- land, reflect Hemingway’s love for Agnes, just as Catherine’s death (however {{pg|373|374}} tragic to Frederic) reflects Hemingway’s anger at Agnes’s betrayal, as does the bitter portrait of Luz in “A Very Short Story” (1925).

Dorothy Bridges is based on Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s lover during the Spanish Civil War and later his third wife—once Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer had divorced, a long process whose conclusion was often in doubt, Pauline insistent on maintaining the marriage, and Hemingway wavering between his wife and his lover. The few lyric passages of ''The Fifth Column'' occur at night, when Philip expresses his love for Dorothy and asks her to marry him, a reflection of Hemingway’s own intensifying love for Martha. The daytime exchanges between Philip and Dorothy are marked by arguments and Philip’s contempt, reflecting Hemingway’s anger at Martha for threatening his domestic life with Pauline and their sons. In a telling hand-written letter to Martha in June 1943, Hemingway reminisced about their Spanish Civil War love affair and their subsequent marriage, about which she had hesitated, to his terrible distress. He thanked her for “interven[ing]” in his life, but he first wrote “interf” (that is, interfering) and then marked out this slip of the pen that unconsciously revealed his continuing ambivalence.<ref> This unpublished letter is dated 9–10 June 1943 and was written by Hemingway while he was submarine hunting on the Pilar.</ref>

Though the characterization of Dorothy Bridges is typically read only in relation to Hemingway’s personal and psychological struggle concerning Martha Gellhorn, it is also a reflection of Hemingway’s complicated attitude toward the appropriate role for women at a time of radical change that was simultaneously independent of and precipitated by modern warfare. While the “New Woman” in America and England had been demanding more political, economic, and social rights since the nineteenth century, the role women played in modern wars—notably World War I, when women were first encouraged to do “male” jobs to free men for the battle front—exacerbated this sense of entitlement. If not on the surface of the text, at the subtextual level Dorothy Bridges threatens a set of foundational categories more or less operative in the western world since the chivalric code of the Middle Ages—that is, the home front in binary opposition to the battle front. Love is for the home front, war is for the battle front. Women are for the home front, men for the battle front. Women are idealized because they symbolize the stakes of male combat, while men are realized by their role as combatants. According to this binary opposition, the role of “wife” is at the home front, away from the intensity of battle, which enables male self-realization while also encouraging an inevitable live-for-the-moment mentality that socially {{pg|374|375}} and morally justifies brief sexual liaisons. Melissa Herbert notes that “the military is a ‘gendered institution’ because soldiering has been about not only war, but being ‘a man’” (7), and she argues that “much of the strategy [designed to establish one’s status as soldier] seems to rely on being that which is not feminine”(8). To be a soldier in this sense is to not be a woman.

Historically, the visible roles for women in the male arena of war have been limited. Always, of course, and especially in civil wars (“the best war for a writer,” Hemingway claims in ''Green Hills of Africa'' [71]), women have been war victims, often victims of rape, whereby the woman’s body is regarded as enemy property to be looted, or as enemy military terrain to be invaded and conquered, as is Maria’s body by the Nationalist soldiers in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls''. Women are even at risk from their own army, whose soldiers may regard use of the female body as rightful recompense for placing their own bodies on the line. Marion Merriman, the wife of Robert Merriman of the Lincoln Battalion, who was the figure on whom Hemingway based Robert Jordan, recounts her own rape by a Lincoln Battalion officer in her 1986 memoir, ''American Commander in Spain''. Having traveled to Spain to nurse her husband after his first wounding, she chose to remain with him in the only way possible, International Brigade officials allowing her to enlist “if [she] would promise to never, under any circumstances, try to get to the front lines” (78). One of only two American women actually in the Lincoln Battalion (women comprising a majority of the staff of the twenty-five-or-so American medical units), she was assigned largely to office duties, at one point making an official trip with two officers under her husband’s command. She recounts her thoughts after one of her fellow officers raped her in the night:

<blockquote>I had to calm myself. This is a war, I told myself. Men are dying and maimed. This is my burden. . . . But should I tell Bob? . . . [I] finally concluded: I must not hurt Bob with this. No, this must be my secret burden. I cannot tell anyone—ever. I could not get the rape off my mind. But I went on with my work. I said nothing about the rape. The war filled Bob’s mind. I could not trouble him further, and I did not. (148–49)</blockquote>

Just as women historically, if often silently, have been war victims, so too have women historically functioned, in Hemingway’s term, as ‘‘whores de {{pg|375|376}} combat” (quoted by Kert 297). His pun suggests woman’s dual role with regard to war—either party to it at the battle front as whore, or apart from it (that is, “hors de combat”) at the home front as wife. As Katharine Moon notes:

<blockquote>Historical conditions of war and military occupation have helped foster socioeconomic conditions that have forced women and girls . . . into sexual labor for the military. In general, they have been grouped together as camp followers, women who have made their sexual and other forms of feminized labor, such as cooking and washing, available to troops either voluntarily or involuntarily (210).</blockquote>

In her study of camp followers in the American Revolution, Holly Mayer reminds us that camp followers should be understood broadly as the men and women who “live[d] and work[ed] with the military” (1). They traditionally formed part of the European and American military communities, supplying many of the support services (transportation, nursing, laundry, food and other supplies) that were gradually absorbed into the military itself only beginning in the eighteenth century. The increasing professionalization of the army in the nineteenth century resulted in the decline of the camp-following community in which women, especially of the lower classes, had played a significant if historically unremarked role from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. This military change was supported by the nineteenth-century “cult of true womanhood” or “cult of domesticity,” which vigorously delineated the female and male spheres as private and public, respectively. In short, the boundary between home front and war front has always already existed in western society, and simultaneously it has been permeable to a greater or lesser extent.

Moon notes that “[camp-following] women belonged to the army, but they belonged to it in the same way they belonged to anything else—as domestic attachments”(275). Typically ordered to “accompany the baggage and stay out of the way” (14), they were regarded as outsiders, historically marginalized though they traveled with and supported the army. Mayer notes that this community was class-inflected, such that officer’s wives were “ladies” who typically visited only during winter quarters and created a social life for the officers, while lower-class women not only traveled year- {{pg|376|377}} round with their men-folk but also necessarily worked to support themselves and their families, thus rendering them suspect since some female merchants inevitably “supplement[ed] their incomes by engaging in prostitution” (7). Prostitutes from nearby and typically urban areas also saw encamped armies as commercial opportunities. Moon notes that “the degree to which military prostitutes’ lives have been controlled or regulated by the armed forces has depended on [a variety of factors]” (210), and Herbert asserts that “historically, in many instances prostitution was organized, or at the very least made available, by the military” (64). In ''A Farewell to Arms'', Hemingway describes a relatively regulated degree of military control, Frederic observing that Gorizia has two separate “bawdy houses, one for troops and one for officers” (5). Rinaldi alludes to “bad administration,” complaining that “for two weeks now they haven’t changed [the girls, who have become] . . . old war comrades” (64-65).

It would seem that rape victims and prostitutes represent ways in which the boundary between women and war is breached, but women in these two categories are essentially redefined as war booty and are therefore appropriated to the war front by men. In effect, the only women who belong at the war front are rape victims and prostitutes, and their place at the front is validated by men—more specifically, by male sexual activity, which reinforces the “masculinity [that is] . . . one mechanism by which men become soldiers” (Herbert 6).

But the woman who goes willingly to war calls into question independently the boundary between women and war, between the private sphere of the home front and the public sphere of the war front. Perhaps that is why the Lincoln Battalion officer felt he had the right to rape Marion Merriman, simultaneously his commander’s wife and a corporal serving in what Marion herself called “woman-less war” (148). And perhaps that is why, over the centuries, whenever women have approached the war front their activities have been marginalized and dismissed, rendered historically invisible, as in the case of the camp-following communities except insofar as they have been reduced to the single identity of prostitute.

While women have historically served as soldiers, until comparatively recently they have done so only by disguising themselves as men, and they have most often been discovered only after being wounded. Most important is that these women-disguised-as-men remain largely disguised in the pages of history. Those who succeeded in their disguises were neither identified {{pg|377|378}} nor counted; those who died were regarded as aberrations whose freakishness was buried with them; those who were wounded were removed behind the lines and warned not to return to the battle front.<ref> For an account of two disguised female soldiers in the Spanish Civil War who were discovered only after being wounded, see Brome 206–08. For an extended discussion of female soldiers in the American Civil War, see Leonard 99–272. </ref> From the male perspective, the more palatable motivation for such behavior was the search for a lover or husband, while less palatable was a desire to fight for the cause directly on the battle front rather than indirectly on the home front.

Atypically, in the early stages of the Spanish Civil War, Republican women fought openly beside men:

<blockquote>The first masculine sphere to which women had access was the military one . . . due, primarily to the initial troop disorganization and, second, to the fact that the Republican army was formed of militia columns organized by trade unions and political parties without any military hierarchy. Thousands of
women under arms and in female battalions, for example, took part in the defense of Madrid in November of 1936 (Coleman 48).</blockquote>

But once the crises of the first six months or so had passed and the militias were increasingly professionalized as the Popular Front army (this so-called militarization a micro-version of the historical professionalization of armies in the nineteenth century), the Republican leadership moved quickly to discourage women from functioning at the front lines as soldiers—notably, not so much for their own comfort or safety, but that of the male soldiers: “Republican soldiers were uncomfortable with the ''miliciana''. For the most part, men expected ''milicianas'' to do kitchen and laundry duties and to act as nurses” (Coleman 49). One International Brigade soldier, for example, was “infuriated” by a women’s battalion that was fighting before the Segovia Bridge, for “women at the battle seemed to him the final degradation of the Republican side” (Thomas 322, n. l). Because such responses testified to male embarrassment and threatened the destruction of male morale, Republican officials launched a propaganda campaign whose slogan was “Men to the front / Women to the home front” (quoted by Coleman 49).

The Republican propaganda effort had a harsher side as well, the ''milicianas'' soon publicly redefined as prostitutes who endangered the army by transmitting sexual diseases. Allen Guttmann notes that the contemporary British and American publics were “fascinated by the females who fought {{pg|378|379}} with the Spanish militia in the early days of the war” (11), and he notes the pornographic combination of sex and violence in the overheated press descriptions of the ''milicianas'' as “Red Amazons, many of them actually stripped to the waist, carrying modern rifles, and with blood in their eye,” and as “supple-hipped Carmens of the Revolution, [who] for want of roses, toss bombs as they whirl”(quoted by Guttmann 11, 12). Hemingway offers a variation on this perspective in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'': “The twenty-three-year-old mistress [of the Republican officer] was having a baby, as were nearly all the other girls who had started out as ''milicianas'' in the July of the year before” (399).

After a Republican decree was issued that forbade women from fighting at the front, the “''miliciana'' icon” reappeared, now a “symbol of Republican resistance” rather than a celebration of military heroines, which was used “to inspire men to serve their patriotic duty” (Coleman 50). The balance between the female home front and the male war front was thus reestablished, at least as a useful fiction.

But in point of fact, the “total war” strategy that Nazi Germany was practicing in Spain meant that besieged Madrid (and later Barcelona, as well as the infamous Guernica and other less famous towns) was itself a war front where women died daily without the opportunity to fight for the Cause or even to defend themselves. Martha Gellhorn observes in ''The Face of War'', a collection of her war correspondence, that “what was new and prophetic about the war in Spain was the life of the civilians, who stayed at home and had war brought to them The people of the Republic of Spain were the first to suffer the relentless totality of modern war” (22). Gellhorn describes her arrival in Madrid as follows: “I had not felt as if I were at a war until now. [The] whole city was a battlefield” (20-21). Marion Merriman describes the combination of terror and frustration engendered by her own trip to Madrid: “In the trenches I had been nervous but not afraid. That was war. In the city I felt defenseless, trapped. In the city the bombing was a deep personal affront, with no reprisals except a soul-shaking hatred There was no way to fight back”(139). Gellhorn similarly describes “this helpless war in the city,” where women cannot fight back but can only scatter for cover “professionally, like soldiers” (Face 32, 43).

Though the ''milicianas'' were banned from the battle front, ''guerrillerinas'' continued to work behind the fascist lines, as Maria Teresa Toral describes in her historical account, providing at great personal risk “aid to the {{pg|379|380}} wounded, to the hungry, to the sick guerrilla, who had descended from the sierra to the village” (308). In ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', Hemingway creates an unforgettable portrait of a ''guerrillerina'' in the sympathetic and psychologically complex character of Pilar. A ''miliciana'' like many other women at the start of the war, she participated in her lover Pablo’s takeover of their village for the Republicans. When the fascists retook the village, she fled into the mountains as the only female member of Pablo’s guerrilla band, not providing food and nursing care to guerrillas who had descended to the village, as Toral describes, but participating in sabotage activities like Robert Jordan’s blowing of the bridge. Though General Golz had noted that “the more irregular the service, the more irregular the life” (8), Pilar is a most irregular figure indeed. She announces, “Here I command” as she accepts “the allegiance. . . given [by the guerrillas]” once they lose confidence in the increasingly unstable Pablo (55, 53). She is admired as a model of courage by Robert Jordan: “You’re shaking, like a Goddamn woman. What the hell is the matter with you? . . . I’ll bet that Goddamn woman up above isn’t shaking. That Pilar” (437).

An admirable figure, Pilar is constructed by Hemingway as simultaneously revolutionary and conventional in her military role. While her aberrance draws the most attention, it is her conventionalism that is ultimately most telling. Certainly her physical presence is unusual. She is massive, ugly, even masculine in appearance (in this regard reminiscent of the female soldiers who have historically disguised themselves as men), and she sexually admires both Robert and Maria. Her Gypsy blood is invoked throughout the novel as an explanation of her sexual power and her supernatural ability to read the future and smell death. Having been the lover of three matadors, among more casual liaisons, before becoming Pablo’s woman, she has “the heart of a whore,” according to Pablo (53). When she describes her years of traveling with the matadors, she represents herself as a camp-follower of sorts, typically describing the women present as “gypsies and whores of great category” (185).

Pilar’s status as guerrilla leader is unusual not only in terms of history but also Hemingway’s canon. But she supplants Pablo only after Robert Jordan arrives, serving largely as symbolic leader while Jordan acts as operational leader. When Pablo returns after having deserted and sabotaged the band, Pilar largely cedes her authority to him, sympathizing with his need to appear as leader before the men he has newly recruited to help blow the {{pg|380|381}} bridge. So by the end of the novel, Pilar willingly shares with Pablo the role of symbolic leader and Jordan continues as operational leader until Pablo takes charge of the band’s escape.

Provocatively, Pilar’s combat activities are never dramatized in the novel, despite her putative role as guerrilla leader. For example, though she identifies herself as an active participant in the initial Republican takeover of her town, thereby sharing moral responsibility for its excesses, her description reveals her to have functioned largely as an observer. She watches Pablo execute the four ''guardia civiles''. She stands in the gauntlet through which fascists run to their death though she never wields a flail. She leaves the gauntlet to watch from a bench after becoming sickened by the action. She does not enter the bullring where the remaining fascists are imprisoned, instead witnessing their execution while standing on a chair. Even then she misses the final horrific events because the chair breaks. Pilar sums up her experience by unconscious reference to her role as witness rather than participant: “That was the end of the killing of the fascists in our town and I was glad I did not ''see'' more of it” (126, emphasis mine).

As a member of the guerrilla band, she participates in the dynamiting of a train, but the only action of Pilar that is actually represented involves her rescue of Maria, who is being transported to prison.<ref> See Prago and Toral for discussions of conditions in women’s prisons. Prago notes that “in addition to the sufferings common to all political prisoners, women were subjected to unique humiliations and tortures, [including] the violations of the body by ‘macho’ guards” (300). </ref> Pilar insists that the guerrillas carry Maria away, beating them when they want to drop her during the dangerous retreat, and also carrying Maria herself. Even during Jordan’s military action, when Pilar directs her own small band above the bridge, separate from Pablo and his small band below the bridge, she is never represented in actual battle (even though gunfire is reported from her position), in contrast to the male characters whom we actually see shooting at the enemy—Robert, Anselmo, Rafael, even Pablo shooting ineffectually at a tank. In short, we never see Pilar in the act of shooting a gun, only holding a gun, carrying a gun, or reloading guns for the men. Instead, Pilar is almost always represented performing domestic activities—cooking, cleaning, sewing. When Pilar declares herself leader, Pablo grudgingly cedes his position while simultaneously undermining her power by commanding her to perform her domestic duty: “‘All right. You command,’ he said. ‘And if you want he [Jordan] can command too.’ . . . He paused. ‘That you should command and that you should like it. Now if you are a woman as well as a commander, that we should have something to eat’” (56–57).

In representing Pilar in a military role, whether as ''miliciana'' or ''guerrille-'' {{pg|381|382}} ''rina'', Hemingway clearly presents her as sympathetic and admirable, yet he also restricts his representation of her actions to the domestic sphere, ignoring dramatically her military actions as though they were unthinkable or inappropriate—indeed, not to be witnessed. Moreover, insofar as Pilar is represented as a woman comfortable at the battle front, she is represented as a whore—sexually knowledgeable, widely experienced, at ease describing herself in the company of prostitutes, indeed at ease hearing herself described in rough language by the male guerrillas and using such language herself. She is located in binary opposition to Maria, the virgin raped by Nationalist soldiers, who is simultaneously part of and apart from the guerrilla band.

Tellingly, Pilar wants to send Maria, whom she has nursed back to sanity, to a “home” (32, 70)—that is, to the home front. Robert Jordan first promises to send her to a home for war orphans that also provides shelter for female war victims, but when he falls in love with her, he determines instead to locate a home in Madrid and later Montana for her to inhabit as his wife. Agustin tells Jordan that “Pilar has kept her away from all as fiercely as though she were in a convent of Carmelites,” carefully explaining, “Because she sleeps with thee she is no whore. You do not understand how such a
girl would be if there had been no revolution She is not as we are”
(290–91).

In one sense, Hemingway presents in Pilar a revolutionary portrait of a woman active as a soldier at the front, indeed behind enemy lines. Yet in another sense he invokes the familiar stereotype of the female at the battle front as whore (indeed, whore with a heart of gold), while invoking in his portrait of Maria the other familiar stereotype of rape victim. These two women in the otherwise male guerrilla band thus represent the only two historically visible roles for women at war. Moreover, even Pilar is restricted dramatically to the domestic sphere, as Maria always is (to the degree that is possible given the constraints of her environment). Paradoxically, Hemingway participates by these strategies in the historical erasure of women other than the whore and the rape victim from the war front, despite his seemingly revolutionary portrait of Pilar as guerrilla leader.<ref> See Weitz for a brilliant discussion of the often overlooked military roles that women in Occupied France played, including as guerrillas. Weitz candidly discusses not only their contributions but also the difficulties they encountered; for example, they were often “assigned traditional feminine support roles, for the customary view was that ‘War is a man’s affair’” (147).</ref>

But this ongoing historical erasure was countered, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, by the emergence of new professional roles for women at war. The New Woman was first incarnated on the battlefield as the female war nurse.<ref> See Reeves for an overview of the role female nurses have played in American wars from the Revolution to the Persian Gulf War. For a discussion of their role in the American Civil War, see Garrison, Maher, Oates, Pryor, and Wormeley; in World War I, see Gavin 43–76; and as camp followers in the American Revolution, see Mayer 17, 142–43, and 219–23. </ref> This new development was marked in England by the Crimean {{pg|382|383}} War (1853–56) and in the United States by the American Civil War (1861–1865). In part, this new female identity developed in response to the actions of men who were themselves creating a new male identity, that of the war correspondent. William Howard Russell of the ''London Times'' is most often cited as the first war correspondent, though other challengers inevitably exist. It was the reporting of Russell and several others, for example Edwin Lawrence Godkin and especially Thomas Chenery, that roused the English public to outrage over the despicable conditions of the British army in the Crimea, especially regarding medical care.<ref> This new male identity was initially suspect, the military deriding war correspondents as camp followers. For a discussion of the vexed question of the identity of the first war correspondent, see Mathews 31–78. For a description of the role of the Crimean war correspondents, their treatment by the military, and their role in the introduction of female nurses to the war theater, see Knightley 6–17. For a discussion of William Howard Russell’s actions in the Crimea, see Bullard 31–48. </ref> Florence Nightingale responded to the request for nursing aid (female nurses from France were already on scene), and her “aristocratic background” and “social and political connections” enabled her to overcome the prejudice against sending female nurses to the field (Garrison 12). But the nurses nonetheless suffered under public charges of immodesty and worse—that is, sexual promiscuity and prostitution—because they breached the boundary between home front and war front. They left the private for the public sphere, even though they did so while practicing the traditionally female actions of nurturing and caretaking, often fulfilling specifically domestic functions such as cooking and cleaning. In this regard, Hemingway’s Pilar is ironically like them.

Nightingale and her party of thirty-eight women constituted “an historic deputation which established a precedent for women determined to serve as nurses in military hospitals, and became the model for respectable female Sanitarians [members of the US Sanitary Commission, a volunteer organization established during the American Civil War] as they entered a male environment previously forbidden to them”(Garrison 13). In fact, the precedent was class-inflected, concerning middle- and upper-class women, since female camp-followers had long functioned as nurses in earlier wars, though their actions went unremarked (Mayer 219-23).

Like the female war nurses of the Crimea, those led by Dorothea Dix in the American Civil War largely remained behind the lines, though more often near the battle front. Katherine Prescott Wormely wrote of her experiences, “I see the worst, short of the actual battle-field, that there is to see” (131). Clara Barton responded yet more radically, providing independent nursing and relief services on the battle front itself. The middle- or upper- class status of these “ladies” rendered their wartime actions surprising on the one hand (why weren’t they satisfied rolling bandages in ladies’ aid societies?) yet also protected them to some degree from sexual gossip. As a {{pg|383|384}} mark of over-compensation, they were apostrophized as saints and angels, Nightingale known as “The Angel of the Crimea” and “The Lady with the Lamp,” and Barton as “The Angel of the Battlefield.” They were also apostrophized more domestically as mothers and sisters, which was especially appropriate for the many Roman Catholic nuns who served as nurses in the American Civil War.<ref> See Maher for a discussion of the role of Roman Catholic nuns as nurses in the American Civil War. </ref> Their vows of chastity and obedience rendered them particularly appealing to male authorities, notably doctors; female doctors were forbidden from serving—a situation that also obtained in World War I, though many female doctors found their way around American Expeditionary Force regulations by attaching themselves to volunteer organizations.<ref> See Hawks for a first-hand account of a female doctor in the American Civil War. For a discussion of the role of female doctors in World War I, see Gavin 157–78.</ref>

Nightingale, Dix, and Barton are the direct ancestors of later female war nurses, among whom are the VADs (that is, the Voluntary Aid Detachment, a British service auxiliary) like Hemingway’s Lady Brett Ashley in ''The Sun Also Rises'' and Catherine Barkley in ''A Farewell to Arms'', and also like American Red Cross nurse Agnes von Kurowsky. To combat the potentially salacious reputation of female war nurses, they labored under strict rules of appearance and behavior. Dix required her nurses to be middle-aged and “plain to the point of ugliness” (Garrison 18). American Red Cross nurses serving in World War I were “forbidden to carry on serious romances, even to be alone with a gentleman caller” (Villard and Nagel 239).

Hemingway reflects these rules in ''A Farewell to Arms'' when Catherine de- scribes the restrictions on the nurses’ behavior at the hospital in Gorizia, only a mile from the front: “The Italians didn’t want women so near the front. So we’re all on very special behavior. We don’t go out”(25). Though the rules are more relaxed at the American Red Cross Hospital in Milan, Frederic notes that “they would not let us go out together when I was off crutches because it was unseemly for a nurse to be seen unchaperoned with a patient who did not look as though he needed attendance” (117-18). Increased personal freedom resulted inevitably, however, in increased sexual freedom, as represented in the actions of Catherine Barkley and Brett Ashley; indeed, Clara Barton’s intimate relationship with the married Colonel John Elwell, quartermaster for the Department of the South, is illustrative in this regard.<ref>For discussions of the relationship between Clara Barton and John Elwell, see Oates 148–58 and Pryor 112–17.</ref> Of course, the same point about increased sexual freedom might be made about male soldiers. But only the female nurses labored under moral opprobrium, whether external or introjected, as Hemingway represents. It is no accident that the name of the sexually promiscuous Brett rhymes with that {{pg|384|385}} of the prostitute Georgette, nor that Jake Barnes confuses their voices. Similarly, Catherine Barkley voices the internal anxiety surrounding the new female role of wartime nurse when she says, “I never felt like a whore before” (152) to her patient-lover. Of course, he is more truly her impatient lover, whose return to the battle front results in her agreeing to a sexual encounter as atonement for her sexual refusal of her now-dead soldier-fiancé.

The type of position that Hemingway held with the American Red Cross as ambulance driver and canteen operator would be appropriated by women once America fully entered World War I. His volunteer service soon became an unwitting escape from the combatant role then urged upon healthy young American men; women were now encouraged to take on the non-combatant roles supervised by volunteer organizations like the Red Cross and YMCA, whose famous “doughnut dollies” operated canteens for the American doughboys fighting the war. By the end of the war, Hemingway’s Red Cross activities would have allied him more with the role of American women than men—hence, perhaps, his public exaggerations of his role on the Italian front and supposedly in the Italian army.

During the early twentieth century, another female figure publicly emerged at the battle front, one yet more troubling in terms of the prevailing paradigm since her activities could not be redefined as appropriately female because domestic: the female war correspondent. The first American woman to win accreditation from the War Department as an official war correspondent was Peggy Hull on 17 September 1918, but she was restricted from access to the battlefields of World War I (as were the few free-lance female correspondents); when the male correspondents realized the popularity of Hull’s stories about “the lives of the common soldier” away from battle, they “demanded her removal” (Sorel xviii) and she was “forced to spend the rest of the war in Paris” (Knightley 127). Some eighteen years later, the women who covered the Spanish Civil War were still small in number but free of official regulations governing their behavior. Outsiders in Spain creating a new professional role, they were little regulated as to dress or behavior (as were the later female correspondents of World War II, who were required to wear uniforms and forbidden access to the front lines,<ref> Gellhorn wrote in 1944 “a formal letter of protest to the military authorities about the ‘curiously condescending’ treatment of women war correspondents which, she said, was as ridiculous as it was undignified, and was preventing professional woman [sic] reporters, with many years’ experience, from carrying out their responsibilities to their editors and to ‘millions of people in America who are desperately in need of seeing, but cannot see for themselves’” (Moorehead, ''Gellhorn'' 221). She wrote more pithily to a friend that “female journalists were now seen as lepers” (quoted by Moorehead, ''Gellhorn'' 221).</ref> though individual resourcefulness frequently overcame this official restriction). These female correspondents ranged as freely as their inclinations, abilities, and contacts enabled.

It would seem that ''The Fifth Column''’s Dorothy Bridges is a war corre- {{pg|385|386}} spondent—how else to explain her residence in Madrid’s Hotel Florida, the presence of a large military map and war poster and typewriter in her room, and her announcement late in the play that she has “sent away three articles” (82)? But her lover Robert Preston, himself a war correspondent, calls her “a bored Vassar bitch” (4)—a change from the 1937 Madrid typescript where she is identified with Martha Gellhorn’s own Bryn Mawr. Rather than protesting, Dorothy agrees that she doesn’t “understand anything that is happening here” (5). Dorothy’s stereotypical characterization as a dumb blonde renders her presumed identity problematic. For example, Philip confusedly shouts, “Aren’t you a lady war correspondent or something? Get out of here and go write an article. This [the assassination of a Loyalist soldier in Philip’s room] is none of your business” (33). Her role as war correspondent cannot stand alone, but must be delimited by the modifier “lady”—or better yet relegated to the unnameable “or something.” But if the assassination of a soldier is not the business of a “lady” war correspondent, then what is? Indeed, what is the appropriate material for the article Philip directs her to write while simultaneously identifying what is off limits to her? In this telling scene, Philip places Dorothy in an untenable position because her identity and her subject matter remain unsayable. She fits into neither of the historically accepted categories of women at the battle front, prostitute or rape victim, nor into that of the more recently accepted category of nurse. But there she is nonetheless, at the war front instead of the home front, practicing it would seem the male profession of war correspondent.

As soon as Philip falls in love with Dorothy, a romance that she boldly initiates, he demands that she “move out of this hotel and . . . go back to America” (31). But Dorothy refuses to leave, calling him an “impudent, impertinent man” (31). An independent woman, she need not comply with his demand that she return to the home front. That is, after all, the realm of wives, as evidenced by Preston’s wife, about whom he is “always going on,” according to Dorothy, who adds, “Let him go back to his wife and children if he’s so excited about them. I’ll bet he won’t” (25).

Though Dorothy commits herself to remaining near the battle front, she has simultaneously worked to make her own room homey, and she makes over Philip’s adjoining room as well. In the context of the play, Dorothy’s redecoration of Philip’s room signals her desire to domesticate him, to lure him away from the war to the home front. Certainly that is how Philip interprets it. His ambivalence about this domestication is revealed by his dis- {{pg|386|387}} comfort in the redecorated room and by his conflicted responses to Dorothy. In the midst of the war, she has created a home front of sorts, a conflation that confuses Philip. He attempts to reestablish the division by associating nighttime with the home front and daytime with the war front, declaring during the night not only his love but more tellingly his desire to marry her, and repudiating these declarations during the day. Dorothy reacts to both nighttime and daytime pronouncements with equanimity, enjoying Philip’s nighttime fantasies which she also shares, yet recognizing them as such. When Philip rejects her at the end of the play, he does so because he fears he will be unable to withstand the temptation she represents to abandon the war front for the home front, a concern that his German comrade Max reinforces. But Philip’s rejection of Dorothy, however painful, does not result in her departure from Madrid.<ref> In Benjamin Glazer’s adaptation of the play for production, the much-revised character of Dorothy ''does'' leave Madrid, hoping but not expecting Philip to follow her. Glazer’s Dorothy is more conventional than Hemingway’s, an attempt to make her more sympathetic to the audience. Notably, she is only pretending to be a war correspondent while she is actually searching for her lost brother who has joined the Lincoln Brigade. In Glazer’s adaptation she is, bizarrely, raped by Philip. She is thereby transformed from Hemingway’s female war correspondent into the conventional female rape victim of war. Despite the rape, Glazer’s Dorothy falls in love with Philip, a response that the audience is expected to approve. For a discussion of Glazer’s version as compared to Hemingway’s, see Fellner 5–30.</ref> Just as Philip has volunteered for the duration, so too, it would seem, has Dorothy. But she is better able to assimilate fantasy and reality, nighttime and daytime, home front and war front, into a complex whole. For Dorothy, the conversations about other places are “just ''playing''” (62), a kind of bedtime story ritual. Realist to his romantic, she accepts the constraints placed on them by their mutual presence at the war: “But can’t we just go on now, as long as we have each other, I mean if we aren’t going to always keep on, and be nice and enjoy what we have and not be bitter?” (63).

In creating a home front at the war front, Dorothy does not split but compounds her loyalties, voluntarily remaining at home in war-torn Madrid. Gellhorn asserts in her 1959 Introduction to The Face of War: “War was our condition and our history, the place we had to live in” (viii). In making the war front their home, women were thus making themselves at home in the public sphere of the world at large. In “The War in Spain” section of ''The Face of War'', Gellhorn specifies: “Thanks to ''Collier''’s I had the chance to see the life of my time, which was war For eight years, I could go where I
wanted, when I wanted, and write what I saw” (22). In a 1945 ''Collier''’s article describing the end of World War II in Europe, “You’re on Your Way Home,” Gellhorn writes that “the war, the hated and perilous and mad, had been home for a long time too; everyone had learned how to live in it, everyone had something to do, something that looked necessary, and now we were back in this beautiful big safe place called home and what would become of us?” (qtd. in Sorel 389).

For women at the war front, now at home in the public sphere, what in {{pg|387|388}} fact was there to return to, since the home front was publicly defined by the presence of a waiting wife? Yet such a return was necessary if the balance between the male public sphere and the female private sphere was to be reestablished. Margaret Mead addressed this male anxiety, complaining about the “continuous harping on the theme: ‘Will the women be willing to return to the home?’’’ and noting the male self-interest involved in this particular skirmish between the sexes: “[This question was] repeated over and over again. . . by those to whose interest it will be to discharge women workers . . . as soon as the war is over” (qtd. in Gilbert and Gubar 3:214). The female war correspondent at the battle front was an extreme example of the millions of women who had entered the public sphere of war work, if most often on the home front.

Dorothy Bridges’ identity as female war correspondent is undermined not only by her characterization but by the very structure of the play, which rigidly confines her to the domestic sphere—a strategy that Hemingway later employed more subtly in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls''. Act One, where Dorothy is prominent, has three scenes, all set at the Hotel Florida. Act Two, where Dorothy is less prominent, has only one scene set at the Hotel Florida; the other two scenes are set at Seguridad headquarters, where two Loyalist soldiers are being interrogated for suspected treason, and at Chicote’s Bar, the hangout for International Brigade soldiers, prostitutes, and war correspondents. Act Three, where Dorothy is again less prominent, has two scenes set at the Hotel Florida; the other two scenes are set at Seguridad headquarters, and at a Republican artillery observation post that Philip and Max infiltrate. The active Philip’s scenes include not only those in his and Dorothy’s rooms at the Hotel Florida, but also those at Seguridad Headquarters, Chicote’s Bar, and the Republican observation post. In contrast, Dorothy is never presented outside of the Hotel Florida, almost always in her own room (only once entering Philip’s room). Indeed, she is most frequently seen in bed, for example “sleeping soundly” through Philip’s extended conversation with the hotel manager (16), “go[ing] back to sleep for just a little while longer” after waking for breakfast and conversation (26), pushed by Philip “toward the bed” in a protective gesture when the Loyalist soldier is shot in Philip’s room (33), eating breakfast in bed, reading in bed, lying in bed with Philip while she wears her new silver fox cape,<ref> Dorothy’s silver fox cape is a fictionalized version of Gellhorn’s own. Reynolds asserts that this cape was “a gift [to Gellhorn] from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade” (270), but he provides no note for his source. Lincoln Brigade veterans Milton Wolff (the Brigade’s last commander) and Mo Fishman independently told me in telephone interviews in May 2001 that they considered this claim unlikely given the extremely low pay of the Brigade soldiers, most of which was donated to build orphanages, and the relative infrequency of contact with Gellhorn and her circle. Moorehead notes that in Gellhorn’s first few weeks in Spain, she “went shopping with [fellow war correspondent] Virginia Cowles, . . . priced silver foxes and got desperately greedy wanting them” (''Gellhorn'' 119–20). In The Fifth Column, Hemingway represents Dorothy’s fur as the morally dubious Black Market purchase of a self-centered woman, and in the context of the play he indicts Gellhorn as well. However, the reality is more complicated. Moorehead notes that “often, [Hemingway and Gellhorn] walked together around Madrid, buying silver and jewelry ‘like specula- tors’” (''Gellhorn ''136), and Kert notes that Hemingway’s sidekick Sidney Franklin not only scrounged food for Hemingway but also “found bargains in furs and perfumes” (297). Hemingway must have found Gellhorn’s fur acceptable, indeed attractive, since she wore it when ac- companying him in 1937 to the Second Congress of American Writers, where he previewed The Spanish Earth, showing an excerpt from it, and gave his famous speech, “Fascism is a Lie”; Gellhorn gave a speech the following day. In a 1937 radio broadcast from Madrid to the United States, Gellhorn “stressed for her radio listeners the composure of Madrid’s population,” noting the irony that “while various staples were scarce, it was possible to purchase ‘furs, fine silk stockings, and beautiful clothes, French perfume, victrolas, wrist watches, and every imaginable luxury’” (Rollyson 115). In order to make such broadcasts, she was required to “dash across the road to the Telefonica, where Madrid’s only radio studio was based, at the moment of peak evening shelling” (Moorehead, ''Gellhorn'' 139). But despite her radio broadcasts and her journalism, she upbraided herself during this same period, “fretting about her own idleness, her visits to the dressmaker and furrier ‘Stupid day, stupid woman. I am wasting everything’” (Moorehead, ''Gellhorn'' 138)
</ref> “asleep in bed” when Philip and Max discuss the initial failure of their counterespionage plan (55). Jeffrey Meyers de- {{pg|388|389}} scribes her with understandable hyperbole as “virtually narcoleptic” (318). The bed is Dorothy’s locus classicus, both defining and containing her.

In the second scene of the play, Dorothy easily switches her sexual loyalties from Preston to Philip, thereby introducing the motifs of loyalty and betrayal that suffuse the play. These motifs are appropriate given the complex politics of the Spanish Civil War, but also the complicated personal situation of Hemingway, who was emotionally torn between his wife and his lover. In an unlikely judgment, the prostitute Anita criticizes Dorothy for “tak[ing] a man just like you pick a flowers [sic]” (43). Dorothy casually rejects Preston, who makes bad puns and takes cover during shelling, in favor of Philip, who does not take cover but otherwise seems Preston’s inferior. A war correspondent who spends his time drinking and carousing rather than writing, he is certainly “''livel''[''y'']” (5), as Dorothy notes with approval, but not productive. On the other hand, she scorns Preston’s productivity since “he never goes to the front . . . [but] just writes about it” (20)—a scruple that suggests her own ethics concerning war correspondence. Of course, Dorothy does not know that Philip is deadly serious, his carousing a cover for counterespionage activities at which he is extraordinarily successful. In company with Max, he overcomes a Nationalist command post, kills multiple soldiers, captures a general and a political leader, and gains information that ultimately results in the capture of three hundred Fifth Columnists in Madrid. Petra the hotel maid explains that the Fifth Column is “the people who fight us from inside the city” (46). This term gained its historical currency from Nationalist General Mola who, “when asked by a group of foreign journalists which of his four columns he expected would take Madrid . .. replied, in words repeated incessantly during the . . . years of treachery and espionage since that time, that it would be that ‘Fifth Column’ of secret Nationalist supporters within the city” (Thomas 317)—a term that Hemingway’s play popularized. General Mola’s words unleashed in Madrid and elsewhere a charged atmosphere of mistrust and paranoia, which promoted a civil war within the civil war, given the uneasy coalition of political parties that eventually composed the Republic’s Popular Front.

That Philip, the seeming playboy-correspondent, is involved in something secret and serious is realized even by the idiot hotel manager, a point emphasized not in the 1937 Madrid typescript but in Hemingway’s 1938 Key West revision of the play. But dim Dorothy, who lives with Philip in adjoining rooms at the Hotel Florida, never suspects his other life, the resulting {{pg|389|390}} dramatic irony redounding always to Philip’s credit. Philip’s apologia for loving Dorothy sounds instead like an indictment: “Granted she’s lazy and spoiled, and rather stupid, and enormously on the make. Still she’s very beautiful, very friendly, and very charming and rather innocent—and quite brave” (44). While Dorothy is here damned by faint praise, Philip’s description calls his own values into question. Philip loves her because of her superficial qualities, only his appreciation of her bravery hinting at something deeper. In this sense, they are well matched, each largely drawn to the other because of physical size and sexual appeal. Dorothy is referred to as “that great big blonde” (41), and she is attracted by Philip’s sexual prowess,<ref>Hemingway here engages in an ego-bolstering move, since Gellhorn “did not find [Hemingway] physically attractive” and sex with Hemingway “was never very good” (Moorehead, ''Gellhorn'' 114, 135). Moorehead notes that Gellhorn “told a friend [in a 1950 letter], [that] all through the months in Spain she went to bed with Hemingway ‘as little as she could manage’: My ‘whole memory of sex with Ernest is the invention of excuses and failing that, the hope it would soon be over’” (''Gellhorn'' 135–36). </ref> noting that “he made me happier than anyone has ever made me” (47). When he throws her over, asserting, “You’re uneducated, you’re useless, you’re a fool and you’re lazy,” she responds, “Maybe the others. But I’m not useless” (83). She here indirectly refers to her sexual utility, which Philip identifies as “a commodity you shouldn’t pay too high a price for” (83). Hurt and angry, Dorothy retaliates by asking Philip, “Did it ever occur to you that you’re a commodity, too? A commodity one shouldn’t pay too high a price for” (84). Philip is amused, never having had to think of himself as a sexual object, indeed a whore (“commodity” an economic term saturated with Marxist significance). But Dorothy does not have the luxury of Philip’s laughter. She is psychologically vulnerable to the charge, for “women who push the boundaries of gender are censured for such behaviors” in gender- specific ways (Herbert 2). Just as the ''milicianas'' were figured forth as whores to discourage their presence at the front lines and to render them a familiar female type if they stayed, so too is Dorothy when she will neither leave the war front for the home front nor deny the interrelationship of war front and home front that she herself has created and represents.

The correlation between Dorothy and the whore would thus seem to be historically inevitable, a correlation that develops from the play’s very first short scene, which exists solely to provide a gloss on the play. A whore sees the sign on the door to Dorothy’s room: “Working. Do Not Disturb” (3). When she asks her soldier-customer to read it to her, he responds with contempt: “So that’s what I’d draw. A literary one. The hell with it” (3). She responds—to the sign? to his contempt?—with “a dry high, hard laugh,” asserting, “I’ll get me a sign like that too” (3). The stage goes dark and the scene ends, these allegorical characters disappearing forever, having provided their implicit commentary on all that follows. {{pg|390|391}}

In the next scene Anita—“a Moorish tart” as the stage directions initially refer to her rather than by name—is brought by Philip to Dorothy’s room, where Anita objects to the sign because “all the time working, isn’t fair” (10). She insists that Dorothy give her the sign as a means of forestalling unfair competition. Anita is, in fact, in competition with Dorothy for Philip’s affections and his sexual favors. At one level, the play presents a choice between Dorothy and Anita. And the final scene of the play presents the high-minded Philip, having rejected Dorothy, initiating a sexual encounter with Anita. Sexuality without strings is preferable to the entanglements of love and marriage when one has committed oneself to fighting for the Cause, although this loveless encounter seems like torture to Max, who responds to it exactly as he does to an interrogation scene earlier (76, 85). In “Night Before Battle,” one of the Spanish Civil War stories that Hemingway blocked out while revising ''The Fifth Column'' in Key West, the only difference between “two American girls at the Florida [who are] newspaper correspondents” and two prostitutes is that a soldier must talk to the female war correspondents before sex, while he may simply pay the prostitutes for their sexual services (118). Max’s confused articulation of Dorothy Bridges’ name—“Britches?” (64)—reinforces her redefined identity as sexual object, indeed as whore.

In both characterization and structure, then, the play works against the recognition of Dorothy as a serious woman, a competent journalist, a war correspondent. Malcolm Cowley asserted in his review of the play that “if Philip hadn’t left her for the Spanish people, he might have traded her for a flask of Chanel No. 5 and still have had the best of the bargain”(qtd. in Trogdon 213), thereby wittily suggesting her triviality, decorative quality, and stereotypical femininity.

But just as Dorothy does not catch on to Philip’s secret life, perhaps neither does Philip catch on to Dorothy’s. Though she is never represented as writing, only once sitting down at her typewriter and then only for a moment (as though to emphasize her disengagement from it), she somehow writes three articles during the play’s time period, not merely the one article whose potential completion Preston doubts, saying, “You never do work anyway” (10). Philip shares this judgment, labeling her “lazy” (83). In the final scene of the play she is presented in the stage directions as returning “home” (81) to her room at the Hotel Florida—but from where? Her activ- {{pg|391|392}} ities outside the confines of her room, if occasionally referenced, are never dramatized like Philip’s.

Yet Dorothy clearly goes out on her own in besieged Madrid when no one (neither the playwright, nor the other characters, nor the audience) is “watching,” and her criticism of Preston for writing articles without visiting the battle front suggests one of her probable destinations. She tells Philip at one point, “You know I’m not as silly as I sound, or I wouldn’t be here”(57)— a claim that Philip himself could have made yet to which he does not react. Just as his career requires him to act silly, so too perhaps does hers, for it cannot have been easy to be one of only a few female correspondents in the male realm of war. Indeed, Philip’s cynical comments and bored manner find their corollary in Dorothy’s Vassar idiom and equally bored manner. Just as Philip’s manner masks his deadly seriousness as a counterespionage agent, so may Dorothy’s manner mask her own seriousness as a war correspondent.<ref>For perhaps the only other interpretation that takes Dorothy seriously, offering a subtextual reading, see Nakjavani. His argument differs from mine, however, insofar as he focuses narrowly on ideology and politics, associating Dorothy with ideology (a positive value in Nakjavani’s argument) and Max with politics (a negative value).</ref> Though she earlier claimed that she didn’t “understand anything that is happening here,” she follows up by commenting, “I understand a little bit about University City, but not too much. The Casa del Campo is a complete puzzle to me. And Usera—and Carabanchel. They’re dreadful”(5). She cites four critical locations, neighborhoods and suburbs of Madrid where the Nationalist enemy had been dug in since November 1936, sites of horrific battles between Republican militias (soon supported by the International Brigades) and the Nationalist Army that determined whether Madrid would stand or fall. Madrid suffered mightily, but La Pasionaria’s cry "No Pasarán”—“They shall not pass”—became the city’s watchword. For the rest of the war, the Nationalists maintained their positions on the outskirts of Madrid, shelling the city and inhibiting the movement of supplies, while Madrid held fast despite terrible punishment until the very end. It was a “City of Anguish” as Edwin Rolfe titled one of his Spanish Civil War poems. These battle sites were indeed “dreadful,” as Dorothy asserts in her understated idiom (and as Robert Jordan recollects in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', having fought at Usera and Carabanchel himself). And she keeps her promise to write “just as soon as [she] understand[s] things the least bit better” (10).

Employing understatement like Philip’s own, Dorothy later comments to Philip in passing, “I work when you’re not around,” a claim that Philip could also make (57). Yet Philip has a history on which to draw to enact his role successfully, whereas Dorothy must create a new role without history’s support, {{pg|392|393}} rendering her circumspect as she defines this identity. Nancy Sorel notes of the women war correspondents who reported World War II—“fewer than a hundred in all” (xili)—that “every women felt vulnerable in regard to her professional status,” whether because of “discriminatory treatment by generals,” “denigrating remarks from hostile male reporters,” or unwanted romantic or sexual advances (xiv). Dorothy disguises her vulnerability at enacting her new role as war correspondent just as Philip does at enacting his role as counterespionage agent. But Dorothy has no one to talk to about her secret life, while Philip has Max, to whom he confides his doubts and fears, and even the hotel manager, to whom he confides information in a code they both understand. As Pilar tells Robert Jordan in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', “Everyone needs to talk to someone. Now for every one there should be some one to whom one can speak frankly, for all the valor one could have one becomes very alone”(89). And secretly valorous Dorothy is in this regard far more alone than Philip.

In one sense, of course, Dorothy’s secret life is that of Martha Gellhorn. Accomplished journalist and author of two books, the novel ''What Mad Pursuit'' (1934) and the much-lauded fiction collection ''The Trouble I’ve Seen'' (1936), Gellhorn had considered covering the Spanish Civil War before she met Hemingway, who had come to a similar decision. His longtime marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer breaking down, he and Gellhorn quickly followed up on their initial attraction in Key West once they arrived separately in Spain in March 1937. Their mutual commitment to the Republican cause, her long-time admiration for him as a writer, her newfound appreciation for his talents as a war correspondent (including a tactical understanding of war and great personal courage), his ease at living in Spain, his willingness to teach an apt and adoring pupil—all combined with the intensity of war such that their love affair ignited almost immediately. During their four stays in Spain, Gellhorn often followed Hemingway about, whether in Madrid, to the front, or on longer battlefield trips around Spain. She actively participated with Hemingway and Joris Ivens in the filming of ''The Spanish Earth'', a propaganda film for which Hemingway wrote the script and which he ultimately narrated. Because of her personal friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt, Gellhorn was able to arrange for the film to be viewed by the Roosevelts at the White House, with her and Hemingway and Ivens in attendance to plead the cause of the Spanish Republic.

But Gellhorn also spent many days in Spain on her own, learning Span- {{pg|393|394}} ish, visiting hospitals, talking with the common people, traveling to other battlefields. She was smart enough to know that she did not know much about being a war correspondent, but she learned quickly under Hemingway’s apt tutelage (and that of fellow correspondents Herbert Matthews of the ''New York Times'' and Sefton Delmer of the ''Daily Express''). In July 1937 she sent off her first article, under Hemingway’s prodding encouragement. Collier’s published it as “Only the Shells Whine,” a title that Gellhorn changed to “High Explosive for Everyone” in ''The Face of War''.

Far from wanting Gellhorn to leave the dangerous arena of war, Hemingway wanted her to stay, for it was the locus of their love affair. Only after their affair was firmly established did he once briefly forbid her from accompanying him, telling her in Paris to wait there with the wife of war correspondent Vincent Sheean, since "Spain’s no place for women,” then promising to “phone to say whether ‘the women’ might come” (quoted by Wyden 450). Gellhorn did not wait for his approval to join him in Barcelona, thereby again demonstrating her independence.

Like Dorothy’s first lover Preston, Hemingway had a wife and children on the home front, and his coverage of the Spanish Civil War provided him with a reason to be away from his family as well as with an environment of danger and intensity where a shared cause subsumed any other differences, encouraging the pleasures of a sexual liaison without thoughts of consequences. Indeed, a wife and children seemed to preclude consequences. Hemingway demonstrates a degree of masculine self-awareness when he has Dorothy say, “Those wife-and-children men at war . . . just use them as sort of an opening wedge to get into bed with some one and then immediately afterwards they club you with them” (25).

Gellhorn most valued her comradeship with Hemingway as they worked together (thereby reversing the priorities of Dorothy and Philip, whose sexual relationship is primary and comradeship a farce). Gellhorn was an apt pupil, and Hemingway loved the role of teacher. His tutelage, born of hard experience, demonstrably influenced Gellhorn, who learned fast and with a gusto that delighted Hemingway, as did her courage.

Yet once Gellhorn and Hemingway were able to live together outside the war zone (even before his divorce was finalized), Hemingway resented Gellhorn’s continuing career as war correspondent because it resulted in what he viewed as her abandonment of him—for example, when she left him in 1939 at Sun Valley in order to cover the Russo-Finnish War. In effect, she thereby {{pg|394|395}} relegated him to the role of home-front wife. Having experienced that role long before during World War I, he must have feared being jilted again as Agnes had jilted him when he returned to the home front of Oak Park while she remained in Italy, and as he had recently jilted Pauline, who had begged to accompany him to Spain but whom he had insisted remain on the home front in Key West.

Hemingway hoped to keep Gellhorn “away from war, pestilence, carnage and adventure” (''Letters'' 511). Nevertheless, shortly after their 1941 marriage she persuaded him to accompany her as a fellow war correspondent to the Far East (thereby reversing the power-relationship that had obtained between them in Spain), where she was to report for ''Collier’s'' on the China-Japan War as well as the defense of Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies. Though Gellhorn tolerated the difficulties of this trip less well than did Hemingway, that did not quench her thirst for such assignments. While Hemingway remained at the Finca Vigía on the home front of Cuba, she traveled the Caribbean on assignment for ''Collier’s'' in 1942, investigating the impact of submarine warfare on the islands; the lack of action perhaps caused her to underestimate Hemingway’s own later submarine-hunting activities off Cuba and Bimini.<ref>For Gellhorn’s description of her trip to the Far East with Hemingway, see her ''Travels'' 19–63; for her description of her Caribbean trip, see her ''Travels'' 64–108.</ref>

When she left Hemingway in Cuba for the European theater of World War II in 1943, she begged him repeatedly to accompany her or to join her there, as in this letter of 9 December 1943: “I so wish you would come. I think it’s so vital for you to see everything; it’s as if it wouldn’t be entirely seen if you didn’t” (''Letters'' 156). The insistent tone of her letters reveals her desperate desire to recapture their best time together—in Spain, at the Hotel Florida, both comrades, both dedicated to the same cause, both writing.

But Hemingway was comfortable at the Finca and satisfied with his sub-hunting adventures (which incorporated the counterespionage activities that he had invested in Philip Rawlings). He resented Gellhorn’s demands, partly because he was no longer her teacher, but more importantly because she was now his wife instead of his lover. He cabled her, “Are you a war correspondent or wife in my bed”(quoted by Moorehead, ''Gellhorn'' 212), thereby drawing an absolute boundary between the war front and home front, and announcing that he would no longer tolerate her conflation of the two. He desperately wanted her to return to the home front and to him, but after her repeated refusals he determined to go to the war front in 1944 in order to defeat her in the battle of the sexes their marriage had become. He wrote to {{pg|395|396}} her, “Will organize the house, close down boat, go to N.Y., eat shit, get a journalism job, which hate worse than Joyce would, and be over. Excuse bitterness”; in a letter shortly thereafter he labeled her “unscrupulous” and wrote, “Maybe will see you soon maybe not” (qtd. in Moorehead, ''Gellhorn'' 212). In his eyes she had betrayed him, and as he wrote in “Treachery in Aragon,” an article about the Spanish Civil War, “When one has become involved in a war there is only one thing to do: win it” (26). Thus he purposely did not travel with Gellhorn, instead flying to Europe while she was relegated to a twenty-day voyage on a dynamite-laden ship traveling through mined waters. World War II became a nightmare version of Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War dream.

In a matter of days, Hemingway met Mary Welsh, Martha’s opposite in appearance, social class, and temperament. Taking Mary’s attentions from fellow war correspondent and novelist Irwin Shaw in what must have been an ego-bolstering move, Hemingway almost immediately asked this female war correspondent to marry him, in yet another example of the repetition compulsion that structured so much of his life. And soon, despite serious doubts, Mary agreed, taking a leave of absence from her job that became permanent. Before the war had officially ended and while Martha was still covering it, Hemingway and Mary were together in Cuba. The only journalism that Mary ever wrote again concerned life with Hemingway on the home front.

Hemingway’s attitude toward the female war correspondent was complex, reflecting that of the culture at large with regard to women “at-home” in the public sphere. He knew a number of such New Women, among them Josephine Herbst (a longtime friend from 1920s Paris) and Virginia Cowles in the Spanish Civil War, and Helen Kirkpatrick and Lee Carson in World War II, along with Martha Gellhorn and Mary Welsh—women venturing into the heretofore male realm of war, venturing yet further into it than had the female nurses he had come to know during World War I. He admired their sexual independence and also their courage, since grace under pressure was an ideal appropriate for women as well as for men, and war provided the ultimate pressure-cooker in which grace could be measured. He married two female war correspondents.

Yet Hemingway came to resent the very qualities that had attracted him because he was fearful, not without reason, that these women would refuse to return permanently to the home front upon becoming his wife—an iden- {{pg|396|397}} tity to his mind that subsumed all others. When angry at Mary in later years, he called her a “camp-follower” (quoted by Kert 455), saying, “I haven’t fucked generals to get my information” (quoted by Whiting 20)—a sexually demeaning remark that redefined her war-front identity from war correspondent to whore while simultaneously signaling his uneasy sense of professional rivalry. In calling Mary “you goddamn smirking, useless female war correspondent” (quoted by Lynn 515), he indicted all female war correspondents because the adjective “female” is joined in this list by uniformly pejorative adjectives. And Hemingway’s indictment of Mary was an indictment of Martha Gellhorn, whose war correspondence he chose to criticize at one of their last meetings, knowing exactly how to hurt her. Indeed, it was an indictment of all those women whose positions at the home front had been compromised by their experiences at the war front, which were among the most exaggerated of the public-sphere activities in which modern women were involved. Such activities rendered them simultaneously more fascinating and more terrifyingly unpredictable to modern men.

Hemingway wrote a self-justifying letter to his adolescent son Patrick, explaining the breakdown of his marriage to Gellhorn while also preparing Patrick for his new relationship with Mary Welsh: “We want some straight work, not be alone and not have to go to war to see one’s wife and then have wife want to be in different war theatre in order that stories not compete. Going to get me somebody who wants to stick around with me and let me be the writer of the family” (''Letters'' 576). He wrote similarly to his eldest son John, “[I] would swap her for two non beautiful [sic] wives I might occasionally have the opportunity to go to bed with”(Moorehead, ''Gellhorn'' 228). While Hemingway had gone to war to see his lover quite willingly, the change in Gellhorn’s identity from lover to wife was a sea-change that Hemingway could not get past because, by definition, wives were for the home front. Husbands might go to war as an act of self-realization, but wives should not, as he made very sure Mary understood. In his 1950 novel ''Across the River and into the Trees'', he provides a thinly veiled attack on Martha that doubles as a warning to Mary: “You mean she went away, from ambition, when you only were away from duty,” Renata says to Colonel Cantwell about his former wife, adding, “You couldn’t have married a woman journalist that kept on being that” (212).

Martha Gellhorn came to recognize the dilemma that inevitably resulted when modern men were attracted to modern women for qualities that they {{pg|397|398}} would abjure in a wife, playing it for comedy in the 1945 play she and Virginia Cowles wrote, ''Love Goes to Press'' (originally titled ''Men Must Weep'' and then, with wonderful ambiguity, ''Take My Love Away''). The two female protagonists, Annabelle Jones (based on Gellhorn) and Jane Mason (based on Cowles), are successful war correspondents who report from the front lines of World War II, when “any decent woman would stay at home” according to Philip, the British Public Relations Officer and Jane’s love interest (10). Joe Rogers, war correspondent and Annabelle’s ex-husband, “says war’s no place for a woman” according to his new fiancée, actress Daphne Ruther- ford (14). She is entertaining the troops rather nearer to the front line than she had expected, and he promises to “bundle [her] up and send [her] straight off to America where it’s safe” (14).

While the male correspondents are satisfied to rewrite military communiques, Annabelle and Jane show remarkable ingenuity in finding ways to get to the front so as to report the action firsthand. However, their efforts are denigrated, Joe Rogers repeatedly complaining, to the widespread agreement of the other men, that they “run this lousy war on sex-appeal” (45, 49). As Sandra Spanier notes in her Afterword to the play:

<blockquote> The fact is, of course, that being female is a definite occupational handicap for a war correspondent, and both Jane and Annabelle know it. But because their womanhood is something that they have never been allowed to forget, they have great fun flaunting it. With a perfect understanding of the currency of power, they turn a handicap to their own advantage in repeated acts of subversion that the authors exploit to comic effect. (82–83)</blockquote>

In considering the likely outbreak of World War II, Gellhorn had noted of her own plan to once again take up the profession of war correspondence, “It is going to be a serious drawback to be a woman, it always has been but probably worse now than ever” (''Letters'' 90).

Jane and Annabelle find it a minor irritant that everyone assumes they must inevitably be nurses. “No, I’m not a nurse,” Jane patiently repeats (16). But this correction implies criticism of the stereotype alone, not the role itself. Indeed, Jane forgoes a scoop in order to render medical aid to a wounded officer on the battlefield, just as Gellhorn helped the medical staff with the wounded on the hospital transport ship where she had stowed away {{pg|398|399}} in the toilet so as to get to Normandy to report on the D-Day landing. Even the “repugnant” Daphne is recuperated (36). When Philip criticizes Daphne because “all she can think about is her dreadful career,” Jane responds with exquisite irony that “it isn’t the career that’s silly,” and she notes with admiration that Daphne “certainly knows what she wants” (63).

Jane briefly thinks that what she herself wants is marriage to Philip, who suddenly expresses admiration for her independence and professionalism as a war correspondent. But soon he says, “I can’t have you going to the front any more. . . [because] you’re mine now”(60). He sabotages her work by arranging for her to sleep through an attack she is to report, and he makes plans to send her to his family home in England. This last is too much for Jane. She is appalled by his description of the life his mother and sister lead there—notably, not because she finds it trivial, but rather because the riding and hunting, the bee-keeping and cow-tending, the war committees and the uniformed “land army” all require a different sort of courage and a different set of talents than she possesses (76). She is horrified to discover, for example, that there are no “field dressing station[s]” at fox hunts, and she bewails the fact that “there’s no one to pick up the wounded” (69, 64). Imagining a future where she will be “kicked by horses and stung by bees and finally die of mastitis from a cow,” she envies Annabelle whom she envisions “in a lovely dry dug-out somewhere” (73, 69). Jane changes her mind about marrying Philip and lights out for the territory—to Burma, in fact, with Annabelle, to report on the war front there.

Annabelle does indeed plan to continue her war correspondence, but she hopes to do so with Joe Rogers, who has proclaimed not only his continuing love for her but also a new attitude of respect for her work: “No other girl would have dared to fly that mission You’re everything. You’re pretty and funny and brave. I think being so brave is one of the things I’m proudest of” (67). He promises never again to steal her stories as he did during their brief marriage. “He said he did it because he loved me so much he couldn’t bear to have me in danger,” Annabelle tells Jane, but “it turned out he married me to silence the opposition” (19). Joe now asserts, “Nothing means anything without you,” and he promises never to interfere in her work again (67). Annabelle imagines a future with this “beautiful, funny, fascinating man” in which they will cover wars together in happy comradeship (20), having learned that marriage is “too dangerous” and that “you risk ruining everything with marriage” (69). But Annabelle discovers that Joe has not {{pg|399|400}} changed when he steals her trip to Poland. The theft is bad enough, but his condescending explanation is still more infuriating: “Hawkins sent for you, but it’s too dangerous. I love you too much. It doesn’t matter for a man. P.S. Back tomorrow” (73). Annabelle’s earlier comment, “If there’s anything I really loathe, it’s a woman protector,” resonates for she senses personal motivations beneath this seemingly generous sentiment (25). Moreover, the same sentiment is expressed by Philip, as one of the male correspondents tells her: “You’ve got to be more tolerant, Annabelle. The poor guy’s been away from England for three years, fighting to protect womankind from the horrors of war. And then the womankind walks in on him. He might as well have spared himself the trouble. You can see it would upset him for a while” (25).

Annabelle is terribly hurt by Joe’s betrayal, but she vows not “to let any worthless man ruin [her] job”(74), and she is cheered at the prospect of covering the war in Burma: “It sounds too terrible. Those poor men, and no one to tell what they’re doing. Forgotten Army. How dare people treat them like that” (75). Annabelle proves herself “still out to save the world,” as Jane had earlier described her, claiming, “We have to write, Jane. The people who fight can’t. It’s our job. Our duty, really” (19, 18). So Annabelle and Jane go off to yet another war front, finding it “lovely to be at the same war” but regretting that the men they love cannot somehow tolerate sharing the ex- perience with them (23). Hemingway’s Philip Rawlings had criticized Dorothy, saying that “the first thing an American woman does is try to get the man she’s interested in to give up something” (24), but in ''Love Goes to Press'' it is the men who try to change the women. As Sandra Spanier notes in her Afterword, ''"Love Goes to Press'' portrays men and women in love and at war from a distinctly female point of view, a lens through which we rarely have had the opportunity in American literature to view any war. And in this wartime drama, the European Theater of Operations is literally that— the stage set for the main action: the War between the Sexes” (82).

In ''The Fifth Column'', Hemingway also portrays what he called “the great unending battle between men and women” (Baker 481-82), though he plays it for tragedy rather than comedy. His biting portrait of Dorothy Bridges, Philip Rawlings’ potential wife, provided a cautionary example that Hemingway proceeded to ignore, as so many critics have pointed out, and as Philip seems to know when he famously confesses, “I’m afraid that’s the whole trouble. I want to make an absolutely colossal mistake” (42). But in order to render evident this colossal mistake, which Philip actually avoids, {{pg|400|401}} Hemingway is reduced to caricaturing Martha in the role of Dorothy—in point of fact, underplaying those characteristics that he found most attractive in Martha and also most disconcerting. But the play didn’t work, critics citing most often as its primary flaw the unbelievable characterization of Dorothy. And so he easily ignored his own warning, as Martha also apparently did, though her fictional counterpart quite rightly says of Philip, “You’re a very serious problem for any woman” (24). These two willful, talented, independent people came together in the heat of battle, then waged their own personal war, from which Martha emerged an accomplished war correspondent and Hemingway emerged as husband to a woman whom he had persuaded to abandon war correspondence—not a pocket Reubens, as he affectionately termed her, but a pocket female war correspondent whom he packed up for the home front once he decided he wanted to leave the war behind. But given the modernist merging of home front and war front, Hemingway should not have been surprised to discover that in moving Mary into Martha’s room at the Finca Vigía, he had not emerged as victor in the war between the sexes but had merely shifted the battlelines.

==Citations==
{{reflist}}

==Works Cited==
{{Refbegin}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date= |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher=Avon, 1969 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Beevor |first=Antony |date= |title=The Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Peter Bedrick Books, 1983 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Brome |first=Vincent |date= |title=The International Brigades: Spain 1936-1939 |url= |location=New York |publisher=William Morrow, 1966 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Bullard |first=F. Lauriston |date= |title=Famous War Correspondents |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown, 1914 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Coleman |first=Catherine |date= |series="Women in the Civil War" |title=Heart of Spain: Robert Capa's Photographs of the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Aperture, 1999 |pages=43-51 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fellner |first=Harriet |date= |title=Hemingway as Playwright |series= The Fifth Column |url= |location=Ann Arbor |publisher=UMI Research P, 1986 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite interview |last=Fishman |first=Mo |title=Phone interview |date=May 2001 }}
* {{cite book |last=Fraser |first=Ronald |date= |title=Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Pantheon, 1979 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Garrison |first=Nancy Scripture |date= |title=With Courage and Delicacy, Civil War on the Peninsula: Women and the U.S. Sanitary Commission |url= |location=Mason City, Iowa |publisher=Savas, 1999 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Gavin |first=Lettie |date= |title=American Women in World War I: They Also Served |url= |location=Niwot, CO |publisher=UP of Colorado, 1997 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Gellhorn |first=Martha |date= |title=The Face of War |url= |location=New York |magazine=Atlantic Monthly P, 1986 |edition=3rd|pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Gellorn |first=Martha |author-mask=1 |date= |title=Travels with Myself and Another |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin, 1978 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last1=Gilbert |first1=Sandra M. |last2=Gubar |first2=Susan |date= |title=No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century |url= |location=New Haven |publisher=Yale UP, 1988-1994, 3 vols |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date= |title=The Wound in the Heart: America and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Macmillan, 1962
|pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hawks |first=Esther Hill |date= |title=A Woman Doctor's Civil War: Esther Hill Hawks' Diary |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Carolina, 1984 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1950 |title=Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 1978 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1 |date= |title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961 |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 1981 |editor-last=Baker |editor-first=Carlos |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1 |title=For Whom the Bell Tolls |year=1940 |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 1968 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1 |title=Green Hills of Africa |year=1935 |location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 1967 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |chapter=A New Kind of War |year=1935 |location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 1967 |pages=262-67 |editor-last=White |editor-first=William |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1 |date= |title=The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War |chapter=Night Before Battle |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 1969 |pages=110-139 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1937 |title=A Play |url= |location=Box 1, Folder 3, Typescript carbon, Ernest Hemingway Manuscripts Collection. U of Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware |publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1926 |title=The Sun Also Rises |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 1970 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=30 June 1938 |title=Ken |chapter=Treachery in Aragon |url= |location=1.7 |publisher= |pages=26 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=9-10 June 1943 |title=Unpublished Letter to Martha Gellhorn |chapter=Outgoing Correspondence, 1943-1948 |url= |location=Box 45, Folder EH 1943 June. Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA. |publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1 |date= |chapter=A Very Short Story |title=The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 1966 |pages=141-142
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Herbert |first=Melissa S. |date= |title=Camouflage Isn't Only for Combat: Gender, Sexuality, and Women in the Military |url= |location=New York |publisher=New York UP, 1998 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Kert |first=Bernice |date= |title=The Hemingway Women |url= |location=New York |publisher=Norton, 1983 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Knightley |first=Phillip |date= |title=The First Casualty, From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker |url= |location=New York |publisher=Harcourt, 1975 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Leonard |first=Elizabeth D. |date= |title=All the Daring of the Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies |url= |location=New York |publisher=Norton, 1999 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lynn |first=Kenneth |date= |title=Hemingway |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Harvard UP, 1987 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Maher |first=Sister Mary Denis |date= |title=To Bind Up the Wounds: Catholic Sister Nurses in the U.S. Civil War |url= |location=Baton Rouge |publisher=Louisiana State UP, 1989 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mathews |first=Joseph J |date= |title=Reporting the Wars |url= |location=Minneapolis |publisher=U of Minnesota P, 1957 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mayer |first=Holly A |date= |title=Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community during the American Revolution |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Carolina P, 1996 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last1=Merriman |first1=Marion |last2=Lerude |first2=Warren |date= |title=American Commander in Spain: Robert Hale Merriman and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade |url= |location=Reno |publisher=U of Nevada P, 1986 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Meyers |first=Jeffrey |date= |title=Hemingway: A Biography |url= |location=New York |publisher=Harper, 1985 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Moon |first=Katharine H.S. |date= |chapter=Military Prostitutes and the Hypersexualization of Militarized Women |title=Gender Camouflage: Women and the Military |url= |location=New York |publisher=New York UP, 1999 |pages=209-222 |editor-last1=D'Amico |editor-first1=Francine |editor-last2=Weinstein |editor-first2=Laurie |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Moorehead |first=Carolyn |date= |title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life |url= |location=New York |publisher=Holt, 2006 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Moorehead |first=Carolyn |author-mask=1 |date= |title=Selected Letters of Marthat Gellhorn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Holt, 2006 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Moreland |first=Kim |date= |title=A Farewell to Arms: Teaching Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms |chapter=World War I, and the stockyards at Chicago |url= |location=Kent |publisher=Kent State UP, 2008 |editor-last=Tyler |editor-first=Lisa |pages=85-97 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Moreland |first=Kim |author-mask=1 |date= |title=The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature: Twain, Adams, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway |url= |location=Charlottesville |publisher=UP of Virginia, 1996 |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Nakjavani |first=Erik |date= |title=''Hemingway's'' The Fifth Column ''and the Question of Ideology'' |url= |location=North Dakota |publisher=Quarterly 60.2, 1992 |pages=159-184 |ref=harv }}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hemingway and Women at the Front: Blowing Bridges in The Fifth Column, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Other Works}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

Donald L. Kaufmann

2025-03-25T20:55:42Z

Jules Carry: Added cat.

{{start|Donald L. Kaufmann}} was Professor of English at the University of South
Florida, where he has taught American literature and creative writing since
coming to USF from the University of Alaska in 1965. He is the author of
''Norman Mailer: The Countdown: The First Twenty Years'' (Southern Illinois
University Press, 1969), one of the first two books to appear on the work of
Norman Mailer. He has also published essays on Mailer, Updike, Bellow,
Hemingway, and other twentieth-century American writers. Professor Kaufmann
holds one of the largest Mailer collections of books, stories, essays,
memorabilia, and ephemerals.

{{Big|{{c|Written by Donald L. Kaufmann}}}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kaufmann, Donald L.}}
[[Category:Contributors]]
[[Category:2010 Vol. 4 (MR)]]
[[Category:2008 Vol. 2 (MR)]]
[[Category:2007 Vol. 1 (MR)]]

Victor Peppard

2025-03-25T20:54:26Z

Jules Carry:

{{start|Victor Peppard}} is Professor of Russian at the University of South Florida in Tampa, where he has taught since 1975 and was chair of World Languages from 2000 to 2011. He received a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Michigan in 1974 and taught Russian at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia in 1973 and 1974. He has published on Russian language pedagogy and on such writers as Isaak Babel’, Gogol’, Dostoevsky, Norman Mailer, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, Yury Olesha, and Vladimir Voinovich, as well as on the history of Russian and Soviet sport and he has also published several short stories.

{{Con}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Peppard, Victor}}
[[Category:Contributors]]
[[Category:2021 Vol. 15 (MR)]]
[[Category:2010 Vol. 4 (MR)]]
[[Category:2020 Conference]]
[[Category:2019 Conference]]
[[Category:2018 Conference]]
[[Category:2017 Conference]]

Ezra Cappell

2025-03-25T20:54:03Z

Jules Carry: Added cat.

{{start|Ezra Cappell}} holds a joint appointment at the College of Charleston as Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of English. Prior to this appointment, Dr. Cappell was Professor of English and Director of the Inter-American Jewish Studies Program at the University of Texas at El Paso. Dr. Cappell holds degrees from NYU (M.Phil and Ph.D.) as well as City College (M.A.) and Queens College (B.A.). His publications include ''American Talmud: The Cultural Work of Jewish American Fiction'' (SUNY Press, 2007) and a co-edited volume (with Jessica Lang): ''Off the Derech: Leaving Orthodox Judaism in the Modern World'' (SUNY Press, 2020).

{{Big|{{c|Written by Ezra Cappell}}}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Cappell, Ezra}}
[[Category:Contributors]]
[[Category:2010 Vol. 4 (MR)]]
[[Category:2008 Vol. 2 (MR)]]
[[Category:2022 Conference]]
[[Category:2018 Conference]]

Erik Nakjavani

2025-03-25T20:53:04Z

Jules Carry: Added cat.

{{start|Erik Nakjavani}} is Professor Emeritus of Humanities at the University of Pittsburgh. His life-long interests have been in literary theory, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. He specializes in Hemingway studies, and is a founding member of the Hemingway Society. His latest essay, “Theory and Practice of Fictionalized Biography: Hemingway’s ‘Under Kilimanjaro{{' "}} appeared in ''The Mailer Review'' (2018).

{{Con}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Nakjavani, Erik}}
[[Category:Contributors]]
[[Category:2021 Vol. 15 (MR)]]
[[Category:2010 Vol. 4 (MR)]]
[[Category:2019 Conference]]
[[Category:2017 Conference]]

Barry H. Leeds

2025-03-25T20:52:01Z

Jules Carry: Added cat.

[[File:Mailer and Leeds.jpg|thumb|500px|Norman Mailer and Barry Leeds.]]

{{start|Barry H. Leeds}} was an Emeritus Professor of English at Connecticut State University, was one of the co-founders of the [[Norman Mailer Society]], and served as its Vice President since the Society’s founding in 2003. He wrote extensively on the life and works of his good friend, [[Norman Mailer]], including his pioneering study, ''[[The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer]]'' (1969), and ''The Enduring Vision of Norman Mailer'' (2002), and countless essays and reviews. In 2014, he published a candid and moving memoir, ''A Moveable Beast: Scenes from My Life''. He also served on the editorial board of the ''[[Mailer Review]]''. His many contributions to understanding Mailer the man and Mailer the artist are one of the pillars of Mailer scholarship.

===Selected Publications===
* {{cite book |last=Leeds |first=Barry H. |date=2002 |title=The Enduring Vision of Norman Mailer |url=https://amzn.to/2TlVYTi |location=Bainbridge Island, Wash. |publisher=Pleasure Boat Studio |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Leeds |first=Barry H. |authormask=1 |date=1981 |title=Ken Kesey |url=https://amzn.to/2CQD1Rp |series=Modern Literature Series |location=New York |publisher=Ungar Pub Co |page= |isbn= |author-link= }}
* {{cite book |last=Leeds |first=Barry H. |authormask=1 |date=2014 |title=A Moveable Beast: Scenes from My Life |url=https://amzn.to/2TgTe9F |location=London |publisher=AuthorHouseUK }}
* {{cite book |last=Leeds |first=Barry H. |authormask=1 |date=1969 |title=The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer |url=https://prmlr.us/svnm |location=New York |publisher=NYU Press |ref=harv }}

===Links===
* {{c|Written by Barry H. Leeds}}
* [[Remembering Barry Leeds]]

{{DEFAULTSORT:Leeds, Barry H.}}

[[Category:Contributors]]
[[Category:2010 Vol. 4 (MR)]]
[[Category:2008 Vol. 2 (MR)]]
[[Category:2004 Conference]]
[[Category:2003 Conference]]

Category:Written by Hilary K. Justice

2025-03-25T20:50:44Z

Jules Carry: Created page with "{{AuthorCat |last=Justice |first=Hilary K.}}"

Hilary K. Justice

2025-03-25T20:50:05Z

Jules Carry: Created page with "{{start|Hilary K. Justice}} is Associate Professor of English Studies and Publishing at Illinois State University and author of ''The Bones of the Others'' (Kent UP 2006) as well as several award-winning works of fiction. Her essays on Hemingway and on twentieth-century publishing have appeared in several collections, including ''Terminus'', ''Hemingway and Women'', ''The Hemingway Review'', ''Resources for American Literary Study'', and ''North Dakota Quarterly''. {{Co..."

{{start|Hilary K. Justice}} is Associate Professor of English Studies and Publishing at Illinois State University and author of ''The Bones of the Others'' (Kent UP 2006) as well as several award-winning works of fiction. Her essays on Hemingway and on twentieth-century publishing have appeared in several collections, including ''Terminus'', ''Hemingway and Women'', ''The Hemingway Review'', ''Resources for American Literary Study'', and ''North Dakota Quarterly''.

{{Con}}
[[Category:2010 Vol. 4 (MR)]]

Category:Written by Kasia Boddy

2025-03-25T20:48:04Z

Jules Carry: Created page with "{{AuthorCat |last=Boddy |first=Kasia}}"

Kasia Boddy

2025-03-25T20:47:41Z

Jules Carry: Created page with "{{start|Kasia Boddy}} teaches in the English Department at University College London. She is the author of ''Boxing: A Cultural History'' (2008) and ''The American Short Story Since 1950'' (2010) as well as numerous articles on various aspects of American literature and culture. She met Norman Mailer in 1997 when she introduced him at a reading in a bookstore in Scotland. {{Con}} Category:2010 Vol. 4 (MR)"

{{start|Kasia Boddy}} teaches in the English Department at University College London. She is the author of ''Boxing: A Cultural History'' (2008) and ''The American Short Story Since 1950'' (2010) as well as numerous articles on various aspects of American literature and culture. She met Norman Mailer in 1997 when she introduced him at a reading in a bookstore in Scotland.

{{Con}}
[[Category:2010 Vol. 4 (MR)]]

Category:Written by Mark Cirino

2025-03-25T20:46:08Z

Jules Carry: Created page with "{{AuthorCat|last=Cirino |first=Mark}}"

Mark Cirino

2025-03-25T20:45:39Z

Jules Carry: Created page.

{{start|Mark Cirino}} is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Evansville. He is the author of two novels and the co-editor of ''Ernest Hemingway and the Geography of Memory'' (Kent State UP, 2010). He received his Ph.D. in English at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

{{Con}}
[[Category:2010 Vol. 4 (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Postscript to the Fourth Advertisement for Myself

2025-03-25T19:48:42Z

Jules Carry: Fixed typo.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}

{{Byline|last=Mailer|first=Norman|note=This Postscript appeared in Norman Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself''. New York: Putnam, 1959: 265–267. We are grateful to the Estate of Norman Mailer for permission to reprint.}}

''Rewriting ''The Deer Park'' I had come to recognize by the time I was done that willy-nilly, in admiration for Hemingway’s strength and with distaste for his weaknesses, I was one of the few writers of my generation who was concerned with living in Hemingway’s discipline, by which I do not mean I was interested in trying for some second-rate imitation of the style, but rather that 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, that probably I could not become a very good writer unless I learned first how to keep my nerve, and what is more difficult, learned how to find more of it.''

''Filled with this hard new knowledge that the secret to everything was never to cheat life, I set out immediately to try to cheat life. ''The Deer Park'' was done, it would be out in six weeks; I could not keep myself from thinking that twenty good words from Ernest Hemingway would make the difference between half-success and a breakthrough. He would like the book, he would have to—it would be impossible for him not to see how much there was in it. So I cracked the shell of my pride, got his address from a reliable source, and sent him an inscribed copy. But because I was furious with myself for stealing a trick from that Hollywood I knew so well, I turned on my intent, and put the following words on Father Ernest's copy:''{{pg|19|20}}
{{cquote|
<poem>
To ERNEST HEMINGWAY

–because finally after all these years
I am deeply curious to know
what you think of this.

–but if you do not answer, or if you
answer with the kind of crap you
use to answer unprofessional writers,
sycophants, brown-nosers, etc., then
fuck you, and I will never attempt
to communicate with you again.

–and since I suspect that you're even
more vain than I am, I might as well
warn you that there is a reference to
you on page 353 which you may or may
not like.

NORMAN MAILER
</poem>}}

''About ten days later, the book came back in the mail, same wrapper and maybe the same string enclosing the package. Stamped all over it was the Spanish equivalent of ''Address Unknown-Return to Sender''. So I had the following possibilities to choose from:''

''1. The address was not correct, and the mail clerk in the Havana post office had never heard of Ernest Hemingway.''

''2. By Standard-Operating-Procedure, all unsolicited books received by Mr. and Mrs. Hemingway were returned unreceived to insure the minimum of bile for the sender.''

''3. Good wife Mary saw the inscription first, thought it best to leave the husband to his work, and made a lady's executive decision.''

''4. Hemingway looked at ''The Deer Park'', decided he wasn't ready to say yes or no, called up his good friend Colonel C.— in the Cuban postal service, had the island searched for shipping paper similar to mine (the original wrapper having been torn by a Latin houseboy on reception), had the best Havana forger copy the handwriting, gave a ''mordida'' to the proper authorities for this breach''{{pg|20|21}}''of postal etiquette, and broke a bottle of champagne over the book just before it was stamped by some of the best bureaucratic hands in Havana and sent on its way back to Putnam where Walter Minton put it in his desk, figuring the copy might be worth half a grand to the grandchildren.''

''Or, 5. The inscription was read, and that carried the day. “If you want to come on that hard, Buster, don't write words like ‘deeply curious,{{' "}} Papa said, had the original wrapper put back on, stamped it with his private Address Unknown stamp (purchased at Abercrombie and Fitch) and started to drink fifteen minutes early that day.''

''This is all fine in its way, but once on television in the eighth round, as I remember, I saw Carmen Basilio take one of Paddy De Marco’s best punches, go out on his feet, start to sit down on the canvas, and then with his butt three inches from the ground, Basilio did a one-legged knee stand, pushed up, avoided the knockdown (he had never been knocked down in a fight before or since) and went on to knock out De Marco in a few rounds. The story in the newspapers the next day which I would like to think is true, was that Basilio, when asked why he didn’t take an eight-count and get some rest, answered, “I didn’t want to start any bad habits.”''

''I could have followed that advice. Moderation is the last virtue I’ll capture, and a day or two after the book went off to Hemingway, the broken shell of my pride collapsed into powder, and I sent off inscribed copies to Graham Greene, Cyril Connolly, Philip Rah, and a dozen others whom I no longer remember, probably from shame. The only one who answered was Moravia, but then we knew each other, and I had told him I didn’t want his comment for advertising copy, so that particular effort to promote myself ended in fiasco, and I hope I’m not so hungry again as to send off novels of which I’m not ashamed to the narrow attention of established novelists and critics.''

''This confession off my liver forever, it occurs to me now that I must have carried the memory as a silent shame which helped to push me further and deeper into the next half year of bold assertions, half-done work, unbalanced heroics, and an odd notoriety of my own choice. I was on the edge of many things and I had more than a bit of violence in me.''

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Postscript to the Fourth Advertisement for Myself}}
[[Category:Excerpts (MR)]]

Talk:The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010

2025-03-25T11:30:48Z

Jules Carry: Added rest of articles.

===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]] || {{cross}}
|-
| 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}}
|-
| 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]] || {{cross}}
|-
| 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]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Justice || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation]] || [[User:APKnight25]] || {{cross}}
|-
| 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]] || {{cross}}
|-
| 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:TClark]] || {{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]] || {{cross}}
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| Gordon || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Encounters with Mailer|Encounters with Mailer]] || [[User:Priley1984]] || {{cross}}
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| Vince || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer|Rumors of Grace]] || [[User:Sherrilledwards]] || {{yellow tick}}
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| Apple || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]] || [[User:Chelsey.brantley]] || {{cross}}
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| Sinclair || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman Mailer: An Expected Encounter in an Unexpected Place|An Expected Encounter]] || [[User:Wverna]] || {{cross}}
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| Klavan || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/On Reading Mailer Too Young|On Reading Mailer Too Young]] || [[User:Essence903m]] || {{cross}}
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| Miele || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/What Norman Mailer Taught Me about Combat|What Norman Mailer Taught Me about Combat]] || ? || {{cross}}
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| 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}}
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| 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]] || ? || {{cross}}
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| Hinton || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Advertisements for Others: The Blurbs of Norman Mailer|Advertisements for Others]] || ? || {{cross}}
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| Hicks || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway|''Harlot’s Ghost'', ''Bildungsroman'', Masculinity and Hemingway]] || ? || {{cross}}
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| Mercer || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Automatons and the Atomic Abyss: The Naked and the Dead|Automatons and the Atomic Abyss]] || ? || {{cross}}
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| Westaway || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator|“A Noble Pursuit”]] || ? || {{cross}}
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| Fox || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norris Church Mailer|Norris Church Mailer]] || ? || {{cross}}
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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norris Church Mailer

2025-03-25T11:29:49Z

Jules Carry: Added banner.