User:JBrown/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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Mailer evoked the boxing-and-bullfighting combination in ''The Deer Park'' (1955), his third novel and the one in which he most directly confronts the Hemingway persona and style. 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” (45) and therefore into flying school. O’Shaugnessy goes first to Hollywood, where the producers are initially dismissive ("I didn’t even know the athlete could read" (198)); and then, when he gets depressed—becoming “a boxer without a punch” (325)—he goes to Mexico. There he plans to learn to be the “first great and recognized American matador” (352), but finally he gives up his novel on bullfighting as “inevitably imitative” of Hemingway (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 (''Advertisements'' 235–37), and, “like a fighter who throws his right two seconds after the bell,” think much more closely about variations in pace (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” (''Pontifications'' 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” (''Spooky'' 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”(''Existential'' 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. 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

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” (''Spooky'' 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”(''Existential'' 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. 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 the later style” (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 (''Harlot’s'' 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” (116–7) to the writer in build, mustache

and presence; he’s a drunk and a

“prodigious philanderer” (114) 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. He is also, as a CIA operative, a great proponent of “protocol” (869),

“craft” (445) and the “rules of procedure” (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” (145).

Harry also reflects upon the character of Robert Cohn (422)—whose upper class New York background he shares—and to some extent, he belongs to the ranks of Cohn’s literary “avengers” (Fiedler 71). ''Harlot’s Ghost'' reveals the limits of methodology and “purity of intent” (1021) and instead asserts the virtues of division and dialectic, of ongoing “war”and “relation”(594).

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 Mailer evoked the boxing-and-bullfighting combination in ''The Deer Park'' (1955), his third novel and the one in which he most directly confronts the Hemingway persona and style. 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” (45) and therefore into flying school. O’Shaugnessy goes first to Hollywood, where the producers are initially dismissive ("I didn’t even know the athlete could read" (198)); and then, when he gets depressed—becoming “a boxer without a punch” (325)—he goes to Mexico. There he plans to learn to be the “first great and recognized American matador” (352), but finally he gives up his novel on bullfighting as “inevitably imitative” of Hemingway (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 (''Advertisements'' 235–37), and, “like a fighter who throws his right two seconds after the bell,” think much more closely about variations in pace (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” (''Pontifications'' 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” (''Spooky'' 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”(''Existential'' 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. 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
+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” (''Spooky'' 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”(''Existential'' 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. 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 the later style” (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 (''Harlot’s'' 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” (116–7) to the writer in build, mustache
+and presence; he’s a drunk and a
+“prodigious philanderer” (114) 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. He is also, as a CIA operative, a great proponent of “protocol” (869),
+“craft” (445) and the “rules of procedure” (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” (145).
+Harry also reflects upon the character of Robert Cohn (422)—whose upper class New York background he shares—and to some extent, he belongs to the ranks of Cohn’s literary “avengers” (Fiedler 71). ''Harlot’s Ghost'' reveals the limits of methodology and “purity of intent” (1021) and instead asserts the virtues of division and dialectic, of ongoing “war”and “relation”(594).