The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Ernest and Norman (Exit Music): Difference between revisions

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 As for present and future biographers of Hemingway and Mailer, they can only note a growing incompatibility in lifestyles. Mailer’s career, especially its later stages, points up the absurdity of any conscious imitation of classic Hemingway. Even the two World Wars, supposedly Hemingway’s and {{pg|253|254}} Mailer’s twin springboards, make for little harmony. In the South Pacific, Private Mailer with his cool rifle and hot dream of being first with the big postwar novel looks bush league next to the legendary adventures of a warrior-Papa who (as an over-aged World War II war correspondent) still takes a lion’s share of frontline action around Paris and elsewhere. Hemingway’s “big” wounds—237 mortar fragments from World War I plus countless late injuries—look like high romance when set against the black eyes and bruised fists and other more prosaic variations of Mailer’s peace “in our time.” Mailer’s world—Dachau, Hiroshima, Watts, man on the moon, 9/11, and Iraq—is tone-deaf to the Byronic rumblings of a writer whose shadow loomed over bullrings, safaris, and big and little wars. This disparity in lifestyles comes out in their fiction. “Big Two-Hearted River,” which features Nick Adams—a chunk of composite Hemingway—the wounded outdoor man who embodies the American loner’s last rapport with nature, passes into the Mailer canon as the surrealistic autobiography of ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' where an American eclectic voice chimes in and beeps out an overkill world of Heinrich Himmler. A second go-round with Papa’s classic life was off the American literary map, and this Mailer well knew.
-But Mailer and the rest of the literary world had to ride out Hemingway’s grotesque finale, a suicide that made his life in retrospect read like terminal writer’s block. Prior to the end, the Hemingway style as a viable force in American letters had already been eclipsed, even Papa’s twilight triumph in ''The Old Man and the Sea'', despite its fine prose, still reeked with the lastditch happenings of hero, code, and the rest of Hemingway’s message, tied neatly with upbeat humanism. An old Cuban fisherman’s stoic victory over a big fish sounded hollow to Mailer’s generation, more in tune with the earlier Hemingway whose fictive world was rooted in an encounter with Nada without any fishy ''deus ex machina''. A big fish or any ready made index to identity was a metaphysical luxury out of sight for Mailer’s generation. Papa was human after all. Like most men, Hemingway has lacked the ultimate “grace under pressure,” that of growing old. The Hemingway message in the sixties had a last-minute relevancy for the middle-aged. Or, as Mailer said— in regard to ''An American Dream'' and how he cast Rojack (age 44) in the Hemingway mold—a reader “really enjoys Hemingway” when middle-aged, when ripe for “that attack on masculinity that comes about the time when life is chipped away” (qtd. in Kaufmann 124–125).{{sfn|Kaufman|1969|pp=124-125}} Mailer was speaking, three years after a death that had shocked both him and America:
+But Mailer and the rest of the literary world had to ride out Hemingway’s grotesque finale, a suicide that made his life in retrospect read like terminal writer’s block. Prior to the end, the Hemingway style as a viable force in American letters had already been eclipsed, even Papa’s twilight triumph in ''The Old Man and the Sea'', despite its fine prose, still reeked with the lastditch happenings of hero, code, and the rest of Hemingway’s message, tied neatly with upbeat humanism. An old Cuban fisherman’s stoic victory over a big fish sounded hollow to Mailer’s generation, more in tune with the earlier Hemingway whose fictive world was rooted in an encounter with Nada without any fishy ''deus ex machina''. A big fish or any ready made index to identity was a metaphysical luxury out of sight for Mailer’s generation. Papa was human after all. Like most men, Hemingway has lacked the ultimate “grace under pressure,” that of growing old. The Hemingway message in the sixties had a last-minute relevancy for the middle-aged. Or, as Mailer said— in regard to ''An American Dream'' and how he cast Rojack (age 44) in the Hemingway mold—a reader “really enjoys Hemingway” when middle-aged, when ripe for “that attack on masculinity that comes about the time when life is chipped away” (qtd. in Kaufmann 124–125).{{sfn|Kaufmann|1969|pp=124-125}} Mailer was speaking, three years after a death that had shocked both him and America:
 {{pg|254|255}}
 <blockquote> I think Ernest hates us by the end. He deprived us of his head. It does not matter so much whether it was suicide or an accident— one does not put a gun barrel in one’s mouth, tickle the edge of an accident and fail to see that people will say it’s suicide. Ernest, so proud of his reputation. So fierce about it. His death was awful. Say it. It was the most difficult death in America since Roosevelt. One has still not recovered from Hemingway’s death. One may never. (''Presidential'' 103){{sfn|Mailer|1963|p=103}} </blockquote>
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 ===WORKS CITED===
-*{{cite book|last=Kaufmann|first=Donald L.|title= Norman Mailer: The Countdown (The First Twenty Years).|publisher=Carbondale:Southern Illinois UP|date=1969|ref=Print}}
+*{{cite book|last=Kaufmann|first=Donald L.|title= Norman Mailer: The Countdown (The First Twenty Years).|publisher=Carbondale:Southern Illinois UP|date=1969|ref=harv}}
-*{{cite book|last=Mailer|first=Norman.|title= Advertisements for Myself. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons|date=1959|ref=Print.}}
+*{{cite book|last=Mailer|first=Norman|title= Advertisements for Myself. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons|date=1959|ref=harv}}
-*{{cite book|last=Mailer|first=Norman.|author-mask=1|title= .An American Dream. New York:|publisher=Dial Press, |date=1965|ref=Print.}}
+*{{cite book|last=Mailer|first=Norman|author-mask=1|title= .An American Dream. New York:|publisher=Dial Press, |date=1965|ref=harv}}
-*{{cite book|last=Mailer|first=Norman.|author-mask=1|title= Cannibals and Christians.|location=New York: |publisher=Dial Press,|date=1966|ref=Print.}}
+*{{cite book|last=Mailer|first=Norman|author-mask=1|title= Cannibals and Christians.|location=New York: |publisher=Dial Press,|date=1966|ref=harv}}
-*{{cite book|last=Mailer|first=Norman.|author-mask=1|title=The Presidential Papers.|location=New York:|publisher=G.P. Putnam’s Sons,|date=1963|ref= Print.}}
+*{{cite book|last=Mailer|first=Norman|author-mask=1|title=The Presidential Papers.|location=New York:|publisher=G.P. Putnam’s Sons,|date=1963|ref=harv}}
-*{{cite book|last=Mailer|first=Norman.|author-mask=1|title=The Time of Our Time.|location=New York:|publisher=Random House,|date=1998|ref=Print.}}
+*{{cite book|last=Mailer|first=Norman|author-mask=1|title=The Time of Our Time.|location=New York:|publisher=Random House,|date=1998|ref=harv}}
-*{{cite book|last=Thomas|first=Dylan.|title=“Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.”|series=The Norton Introduction to Literature.|editor= Ed.Alison Booth,J. Paul Hunter and Kelly J. Mays.|edition=Shorter 9th ed.|location=New York: |publisher=W.W. Norton,|date=2005|ref=Print.}}
+*{{cite book|last=Thomas|first=Dylan|title=“Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.”|series=The Norton Introduction to Literature.|editor= Ed.Alison Booth,J. Paul Hunter and Kelly J. Mays.|edition=Shorter 9th |location=New York: |publisher=W.W. Norton,|date=2005|ref=harv}}
 {{Refend}}
 {{Review}}
-{{DEFAULTSORT: Ernest and Norman Exit Music}}
+{{DEFAULTSORT:Ernest and Norman Exit Music}}
-[[Category:Category:Articles]]
+[[Category:Articles (MR)]]