User:KForeman/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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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”(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; however, without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will” (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’S’s 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”).

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’S’s 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”). For years, Mailer has worked to develop his prose to become a prized writer (Gutierrez 5)

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.

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 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”(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; however, without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will” (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’S’s 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”).
+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’S’s 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”). For years, Mailer has worked to develop his prose to become a prized writer (Gutierrez 5)
 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.