The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing: Difference between revisions
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At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true”(Death 1).Echoing Hemingway’s standards,Mailer believes a writer must write“to the limit of one’s honesty”(“Hazards” 399). But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes,“Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good” (354). According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is” (354). Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,” | At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true”(Death 1).Echoing Hemingway’s standards,Mailer believes a writer must write“to the limit of one’s honesty”(“Hazards” 399). But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes,“Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good” (354). According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is” (354). Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,” | ||
Mailer writes, | Mailer writes, | ||
how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” | how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” 399) | ||
If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to,this“point of purity,”the author succeeds in showing life“as it really is”(“Letter to John”). Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity”when he defines what he calls“the real thing”in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon (). Hemingway writes, | If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to,this“point of purity,”the author succeeds in showing life“as it really is”(“Letter to John”). Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity”when he defines what he calls“the real thing”in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon (). Hemingway writes, | ||
In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. () | In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. () | ||