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| | {{Byline|last=Cohen|first=Sarah Jo|abstract=A discussion of Mailer’s career, interrelating Mailer’s ethnicity with his corpus of work, with special attention to his cinematic work.|url=https://projectmailer.net/pm/Sara_Jo_Cohen}} |
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| Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer both wrote fiction and journalisms that deal with what I am calling here the “Reds.” In Hemingway’s ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' and in Mailer’s ''Harlot’s Ghost'' and ''Oswald’s Tale'' Reds or communists of different types, stripes, and nationalities appear in various significant roles and guises. There are several questions I would like to address, especially the following: What is it that attracted Hemingway and Mailer to write about the Reds? Even if they depict very different historical periods, can we still discern certain commonalities in their approaches to and treatment of the Reds? Further, what is the dominant image of them in the works of Hemingway and Mailer?
| | NORMAN MAILER’S SIZABLE FBI FILE BEGINS WITH HIS VOICE. The 165 pages of Mailer’s 171-page file available to the public cover fifteen years of observation and surveillance, and includes materials ranging from endless notes tracking Mailer’s passport applications and international travel, to FBI agents’ reviews of Miami and the Siege of Chicago (with meticulous notes about each mention of the FBI), and even a letter from a high school teacher asking J. Edgar Hoover for permission to teach ''The Naked and the Dead''. 1 The file begins, however, with a clipping from ''The Washington Post'', a June 6,1962, George Sokolsky column called “These Days,” that moved J. Edgar Hoover to leave a note for his staff reading, “Let me have memo on Mailer” (United States Federal Bureau of Investigation). Sokolsky’s article responds to an ''Esquire'' piece Mailer wrote about then first lady Jackie Kennedy that describes Mrs. Kennedy’s voice as “a quiet parody of the sort of voice one hears on the radio late at night, dropped softly into the ear by girls who sell soft mattresses, depilatories, or creams to brighten the skin” (qtd. in Sokolsky A). Sokolsky takes offense at Mailer’s mockery of Mrs. Kennedy and scrutiny of her voice, responding, “[A] person’s voice is what it is. I never heard Norman Mailer’s |
| | voice but whatever the Lord gave him, baritone or tenor, soprano or bass, it |
| | is what it is, and he can thank the good Lord that he does not suffer from |
| | cerebral palsy or some such thing”(A). Mailer’s voice, however, much like |
| | his persona, is not at all God-given and never “is what it is.” Rather, Mailer’s |
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| The fact that Hemingway and Mailer share a number of common interests and traits is no secret. Both artists dealt extensively and importantly with the horrors of war and with the ways in which people cope with war and conduct themselves in it. Both writers were preoccupied (some might even say obsessed with) macho tests of manhood that in the case of Hemingway involved balls, battles, boxing, bulls, and hunting and fishing. For Mailer balls were also always in play, but he was more of a boxer than a bullfighter, and he was always a battler whatever the arena. A corollary to this is their fascination with the stars and celebrities of American pop culture and with their own stardom and celebrity as well.
| | voice is a deliberate construction pieced together from bits of others’ voices |
| | in order to mask the adenoidal voice of his childhood. |
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| | Mailer reflects briefly upon his voice in his chronicle of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'', written in the third person with himself as its main character. Part IV of ''Armies'' begins with an apology from Mailer for bringing the story of the March on the Pentagon to a climax and then launching into a diversion about his relationship to film and the cameras following him through the melee of the march. Mailer writes of his relationship to film: “he had on screen in this first documentary a fatal taint, a last remaining speck of the one personality he found absolutely insupportable—the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn. Something in his adenoids gave it away—he had the softness of a man early accustomed to mother-love” (Armies 152). For Mailer, the paradoxical experience of seeing his voice undermines the masculinities he works to materialize in his career as a writer and public intellectual, which he goes on to enumerate: “warrior, presumptive general, ex-political candidate, embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling sweet wives, amiable bar |
| | drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter.” As |
| | a result of feeling outed on film as a “nice Jewish boy,” “accustomed to mother love,” our presumptive general and champion of obscenity vows to “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself” (Armies 152). |
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| Hemingway and Mailer were deeply in love with language, and not just English, as we see in the former’s ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', which exudes his fondness for Spanish. Mailer studied German assiduously as preparation for writing ''The Castle in the Forest'', and he also worked with Russian in connection with his trips to the Soviet Union, as is evident in ''Harlot’s Ghost'',
| | The problem of Mailer’s voice is intimately connected with both sexuality and masculinity. The adenoids, after all, are located in the nose, a stereo typical marker of Jewish otherness and degeneracy. We do not need Sander Gilman to tell us, although he does in the chapter of ''The Jew’s Body'' entitled “The Jewish Nose,” that the Jewish nose is the locus of redirected anxiety about the Jewish penis—both are body parts that develop and take shape at puberty—the latter of which is a threat to national purity through its potential to increase the Jewish population. The adenoidal voice signals a kind of impotence for Mailer, revealing him as accustomed to mother love, and functions as “the acoustic mirror in which the male subject hears all the repudiated elements of his infantile babble” (Silverman 81). The infantile babble here, the mother tongue of the mother’s voice, is Yiddish. 2 Kaja Silverman writes that the voice of the mother resonates in the male subject and that “the male subject frequently ‘refines’ his ‘own’ voice by projecting onto the |
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| ''Oswald’s Tale'', and ''Castle in the Forest''. Their stylistic innovations, well celebrated in Hemingway but not yet fully recognized in Mailer, are no doubt related to this love of language that they shared. Further, neither writer hesitated to tackle the burning issues of the day, in and out of their fiction.
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| Thus, it is no wonder they both engaged with the two most controversial and problematic “isms” of their century, Communism and Fascism.
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| Before examining ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' it is instructive briefly to consider Hemingway’s relationship to the Spanish Civil War, which he witnessed primarily as a journalist who wrote about the conflict. William Braasch Watson has shown how, in his attitude toward this war, Hemingway moved from a position of complete abhorrence of all war to an ardent supporter of the Republican / Loyalist / Red or Communist cause against the Fascists /Falangists / Francoists, largely under the influence of Jorvis Ivens, an avid Communist and member of the Comintern. Watson comes to the conclusion that in his enthusiasm for the Comintern / Communist cause
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| Hemingway distorted the truth:
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| <Block|qoute> He suppressed certain realities he knew to be true, and he promoted as realities things he must have known to be false, all in the name of winning a war whose character the Communists had largely defined. In this respect Hemingway had become an effective propagandist . . . . He genuinely admired the Communists for their commitment and for their proven ability to organize and fight the war. But partly too his transformation was the product of a conscious effort on the part of the Communists to gain his confidence and to enlist his support. </blockquote>
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| It should be stressed that Watson is writing about Hemingway’s journalism and not his fiction. Naturally, one has to ask whether in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' Hemingway continues to portray the Spanish Civil War in the same fashion as Watson describes. I believe that in the novel Hemingway’s treatment of the Reds does indeed include a measure of admiration, but it also contains a much fuller depiction of them and their conduct of the war that includes both direct and indirect condemnation of certain communist actors and their acts. Let me quickly say that in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls,'' despite an open sympathy for the Loyalist-Red cause, Hemingway complicates the actual conduct of the war by both sides, as well as the associated moral
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| questions, to a degree that renders any pat conclusions about these matters more than problematic.
| | mother’s voice all that is unassimilable to the paternal position” (81). Mailer |
| | is a case study in this relationship to the maternal voice; when Mailer first sees himself on film, he hears the adenoidal, Jewish, maternal voice within himself. Because the paternal position Mailer strives to create is distinctly not Jewish, or at least one that allies itself with Jewishness without performing it, the mother’s voice becomes unassimilable (or in his words, “unsupportable”) to his identity. Thus, while Mailer asserts that he will “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself,” he returns to film as both actor and director in order to refine his voice by expunging its maternal layers. |
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| | Norman Mailer’s film career, often dismissed as vulgar and/or irrelevant, was short but intense; he directed four films, two of which were released in 1968, ''Wild'' |
| | and ''Beyond the Law'', one in 1970, ''Maidstone'', and, after a long break, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' was released in 1987. Mailer’s first three films were largely influenced by John Cassavetes, although Mailer predictably argues that his mastery of what he calls “existential acting” makes him a much better filmmaker than Cassavetes (“Interview”). In his essay, “Some Dirt in the Talk,” Mailer defines existential acting by addressing each of the terms that comprise the phrase. He notes that existentialism and acting exist at two opposite “poles,” writing, ''“If existentialism is ultimately concerned with the attractions of the unknown, acting is one of the surviving rituals of invocation, repetition, and ceremony—of propitiation to the gods”'' (“Some Dirt” 104). His theory of existential acting, then, strives to collapse these two poles, freeing acting from repetition and ceremony, and liberating his actors (and himself) from the propitiation of the gods. Existential acting, he argues, works because in our daily lives we always pretend, lie, and act, and works by more effectively representing the chaos and “complexity of our century” than mainstream Hollywood cinema (“Some Dirt” 90,108). Unsurprisingly, from the man who gave us the genre-bending history as novel/novel as history, the true life novel, and the novel biography,5 existential acting collapses the cinema and the outside world, documentary and fiction, acting and existentialism, and masculinity and performance, the last of which Mailer explicitly connects, writing: “There is hardly a guy alive who is not an actor to |
| | the hilt—for the simplest of reasons. He cannot be tough all the time...[s]o he acts to fill the gaps” (“Some Dirt”90-1). Thus, armed with the theory and methodology of existential acting, Mailer returns to the cinema as a film |
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| What Hemingway describes in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' has some interesting correspondences with the depiction of the Russian civil war by Russian writers such as Isaac Babel, Vasily Grossman, Vsevolod Ivanov, Nikolai Nikitin, Boris Pil’niak, and Andrei Platonov in their works of the early and mid 1920s and, in the case of Grossman, the early 1930s. These Russian authors portray the atrocities of the Reds, Whites, Greens, anarchists such as Makhno, and assorted marauding bands in graphic scenes of brutality, cruelty, and above all violence. Frequently, the various principals of the war mostly, but not just the Reds and Whites—alternate in taking over towns and villages, and it is usually impossible to distinguish their violent methods from one another. Furthermore, the local villagers and townsfolk are invariably clueless about the great issues of ideology and policy history has associated with the Russian Civil War, and they struggle to understand what is happening to and around them in terms of the cultural practices the past has given them. At the same time, the Russian fiction of this period, such as Babel’s stories in ''Red Cavalry'' (''Konarmiia''), 1926, often exhibit a certain “revolutionary romanticism” that treats the Civil War not so much as a struggle rooted in politics or ideology but as a great force of nature sweeping across the land.
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| I mention this because Hemingway read some of these Russian authors, including Platonov, and because his treatment of the Spanish Civil War has, as I am claiming, significant points of contact with their work. For example, in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' the Reds’ takeover of a town, so brutally led by Pablo and so eloquently described by Pilar, is followed three days later by a fascist takeover that was even worse. Judging by both Hemingway and the Russian authors mentioned here, these horrific cyclical reigns the combatants inflict on towns, villages, and cities appear to be an inevitable phenomenon of any civil war.
| | experience in the above passage: at the same time the camera exposes one’s frailties and the identities one attempts to disguise; it bolsters the masquerade of masculinity by imprinting its performance in celluloid. The same voice that undermines Mailer’s masculinity becomes his primary means of constructing it. |
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| The tendency throughout ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', as we see in the case of the town just mentioned, that Robert A. Martin has identified as Ronda in Malaga Province is for each of the sides to match or exceed each other in the commission of atrocities. For instance, the beheading of Sordo and his men that the fascist Lt. Burrendo orders is followed shortly by Pablo’s execution of several men he has recruited to help with the blowing up of the bridge. When reflecting on Pilar’s story, Robert Jordan admits to himself
| | In his first documentary Mailer sees “something in his adenoids” in a moment of slippage that renders the aural a visual prop. The experience of seeing his voice disrupts Mailer’s viewing experience by first troubling the traditional assumption that film is a visual medium and then forcing Mailer to confront himself as both image and sound. Mladen Dolar provides a means of understanding the revolutionary and revelatory potential of sound, in the form of the voice, in relation to both identity and film, as he writes: |
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| | {{quote|[T]he visible world presents relative stability, permanence, distinctiveness, and a location at a distance, the audible presents fluidity, passing, a certain inchoate, amorphous character and a lack of distance. The voice is elusive, always changing, becoming, elapsing, with unclear contours, as opposed to the relative permanence, solidity, durability of the seen. (79). |
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| that he always knew that the side he was fighting for behaved as she described and that however much he hates this “that damned woman made me see it | | Here the visible is associated with stability, permanence, and distinctiveness—terms that are crucial to our understanding of cinema, but that mirror the ways we come to understand ourselves as selves. In film, the visible is assumed to guarantee presence, an assumption that stems from, among other things, the historical and philosophical privileging of the visual as a primary quality, and the problem of the voiceovers and voice-offs of sound film—which are often disembodied, absent, and coming from beyond the grave or before birth. Because the visual has historically been the privileged epistemological order through which we understand both film and identity, by focusing on sound, which is dynamic and playful, we can begin to dis |
| as though I had been there”. | | mantle both identity and film. As Mailer sees his voice, witnessing his in sides (in the form of his adenoids) undermining his outsides, the visual and audible come together, undoing the binary oppositions between seeing and hearing, insides and outsides. |
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| In a number of places in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' it is clear that the loyalists are executing non-fascists, perhaps most dramatically in the case of Don Guillermo, who is killed, as H. R. Stoneback points out, because of his loyalty to his wife whose religiosity was taken as proof she is a fascist. Robert Jordan wonders at times about the real commitment of his erstwhile enemies to the fascist cause, in particular that of a boy he has killed in battle. Here Jordan concludes that he simply has to kill whether it is wrong or not.
| | Dolar contrasts the visible to the audible, arguing that the latter is associated with a lack of distance, a lack of distance perhaps best embodied by the uterine envelope created by the mother’s voice. This lack of distance with |
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| Robert Jordan’s band of battlers for the Republic, not unlike many of the characters in Russian fiction of the 1920s, are shown at various levels of commitment to and belief in the cause. Pilar is no doubt the most avid devotee
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| of the new red atheism, as we see when she declares that “before we had religion and other nonsense. Now for everyone there should be someone to whom one can speak frankly”. Yet even Pilar can waver in her faith in atheism as when she says, “There probably still is God after all, although we have abolished him”. For all of its many ironies, I do not see a great deal of humor in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', but this example is surely an exception. It is also a most effective way to capture the ambivalence the Spanish Reds experience as they try out their newfound atheism.
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| Pablo is someone whose beliefs, if any, are most mercurial and murky, but at one point he invokes God and the Virgen(sic). This prompts Pilar, acting in her role as law giver, to rebuke him for talking that way. In moments of crisis, as when Joaquín prays to the Virgin Mary at death, and when Maria prays for Robert Jordan’s safety, Republicans of various degrees of redness tend to revert back to their traditional cultural practices.
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| The case of Robert Jordan is special for a number of reasons, primarily of course because he is an American who is taking orders from a Soviet general, but also because he is a fascinating combination of stubborn commitment to what he sees as his duty and his far ranging and sensitive introspection and contemplation. In the early passages of the novel Jordan might be easily mistaken for a hero straight out of Soviet Socialist Realism—not just because he agrees to the highly questionable orders of Soviet General Golz, but because his virtues are so strong, and his motives are so pure. Over the course of the novel, however, Robert Jordan grows ever richer, more complex and
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| elusive as a character. In this sense, ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' is a concentrated case of a ''Bildungsroman'' that covers not an extended period of maturation but only about seventy hours, the last hours of Jordan’s life. In the end, Jordan, for all of his attachment to the Republican cause, tells himself that he is “not a red Marxist” and not to “kid yourself with too many dialectics". It is here that he undergoes the revelation that his love for Maria is the most important thing in his life and that such love is indeed the most important part of life. I would claim also (allowing for the fact that there were indeed genuine American communists such as Jorvis Ivens) that Jordan’s “non-party” commitment to the Red/Republican cause is characteristically American in his lack of interest in the specifics of its ideology.
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| Hemingway’s Soviet Russian characters play important parts in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' and they are problematic in a number of ways and on a number of levels. First, the names of General Golz and the journalist Karkov look as though they are real Russian names, but they are not. This is my own (virtual native speaker’s) reaction to these surnames that I have confirmed with actual native speakers of Russian. Kashkin, however, could be a genuine Russian family name. He is a double to Jordan, as they are both explosives experts. Kashkin’s lack of resolve reflects the side of Robert Jordan that is sometimes subject to indecisiveness. The link between the fates of these two is made explicit when we learn that Robert Jordan killed the wounded Kashkin in an act of mercy so that Kashkin would not be tortured by the fascists. Kashkin’s demise is also a foreshadowing of Jordan’s who, as he lies with a broken left thigh, fights off the temptation to take his own life in order to avoid the sort of torture by the fascists he has spared Kashkin.
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| General Golz has formulated a strategy for winning a battle with the fascists that includes the plan to blow up the bridge, the central, culminating act toward which the plot of ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' inexorably moves. This plan, however, is fraught with danger for Robert Jordan and the others who are supposed to carry it out. If Golz’s indifference to the likely loss of life on the part of those carrying out his orders is on a certain level contemptible, it is more than convincing as a motivation for a general bent on victory at all costs. In one of the many passages of the novel that are so psychologically persuasive, Golz watches the Republican planes take off for battle. Golz, has learned from Robert Jordan via Andrés that the surprise attack he had conceived is no longer a surprise and that “it would be one famous balls up
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| more” and allows himself to bask in the false glow of what might have
| | regard to the sound of the voice stems from the fact that the voice is simultaneously sent and delivered, thus folding back on itself and troubling the |
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| | boundaries between self and other. This lack of distance is also precisely what Mailer experiences when he sees himself in his first documentary, at once spoken and heard. While Christian Metz dismisses seeing oneself on screen as an impossibility, 7 feminist film theory calls attention to the discomfort that comes from not being granted the distance that the visible demands. In “Film and the Masquerade,” Mary Anne Doane argues that the female spectator goes largely untheorized because the historical “imbrication of the cinematic image and the representation of the woman” leaves her too close to the image (76). Doane theorizes that in order to achieve the distance necessary to watch and appreciate film, female spectators assume a |
| | | metaphorical feminine mask, which “in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance” (81). Doane then briefly considers why men do not have to masquerade as more masculine spectators, writing, “The very fact that we can speak of a woman ‘using’ her sex or ‘using’ her body for particular gains is highly significant—it is not that a man cannot use his body in this way but that he doesn’t have to”(82) |
| <blockqoute>All he heard was the roar of the planes and he thought, now, maybe this time, listen to them come, maybe the bombers will blow them all off, maybe we will get a break-though, maybe he will get the reserves he asked for, maybe this is it, maybe this is the time. </blockquote>
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| Although this passage openly broaches the fact that the Loyalist side made strategic mistakes, it is nothing like an overall critique of its conduct of the
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| war. A far more damning instance that lays bare the cynical, opportunistic
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| side of the International / Red / Republican project in the Spanish Civil War
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| André Marty, the Frenchman who is a member of the Comintern. As Robert A. Martin shows, Karkov is drawn on the model of Stalin’s personal journalist Koltsov, whereas Marty, also an actual historical figure, retains his own name in the novel. Marty, for whom, as Martin writes, Hemingway had “an intense personal animosity” appears in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' as a paranoid, deranged careerist who is eager and willing to have executed anyone on his own side about whom he has the least suspicion. He is the embodiment of the worst side of the Comintern’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War. He is also a prescient if unintentional portrait of many of Stalin’s salient character traits, especially in his obsession with rooting out imaginary enemies.
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| Karkov-Koltsov, like Hemingway, detests Marty, who for all of his misdeeds has somehow remained untouchable, and he is determined to find Marty’s “weakness” and expose it (Hemingway 418). When Karkov-Kolstsov forces Marty to release unharmed Gomez and Andrés, who have brought the news from Robert Jordan that the fascists can no longer be subject to a surprise attack, he is asserting his role as the chief do-gooder of the Soviet contingent. Hemingway draws him as the righteous one who uses his privileged status as journalist and Stalin’s right-hand man to make things right in both Spain and the Soviet Union. I have to say that I find this portrait of Karkov-Koltsov to be naïve at best. It is the one place in the novel where Hemingway comes closest to the realm of Socialist Realism, where the heroes
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