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| | Abstract:The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a |
| | deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches. |
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| | THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON 17–18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn. |
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| {{dc|dc=I|N A LENGTHY, SINGLE-SPACED, TWO-AND-A-HALF-PAGE TYPEWRITTEN CRITIQUE}} of the Actor's Studio production of ''Strawhead,'' Norman Mailer's fifth wife, Carol, tasks him with the above observation about this third appropriation of Marilyn Monroe as a focus for his creative endeavors. It is a salient question, something mentioned not only by someone who knew him intimately, but also by critics of the relevant works, ''Marilyn, Of Women and Their Elegance,'' and ''Strawhead''. Mailer's biographers have also noted how beguiled he was with the topic. Robert Merrill calls it "a continuing obsession".{{sfn|Merrill|1992|p=9}} Barry Leeds introduces his book-length study, ''The Enduring Vision of Norman Mailer,'' with a chapter on Mailer and Marilyn, observing in his first sentence that for decades Mailer had been "fascinated with the life and death of Marilyn Monroe",{{sfn|Leeds|2002|p=20}} introducing the similarities between them, and concluding that they were both prisoners of sex. The issue calls for further exploration of both its enduring allure for Mailer and the unsavory aspects of his handling of his Marilyn mania.
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| It is hard to know exactly when this "obsession" began. Mailer claimed on a number of occasions that he had never met Marilyn Monroe. Not so, according to Shelley Winters, quoted in the "Hollywood Politics" chapter of Peter Manso's biography. She contradicts Mailer's claim that he never met Monroe. According to Winters, they met at a rally for Henry Wallace in{{pg|264|265}}
| | By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn| Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch Watson’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War.''}} The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}} |
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| Hollywood in 1948.{{sfn|Manso|1985|p=131}} Both may be right according to their memories. It is possible that in 1948, the woman who would become Marilyn Monroe was still Norma Jeane and displayed little of that incandescent ability to exude sexuality as she projected herself to camera and fans.{{efn|Guiles spells it "Jeane" in ''Legend: The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe,'' as does Leaming in ''Marilyn.'' Mailer spells it "Jean".}} The as-yet-unknown Norma Jeane may not have made enough of an impression on Mailer for him to remember it. Years later, once he began writing about her, the official story from him and a number of his biographers is that the only place they ever met was in his imagination.{{efn|This holds true for the make-believe trial he created to forestall the criticism of his second Monroe book. When he is asked in an imaginary court scene, Mailer answers the Prosecutor's question about whether he had ever met MM, by saying, "No, but I sat behind her once at Actor's Studio" ("Before" 33).}} Regardless of whether or not they met briefly in the forties or never met, once Mailer had fastened onto Monroe as a topic for his literary delectation, he had a hard time letting go. In addition, his fervor sometimes led to "piling on" and on occasion "late hits" or "low blows," to use football and boxing metaphors for Mailer's literary excesses.
| | Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.” |
| | {{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}} |
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| Oddly enough for what became such an enduring interest, the initial impetus to write about Monroe was not Mailer's.{{efn|I am not unmindful of the earlier references to Monroe or the Marilynesque characters in previous Mailer works, but here I mean Marilyn as the main subject.}} It came as part of a book project for a compilation of photographs of Monroe by famous photographers, principle among them Larry Schiller who had taken nude photographs of the actress in the last days of her life. Others included Milton Greene, Bert Stern, Eve Arnold, and Richard Avedon.{{efn|Milton Greene's photographs would be featured in Mailer's second Monroe project ''Of Women and Their Elegance.''}} Mailer was a big name writer, whom they contacted to quickly deliver a ten-thousand-word preface for this photography book. However, as is often the case with addictions and/or obsessions, once started, they are difficult to abandon. The Preface was like an aphrodisiac appetizer for Mailer and once begun, the subject so enflamed his phallic pen, that eventually it produced more than ninety thousand words and, in the opinion of the ''New York Times'' reviewer, the "100 photographs...[were] reduced to serving the relatively minor function of illustrating his text".{{sfn|Lehmann-Haupt|1973|p=27}} And while Marilyn was to serve as Mailer's muse on three separate occasions, it was this initial foray into the world of America's legendary sex goddess that first demonstrated Marilyn's variety of uses for Mailer. In this case, the publication of ''Marilyn'' was professionally valuable in the development of Mailer's career. Middle-aged, with his career in a "holding pattern," according to Mary Dearborn, "''Marilyn'' put Norman's name before the public, where it had not been" for some years.{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=324}}
| | Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding. |
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| Another possible source for Mailer's obsession with Monroe could be Mailer's competitive nature. A number of writers have suggested that his legendary ego might have been wounded by his lack of access to the era's {{pg|264|265}}
| | Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the New York Times will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the Times was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937|p=Note}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937|p=Herbert}} |
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| consummated sex goddess, as he considered himself the epitome of the macho man. The main men in her life were such that Mailer would want to measure himself against them. Husband number one was not a consideration. Mailer interviewed James Dougherty, but the man and his remembrances are summarily dismissed as possibly unreliable since they are those of a narcotics cop. For Mailer, in terms of possible competition, Dougherty qualifies at best as a neophyte, ignorant of the finer points of the contest. Husbands two and three are another matter. They were both significant figures in their different professions. Mailer, for whom boxing was an actual hobby and metaphorical trope, may have consciously or subconsciously regretted that he never even got the chance to get in the ring with either of these champions.{{efn|Hemingway also used the boxing metaphor, famously evaluating his writing in relation to other writers in terms of staying in the ring with them.}} It was about this time in Mailer's life that Jose Torres began giving him boxing lessons in exchange for editorial assistance with the book Torres was writing about Muhammed Ali. In a contest with Monroe's second husband, Mailer is out of his class, division, or league, whichever metaphor works. Joe DiMaggio was a legendary sports hero, an icon of the masculine arena. DiMaggio had reached such mythic status that he was referenced in popular music and in Hemingway's admired novella, ''The Old Man and The Sea''.{{efn|A Simon and Garfunkel lyric for a song in the Academy Award-nominated film, ''The Graduate,'' positions DiMaggio as a national hero, one whose return the nation longs for: "Where have you gone, Joe Dimaggio / A nation turns its lonely eyes to you." Santiago, the heroic fisherman in Hemingway's ''The Old Man and the Sea,'' tells the boy about "the great DiMaggio."}} Bouts are not scheduled between boxers who fall in different weight classes and, in the sports league, Mailer would not even try to get in the ring with DiMaggio. Instead, Mailer presents him in an almost complimentary manner, writing that during the years that Monroe was married to DiMaggio, she looked like she was fed on sexual candy. {{sfn|Mailer1|1973|p=102}} In his need to find sufficiently lusty language, Mailer invents the term "fucky" to describe how Monroe looked during the DiMaggio period. He also pays DiMaggio the high compliment of comparing him to Hemingway in terms of eminence in his art, pointing out the "consistent courage" it took to face thousands of fast balls, any of which could kill or cripple him.{{sfn|Mailer2|1973|p=99}} If there is a hero in this "novel," it would have to be "Jolting Joe." Mailer credits him with always being there for Marilyn "when she needs him, and is probably her closest friend in the months before she dies."{{sfn|Mailer3|1973|p=95}} A photograph of DiMaggio at Monroe's funeral is one of the last images in the book and Mailer's last line reads, "Let us then take our estimate of her worth by the grief on Joe DiMaggio's face the day of that dread funeral in Westwood west of Hollywood."{{sfn|Mailer4|1973|p=262}}.
| | Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The Times received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937|p=May}} |
| | The Times, knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937|p=Bertrand}}{sfn|James|1939|p=Tenney}} |
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| The competition begins in earnest when Mailer turns to Monroe's last husband, Arthur Miller. Miller is definitely in Mailer's class, division, and
| | Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937|p=December}} |
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| league: both are literary heavy-weights. Miller was a dominant figure in the intellectual and arts arena. Both ''Death of a Salesman'' and ''The Crucible'' were prominent theatrical vehicles, winning a number of drama awards and becoming mainstays of university and community theatres all over the country. Mailer takes a number of jabs at Miller, labeling him a "failure" as Monroe's champion in her battles with Olivier in England and a "traitor" because he had written a note about how she embarrassed him, a note that devastated her when she read it.{{sfn|Mailer5|1973|p=167}} As if taking on the role of Marilyn's champion, Mailer pelts Miller with numerous pejoratives. Among them are "tight," "tied up" and "abstemious".{{sfn|Mailer6|1973|p=143}} In addition, Mailer tries to land a knockout blow by characterizing Miller in the the sexual arena as "an inhibited householder from Brooklyn."{{sfn|Mailer7|1973|p=167}} In this metaphorically sexual bout, in addition to his below-the-belt punches, Mailer hits Miller with a glancing blow to the head with the assessment that he had "limited lyrical gifts, no capacity for intellectual shock."{{sfn|Mailer8|1973|p=142}} Mailer is sure he could have beat Miller but he never did get in the ring with him because, as he complains, when they lived in close proximity he "waited for the call to visit, which of course never came."{{sfn|Mailer9|1973|p=19}} He admits that a reason for the cut may have been the very fact of his competitive nature and the fact that stealing Marilyn had been his secret ambition. Convinced of his prowess in this arena, he suggests that Miller may have feared creating the opportunity. Of course that meeting with Marilyn never occurred, and as Mailer could not compete with either of these men in a real life ''mano a mano,'' he resorted to his most effective weapon. He created his own access—with his pen.
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| Returning to the subject of the many uses Mailer made of Monroe, ''Marilyn,'' as I argued in an earlier study, is, among other things, an exercise in creating a masturbatory fantasy about a woman who got away.{{sfn|Gladstein|2010|pp=288-302}} It is also the initial volley in Mailer's campaign to possess his subject inside and out, first in his voice as a biographer and then assuming her voice as memoiorist. From the onset of the first project, Mailer expresses his frustration with the time limitations imposed on his fantasy fulfillment. In "An Acknowledgment," Mailer proclaims his discontent with having to meet a publication deadline.{{sfn|Mailer10|1973|p=257}} This he was able to remedy in the future by creating his own projects, whereby he will be "master of his own domain."^[citation] Because of the time checks in this case, he protests that he cannot write a proper biography, which he claims would take at least two years just to amass the materials needed for a suitable job. Therefore, he complains,
| | Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the Times editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937|p=April}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted.{{sfn|Matthews|1937|p=Herbert}}}} Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937|p=July}} Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937|p=Sulzberger}} A reasonable decision. |
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| rather than the biography he desired to write, he has written a "novel biography." Since he can't do his own original research, he enumerates the other writers whose works he draws on, as well as Norman Rosten's manuscript for the as-yet-unpublished biography, ''Marilyn—An Untold Story.'' In addition, he cites what he calls "interviews in modest depth." {{sfn|Mailer11|1973|p=259}} In this case, the Mailer braggadocio, his advertisments of himself, may have been uncharacteristically muted. In ''Legend: The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe,'' Fred Lawrence Guiles, whose first biography ''Norma Jean'' is one of two cited by Mailer as the main sources for the facts in his book, returns the compliment, when he credits Mailer's "modest" interview with producing the "most thorough account" of the relationship between Norma Jeane (not yet Marilyn) and André de Dienes, a Hungarian born fashion photographer. A number of the fresh-faced, jeans-clad photographs by Dienes are in the book.
| | Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112 Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}} And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937|p=Sulzberger}} |
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| ''Marilyn'' was also to serve Mailer as a vita-enhancing publication. Robert Merrill argues for "serious reconsideration" of ''Marilyn'' as he contends that its excellences as a biography have been overlooked {{sfn|Merrill|1992|p=142}} and, though one of Mailer's "minor" works, it still contributes to the overall "imposing output of serious and original works".{{sfn|Merrill2|1992|p=212}} Carl Rollyson considers it a "significant achievement in American letters with which biographers must reckon".{{sfn|Rollyson|1991|p=261}} Jennifer Bailey reads it as an "unmistakable achievement".{{sfn|Bailey|1979|p=140}} And, indeed, when one gets beyond the leeringly salacious element, there is much to admire about the book, both as a biography and as a novel. A charming element about it is Mailer's tone, which is wonderfully self-deflating in places. One such instance is when he acknowledges his peevishness about not being invited to meet Marilyn as he was sure that "no one was so well suited to bring out the best in her".{{sfn|Mailer11|1973|p=20}} Then, in the next line, he concedes that some failed marriages later, he was better equipped to understand that what he was probably responding to at the time was the same thing that some fifty million other men felt as a result of what he calls "the foundation of her art," which was an ability to "speak to each man as if he were all of male existence available to her".{{sfn|Mailer12|1973|p=20}} He admits that not only would he probably have failed her, but that she might well have "damaged" him. In another instance of uncharacteristically revealing candor, he admits, in a discussion of Monroe's purported lack of self-assurance about sex, that "we all reveal our innocence about sex in a candid remark".{{sfn|Mailer13|1973|p=75}} This from the writer who had, on occasion, postitioned himself as an "sexpert." To a certain extent the tension between the macho writer taking lusty virtual possession of his sub-
| | As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity |
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| | fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway |
| | focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging |
| | artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially |
| | to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name |
| | and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the |
| | states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting |
| | they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins |
| | and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=Hemingway}}{{ NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences. |
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| ject and the self-revelatory hesitations he expresses creates a correspondence between him and Monroe as they both projected a blatant forward sexuality that overlays an undercurrent of vulnerability.
| | That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a |
| | cable Matthews sent to his Times editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the |
| | Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937|p=April}} When a year later the Times asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|Baker’s notes date the Times request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15 |
| | Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the Times and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}} When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in Fact, Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon Fact’s inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from Ken, “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938|p=Edmund}} Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of The Spanish Earth, shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}} |
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| Another service Marilyn/''Marilyn'' performs for Mailer, is facilitating his joys of linguistic excess.{{efn|I do not mean to imply that Mailer's linguistic virtuosity is sparing in other works, only that this work allows him even more occasion for unmonitored verbal hijinks.}} Given the spectacular and extravagant nature of his subject and her reputation, he allows himself a surfeit of verbal highwire acts. On occasion the result is fun as when he catalogs the list of Monroe's early Hollywood relationships: "Snively, Schenck, Karger, and Hyde! If she had been a bargirl lookng to sue an ex-lover in a raunchy case, she would have picked her law firm out of the yellow pages with a name like that".{{sfn|Mailer14|1973|p=89}} But at other times his unmonitored metaphors and imagery are definitely in need of a discerning editor.{{efn|My colleague Robert Gunn suggests that Mailer's prose flaunts a lack of monitoring, that in its "gleefully exhibitionistic (and highly erotic)" display demonstrates "not an absence of artistic control, but rather a deliberate choice to refuse propriety and proportionality."}} In one jarring instance, he writes of Monroe's final moments when "the wings of death lay wet feathers across her face."{{sfn|Mailer15|1973|p=86}} "Wet feathers" is a clumsy image whereby to communicate the dark eminence of death. Rather than a sense of awe, what is evoked is annoyance; wet feathers would tickle or make one want to sneeze. Mailer's choice of metaphor to describe Monroe's inability to escape her past is to describe her behavior "as sluggish as a dinosaur's tail".{{sfn|Mailer16|1973|p=126}} This metaphor is equally inept. The image conveyed is awkward rather than apt. Experience that repeats itself "with the breath of a turnip" is another of his odd images.{{sfn|Mailer17|1973|p=143}} Wet feathers, dinosaur tails, and the breath of a turnip--surely a wordsmith like Mailer could do better. In his explanation of why the "detritus of the insignificant" films she played in early in her career so damaged any good will she may have accumulated as a young women and led to "retaliations" he descibes as "nihilistic," Mailer pulls out more over-the-top verbal imagery.{{sfn|Mailer18|1973|pp=89-90}} He calls Monroe "a sly leviathan of survival, and, Faust among the Faustians".{{sfn|Mailer19|1973|p=90}} In addition to the lingustic abandon, he also allows himself such salaciously voyeuristic flights of the imagination as an invented dialogue after the discovery by studio executives that their newest sensation had posed in the nude. Mailer excuses himself by pointing out that "a novelist has a right to invent the following dialogue".{{sfn|Mailer20|1973|p=92}} He then devises such questions as cannot help but inflame the imagination: "Did you spread your legs?""Is your asshole showing?""Any animals in it with you?"Lest he miss the opportunity to use every profanity he knows, Mailer includes the statement, when trying to describe the divided character of Monroe's personality, that while she could be an angel, she was also "one hard and calculating
| | Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the Toronto Star Weekly “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}} How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day we took Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}} His venue too—Collier’s magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived PM New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}} |
| {{pg|264|265}}
| |
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|
| computer of a cold and ambitious cunt" and then underlines his linguistic choice by stating parenthetically "(no other English word is near)".{{sfn|Mailer21|1973|p=97}}{{efn|I am reminded of an old graffiti:"Profanity is the crutch of the inarticulate mother-fucker." I can think of a number of words that would work as well. I am sure Mailer could too, but he liked to shock and as I argue throughout, he gives himself full license with this topic.}}
| | It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the Times through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, Two Wars and More to Come, and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools.{{sfn|?}} The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}} |
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| The publication of ''Marilyn'' was a boon to Mailer both personally and professionally—and then as a bonus benefit unexpectedly, it serve him as a tool for seduction. In ''A Ticket to the Circus,'' Norris Church Mailer writes of its role in their first encounter and subsequent courtship. In 1975, in anticipation of meeting the famous author, Barbara Norris—her name when they met—brought her copy of the book for him to sign. He did not sign it until February of 1976 when a relationship had already begun. Addressing it to Barbara Mailer he writes, "Because I knew when I wrote this book that someone I had not yet met would read it and be with me".{{sfn|Mailer22|2010|p=89}} The Mailer chutzpah is in full force here.
| | As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the Times cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s |
| | correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same |
| | events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits |
| | to the presence of others, to “this correspondent” |
| | —we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his |
| | employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=American Veterans}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn, |
| | and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also |
| | weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch |
| | on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of |
| | Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway |
| | often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel; |
| | nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn, |
| | for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary |
| | participant in some of her stories. |
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| |
|
| ''Of Women and Their Elegance,'' Mailer's second appropriation of Marilyn Monroe, came some seven years after the first. Like the first, it is heavily reliant on the visual. Here, however, rather than pictures only of Marilyn, there are pictures of other women and their elegance. The photographs by Milton H. Greene run the gamut from Marlene Dietrich to Grandma Moses. In ''Marilyn,'' Mailer claimed to be writing a "novel biography" and he routinely referenced the biographical works of Maurice Zolotow, Fred Lawrence Guiles, and Norman Rosten, also often citing what he called "factoids." Here he baldly states in a note before the text that he "does not pretend to offer factual representations."
| | By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within |
| | convention. William Stott, in Documentary Expression and Thirties America, |
| | calls this first-person participant observer technique “the most common sort |
| | of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion: |
| | the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings |
| | and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride. |
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|
| Obviously foreseeing much of the kind of criticism that this book would engender, Mailer anticipates his detractors in a make-believe trial published in ''New York'' magazine. Deftly titled "Before the Literary Bar," besides his own voice he creates the parts of the Prosecutor, the Defense, and The Court. The charge is "criminal literary negligence" and Mailer himself characterizes the work as a "false autobiography" or "an imaginary memoir".{{sfn|Mailer23|pp=27-28}} The thrust of his main argument about his fast-and-loose treatment of the facts is that what he portrays in the book, "whether factual or not...[could] reasonably have occurred in Miss Monroe's life" and that they are therefore "aesthetically true" if not literally so.{{sfn|Mailer24|p=34}} Mailer assumes the variety of voices, both pro and con, in an adroit manner, convincingly developing the arguments of his detractors. In some spots he even demonstrates a delightful sense of self-irony. An example is when, after having been instructed numerous times to reply only to the questions asked of him, he has The Court remark, "Maybe Mr. Mailer thinks he is being paid by the word".{{sfn|Mailer25|1980|p=34}} In another instance he
| | Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is |
| {{pg|264|265}}
| | generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson |
| | notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its |
| | predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open |
| | and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks |
| | away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked |
| | to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t |
| | you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood, |
| | always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person: |
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| |
|
| has The Court assure him, after a question of whether or not he would like it if someone made up facts about him when he is dead, that they "do not wish to rush that occasion".{{sfn|Mailer26|1980|p=45-46}}
| | {{quote|After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got |
| | a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the |
| | one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? |
| | No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore. |
| | Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish |
| | Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road |
| | to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.” |
| | “Do I know him?” |
| | “I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.” |
| | “Where is he?” |
| | “Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}} |
| | In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a |
| | man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking |
| | away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal |
| | way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and |
| | it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not |
| | move. |
| | “Where’s Raven?” I asked. |
| | “I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}} }} |
| | The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining |
| | five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between |
| | the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide |
| | in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal |
| | of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing |
| | “you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to |
| | the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article |
| | begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name |
| | for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later |
| | “Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, It isn’t me. The historian |
| | Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming |
| | himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name |
| | seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story” (29).}} |
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| Mailer's self-defense in "Before the Literary Bar" is that made-up parts of his fictional autobiography can be justified as having reasonably occurred in Monroe's life. However, his creation of the Bobby de Peralta character pushes the boundaries of a reader's willing suspension of disbelief. Mailer claims to have made him up to try to explain the tragic ambiguities in Monroe's character, attributing them to buried matters in her psyche. He rationalizes that something in her unrecorded years in Hollywood must contain a "psychic cyst" or memories so bad that she could not face them.{{sfn|Mailer27|1980|p=45}}
| | A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting |
| | the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the |
| | wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating |
| | Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches, |
| | print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology The Wound |
| | and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War join in the |
| | Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican |
| | soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing |
| | the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to The Book of the XV Brigade, and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are |
| | a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each |
| | winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead |
| | will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in Bruccoli 76 and Nelson, Remembering 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in Guttmann (Wounded 179–180).}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of |
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| Mailer's rationalizations are unconvinicing and this sordid and sensational section of ''Of Women and Their Elegance'' is a prime example of Mailer's "piling on." To demonstrate the appropriateness of this football metaphor, at the point in her life at which Mailer claims to need a defining episode, like a downed quarterback, Marilyn's background of illegitimacy, foster homes, absent father, family insanity, and a remembered attempted strangling in her crib have effectively already left her "sacked." Any one or any combination of the events of her childhood could more than adequately explain why she would be the unhappy and disturbed person Mailer portrays. Dumping more excrement on her can serve little purpose other than to warrant the author's desire to give license to his lascivious imagination. The pictures he paints are almost cliché in their pornographic purpose. For Marilyn's first Hollywood party Mailer evokes rooms of filthy pictures filled with naked people and the imaginary Bobby "naked except for cowboy boots and a Stetson hat," walking a Doberman named Romulus who tries to get in on the sexual action of the lustful couples.{{sfn|Mailer28|1980|p=130}}
| | cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those |
| | who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, |
| | knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government |
| | lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased |
| | international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the |
| | much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.12 |
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| |
|
| But the party is only the destination point for the heart of this imaginary episode. Traveling to this party, Mailer indulges his fantasy by having Marilyn engage in a brief fling with a fictional "Rod" (the double entendre is almost funny). They ride to the party on his motorcycle, all the while having sexual intercourse at eighty miles an hour. Making the most of his imaginary license, Mailer has Marilyn explain how she had only "to lean up on the handlebars a little, and he was in the proper place, if from behind, my dear. I could have become an addict".{{sfn|Mailer29|1980|p=129}} The situation only gets more sordid after that.{{efn|Stephan Morrow writes of Shelley Winters getting up and objecting when he played that scene in ''Strawhead''}} As if picturing Marilyn as so dissolute that she rides to the party on a motorcycle having sex with the fictional Rod, after which she gives him
| | The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities |
| {{pg|264|265}}
| | because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless (Knightley 232; |
| | Baker 402).{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of |
| | Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes |
| | the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so, |
| | day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth, |
| | evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right |
| | if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe |
| | what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware |
| | of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite |
| | so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position |
| | disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy. |
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| |
|
| a "blow-job" only to spend the night in an orgy with Bobby is not enough, Mailer also gives her murderous inclinations. When the nefarious Bobby suggests they go over and cut his wife's throat, Mailer's Marilyn creation responds with "excitement." The prospect of murder stimulates her to the declaration that "I was nearer to myself than I ever wanted to be".{{sfn|Mailer30|1980|p=137}} She relishes the idea that "everyone would talk of me," seeing it as "beautiful".{{sfn|Mailer31|1980|pp=137-138}} She acknowledges that she is "ready to commit murder."{{sfn|Mailer32|1980|p=138}} Murder is so appealing to her that it vanquishes her headache. If Mailer's excuse for this sensationalism is that he had to create something awful in her past to explain her future bad behavior, his is a sharply flawed argument. In this fictional episode, Mailer's Marilyn is already so lacking in any moral compass that she goes through all the motions of participating in a murder, only prevented from the act because it turns out that the designated victim is not there. She is willing to commit murder with a man who does not even know her "phone number or my address, or even my last name".{{sfn|Mailer33|1980|p=142}} Logically, whatever brought her to this morally bankrupt state happened earlier and Mailer's invention should be flagged by the referee as unnecessary roughness. Two days after this imaginary episode, Mailer adds the information that she had an abortion. Cleverly, in his self-defense before the imaginary literary bar, Mailer has the Prosecutor question him about the factual basis for Bobby de Peralta and the murder plot. He acknowledges that he has none and even allows his Prosecutor creation to describe his actions as "outrageous" ("Before" 40). And I would add self-indulgent.
| | The problem of committed journalism, even sixty years later, has not been |
| | resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well |
| | knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as |
| | Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}} |
| | Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays |
| | one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the |
| | correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic, |
| | heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced |
| | widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism, |
| | with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the |
| | Boston Commonwealth, and more immediately in 1930s social documentary |
| | writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar |
| | new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction |
| | which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s Armies of |
| | the Night and Michael Herr’s Dispatches.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches |
| | fall in this line of development. |
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| |
|
| Even on his own terms, with himself as judge and jury, Mailer's defense rings hollow. He claims that without such an episode the reader would be left with a characterization of Marilyn that presents only her "sweet, charming, madcap" side, thereby unable to understand why one so attractive would end so badly. Acknowledging what might have been "a failure of invention," he concedes that it is difficult "to conceive of one powerful dramatic episode that will substitute satisfactorily for the sum of a thousand smaller episodes".{{sfn|Mailer34|1980|p=45}} And that is, I would argue, because the thousand smaller episodes are more than sufficient explanation by themselves. Mailer, on the basis of what he calls "general knowledge" about the life of a Hollywood starlet{{sfn|Mailer35|1980|p=33}}, gives Marilyn the kind of demeaning and humiliating experiences that, along with her genetic and childhood history, could adequately explain her later behavior. Mailer had her remember being sent to perform fellatio on three executives in a row, on the half hour, before going to acting class. He even
| | Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella |
| {{pg|264|265}} | | term creative nonfiction. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction |
| | narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in |
| | Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}} |
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| |
|
| remarks to the prosecutor's question about the episode that "the scars" of that period in her life explain why a woman with her "angelic appearance" came to be so difficult to work with and inconsiderate of co-stars, directors and crew. Calling the excerpt "factual" he quotes both Lee Strasberg and Arthur Miller to verify the "call girl" and "chewed and spat out" the quality of Monroe's early Hollywood days.{{sfn|Mailer36|1980|p=33}}
| | directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal |
| | with the approaching world war. Ken wanted “precisely the kind of opinion |
| | articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The |
| | Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from |
| | Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials |
| | with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He |
| | ends ironically: “So I don’t believe the people shown in the photo can really |
| | be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.” |
| | {{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the |
| | United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets |
| | through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’ |
| | failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here. |
|
| |
|
| Mailer's sly manipulation here is blatantly self-serving in an additional manner. By making this particularly egregious episode Exhibit B in the trial, he can enjoy his imaginary voyeurism again. Not only are the offensive events in the book, but in case the reader of ''New York'' does not buy the book, Mailer has the opportunity to present his self-indulgent imaginings for a different audience—those who might pick up the magazine. He had the prosecution make him read the whole episode to the court as Exhibit B. The titillation quotient is high.
| | The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against |
| | Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and |
| | anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the |
| | anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example, |
| | sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint |
| | that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . . |
| | What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And |
| | they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those |
| | it received as aid from the Soviet Union” (238–284). Yet the various Catalonia militia were not |
| | as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the |
| | terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}} |
| | But unlike |
| | Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military |
| | matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his |
| | nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he |
| | never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as |
| | Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona |
| | crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as |
| | Matthews had done.{{efn|Hemingway’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff |
| | correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence— |
| | to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the |
| | cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of |
| | the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also |
| | as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a |
| | missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2 |
| | Dec. 1937 (United States 461). Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the New York |
| | Times 22 Aug. 1937: 6, 14.}} |
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| |
|
| As a sidelight, it can be said that still another use Mailer made of his writing about Marilyn is payback or appreciation to Milton and Amy Greene. Whatever the realities of their behavior in their relationship with Monroe, in both ''Of Women and Their Elegance'' and ''Strawhead,'' Mailer casts them a very positive light and puts complimentary language in Marilyn's mouth when she speaks of them. Milton Greene's particular charm is portrayed with Marilyn's initial reaction at their first meeting: "You're just a boy".{{sfn|Mailer37|1980|p=34}} Her expectation, given his fame as a fashion photographer, was for an older man. Mailer also tries to make him appealing in a scruffy kind of way when he has Marilyn describe him as looking like a young John Garfield if Garfield had been chewed a bit a by a toothless lion.{{sfn|Mailer38|1980|p=34}} He is portrayed as the only man who did not take advantage of Marilyn and she blames Arthur Miller for ruining their relationship. Besides the direct compliments, such as when Marilyn tells Amy her eyes are like stars{{sfn|Mailer39|1980|p=28}} and compliments her performance during the Edward R. Murrow interview as "truly scintillating" and done with "real poise" and "real vivacity".{{sfn|Mailer40|1980|p=126}} Mailer also portrays Amy Greene as a mentor to Marilyn in matters of fashion, introducing her to the fashions of Norman Norell.{{efn|Although Norell's fashions are given prominence in Mailer's writing, he is ignored in many of the biographies. An interesting sidelight is that Michelle Obama wore a vintage Norell dress during the 2010 Christmas season.}} Marilyn lauds Amy's organization down to her color coordination of her underwear with her clothing. Of course, the Greenes are his co-authors in a way as they provided the reminiscences and the photographs that make up the bulk of the book. Milton Greene's ethics are also presented in a most favorable light when the break-up of Marilyn Monroe Productions occurs. With the comment, "It was not my idea to make
| | During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his |
| {{pg|264|265}} | | children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate |
| | who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood |
| | the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|nd|p=}} |
| | Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of |
| | the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he |
| | accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization |
| | toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for |
| | Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas |
| | and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with |
| | the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}} |
|
| |
|
| money on Marilyn Monroe," Greene explains why he takes only $100,000 for his share when all had expected him to hold out for five times that much. The irony is not lost that Mailer, who ''is'' trying to make money on Marilyn Monroe, chooses this vindication for Greene. One might also say that Mailer uses this opportunity to pay the Greenes back by telling their stories along with Marilyn's. We learn a lot of their histories and talents. One of the last things Mailer has Marilyn do is recall how beautiful Milton's photographs are and remember, "Oh, how exquisite he could be".{{sfn|Mailer41|1980|p=235}}
| | Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a |
| | dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican |
| | military, even though that would have meant |
| | featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=}} Hemingway also, in a letter |
| | justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to |
| | send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda |
| | “no matter how true” (Letter to Jack Wheeler).{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}} |
|
| |
|
| The reception of ''Of Women and Their Elegance'' was mixed. The exploitive nature of Mailer's use of Monroe did not go without notice. Although David Marshall considered it a "wonderful treasure," mainly because of the photographs, he also remarked that Mailer was "squeezing the last dollar out of a woman he never met." Lawrence Wright's ''Texas Monthly'' article that explores the connections between fact and fiction, particularly in what is called the "new journalism," compares Mailer's ''Of Women and Their Elegance'' unfavorably to ''The Executioner's Song.'' Wright terms the former "reader abuse" and concludes that Mailer's depiction of Marilyn is unconvincing as he is "trying to fill the unexplored spaces in her personlaity with his own".{{sfn|Wright|1981|p=202}} In addition, beyond the critiques of the text of the book, it has the dubious distinction that the 1999 ''Esquire'' Book Awards named ''Of Women and Their Elegance'' as Worst Title. | | Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic |
| | through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the |
| | fundraising from The Spanish Earth helped. Whatever propagandistic streak |
| | colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker, |
| | Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The |
| | documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between |
| | the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright |
| | fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by |
| | knowledge of The Spanish Earth and the Ken essays to the detriment of the |
| | journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable |
| | the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether |
| | something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely |
| | reportage either, and if not altogether something else, still something else, |
| | and should be reckoned with accordingly. |
|
| |
|
| It took Mailer a few years to get back to "piling on" Marilyn. This time, the medium was theatre. Although ''Strawhead'' is often categorized as a dramatization of ''Of Women and Their Elegance,'' there are a number of variances, probably occasioned by the differences in media and perhaps by Mailer's desire to emphasize the imaginary truth aspect of his take on Marilyn. Richard Hannum is listed as the co-author of the play. Among the number of drafts housed at the Harry Ransom Center is a bound copy that emphasizes the "staged" quality of the production.{{efn|There are numerous drafts in the Mailer collection, reflecting pre- and post-production rewrites.}} It begins with the ACTRESS, the DIRECTOR, and the PLAYWRIGHT discussing the issue of whether or not the ACTRESS should take the part and whether she feels up to it. She names her boyfriend, her agent and her consciousness-raising group as reasons not to take the part. In terms of the latter, Mailer's cognizance of previous feminist reations to his "Marilyn" works may be in play. The ACTRESS names feminist indecision about whether to consider Marilyn a martyr, a victim, or a collaborator with the enemy.
| |
|
| |
|
| Further removal of the distance between audience and subject is accom
| | ===Works Cited=== |
| {{pg|264|265}} | | * {{cite book |
| | | |last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }} |
| plished by the way, when the play is ready to begin, the audience watches as the Marilyn character is created. The actress draws a small black mole on her cheek and puts on a blonde wig. In addition, Mailer uses the timeworn theatrical technique of the aside to indicate that the "mirror of her mind" is being reflected to the audience. These he indentifcies as D.A.—Direct Address. There are many occasions for this. Much of the action begins at Marilyn's dressing table as she remembers. Stage directions call for the "actors who play varying roles in Marilyn Monroe's life [to] appear...like 'cat calls.' "They are verbal memories for Marilyn".{{sfn|''Strawhead''|1986|loc=1.1}}
| | * {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York |
| | | |publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }} |
| Among the changes from text to stage is a different initial setting. Whereas ''Of Women and Their Elegance'' begins with an excerpt from a ''Life'' magazine interview shortly before she died and then moves to a Waldorf Towers suite, all of ''Strawhead'' takes place in Marilyn's mind. Added sound effects contribute to the wistful and tragic tone of the piece. In a number of scenes there are claps of thunder heard and in one version, "Smile Though Your Heart is Aching" is played at the end of the play as Marilyn Monroe and Charlie Chapline walk off together.
| | * {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review |
| | | |volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988 |
| Although ''Strawhead'' was never produced on Broadway, it did receive some attention before going "kerflooie" in Mailer's words.{{sfn|Mailer42|1986|loc=letter}} In 1983, The American Repertory Theatre at Harvard had a staged reading for alum of Mailer's spec script. That same year, Provincetown Playhouse also produced a version. Mailer's sexual obession was blatantly evident in the early script that began with a fantasy interview wherein the Marilyn character gives a blowjob to the Mailer-interviewer character. Shelley Winters had such a negative response that it resulted in a Mailer rewrite. The 1986 Actor's Studio production was attended by many of Mailer's friends, some of whom, such as Kitty Carlyle wrote that she found herself "enormously interested." Less complimentary is a letter from Elia Kazan who diplomatically writes, "Your play is worth more work. You can and should improve it."
| | |pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }} |
| | | * {{cite book |last=Donaldson |
| On three occasions, Norman Mailer made use of Marilyn Monroe and I choose my language advisedly. He "used" her shamelessly. In an earlier study, I argue that Mailer, in ''Marilyn,'' creates an auto-erotic fantasy to satisfy his actual inability to consummate a sexual relationship with her. Obviously, the illusion was not fulfilling enough and so he was to attempt satisfaction two more times--again through photograph and text and finally, when those did not suffice, by bodying forth his imaginative vision with live actors in a theatrical production of his script ''Strawhead''.{{efn|Several writers have skirted around the quirky choice of his daughter Kate to play Monroe in the production, noting the Freudian associations. Stephan Morrow comments on the "various and delicious Oedipal" implications, especially during one rehearsal where Mailer demonstrated how he wanted the "blowjob" scene between Marilyn and Rod played. Kate got so disgusted that she refused to go on with the "tabloid bullshit".{{sfn|Morrow|2008|p=278}}}} Barry Leeds has a less cyni-
| | |first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }} |
| {{pg|264|265}}
| | * {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }} |
| | | * {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }} |
| cal take on the subject of Mailer's repeated return to the subject. In his biographical study ''The Enduring Vision of Norman Mailer,'' he suggests other reasons for Mailer's repeated return to the subject. Leeds rhapsodizes on what he considers the many similarities between NM and MM. ''Au contraire,'' I would counter, if there is a oneness of the two, I would invoke the Yin/Yang oneness, the oneness of opposites: in this case, I would suggest, the user and the used. However, Mailer's uses were progressively less effective. ''Marilyn'' was a critical and financial success, ''Of Women and Their Elegance'' less so, and finally, ''Strawhead'' was never published and after a two week run at the Actor's Studio, it had no further production.
| | * {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }} |
| | | * {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages= |
| Lest I be accused of piling on Mailer, a few lines about his success in writing in Marilyn's voice are called for. Among her other attributes, Mailer gives his Marilyn a sensitivity to color, a trait that escapes many male writers who create female characters. She describes the colors of the furniture and walls in her Waldorf Tower apartment, using the word "buff" to describe the walls. Buff is not a word men often use; gradations in color tones are definitely a predominantly feminine bent. ''Strawhead'' also captures the terrible sense of loneliness Marilyn felt by staging her as the only person onstage, all the others being her remembrances. Among the bits printed in ''Fragments'' are the lines "''Alone!!!!!/ I am alone''—I am ''always/ alone/no matter what''."{{sfn|Monroe44|2010|p=35}} Unfortunately, he gets little of her poetic side, her fears of aging captured in lines such as those written on hotel stationary in Surrey. "Where his eyes rest with pleasure—I / want to be still be—but time has changes / the hold of that glance./ Alas how will I cope when I am less youthful—."{{sfn|Monroe45|2010|p=119}} Finally, the issue divides itself into two conflicting parts. On the one hand, Mailer cannibalizes Marilyn for his own purposes, be it fantasy, financial, or ego-maniacal. On the other hand, his writing imagination is sometimes so spot-on as to create a viable portrait, first through biography and then autobiography. Michael Glenday also suggests that there is a certain pleasure associated with "encountering not just the memoir, but also the vitality of interaction between Mailer's imagination and his subject".{{sfn|Glenday|2008|p=350}} In addition, if the commonplace is that a man can't write from a woman's perspective, in ''Of Women And Their Elegance,'' although Mailer's Marilyn voice is totally fictional and does not fully capture Marilyn, it is certainly a plausible creation.
| | |ref=harv }} |
| | | * {{cite journal |
| To date, the obession with Marilym does not seem to have abated.{{efn|As far back as 1974 the obsession was in full flower. In his biography, Robert F. Slatzer noted that over forty books had already been written about Monroe. Mailer was not the only famous novelist to write about her. Joyce Carol Oates tried her hand at it in ''Blonde,'' also labeled as a novel, published in 2000. Gloria Steinem is another celebrity biographer.}} Nor is it limited to Mailer. In a 2010 article, Maureen Dowd lists a number of current "Marilyn" projects. One is a biopic starring Naomi Watts, based on
| | |last=Hemingway |
| {{pg|264|265}}
| | |first=Ernest |
| | | |editor-last=Trogdon |
| | | |editor-first=Robert W. |
| ''Blonde,'' the novel by Joyce Carol Oates. Another movie is in the works about the conspiracy theory that Marilyn was murdered and not a suicide. A recent novel in Britain uses the trick of having "Maf" (short for Mafia), the Maltese terrier gifted to her by Frank Sinatra, as narrator. Still another film with Michelle Williams is titled ''My Week With Marilyn''.{{sfn|Dowd|2010|p=18A}} The dress Marilyn wore in the famous subway grate scene of ''The Seven Year Itch'' brought a record $5.6 million at Debbie Reynolds' movie memorabilia sale in June, 2011. And, finally, a bittersweet footnote about the Marilyn/Mailer connection: A recent ''New York Times'' article about the sale of Mailer's last home includes a reference to, among other items, a framed original print of Milton Greene's photograph of Marilyn Monroe. "Mailer's obsession and the subject of two affectionate books" is the identifying phrase for the picture, one among the many eclectic possessions left when Mailer died. One might conclude that Marilyn was with him to the end.{{efn|My thanks to my colleagues Robert Gunn and Ezra Cappell who read the first draft of this article and made several useful suggestions.}}
| | |author-mask=1 |
| | | |title=Fascism is a Lie |
| ''My thanks to the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin for permission to examine the Norman Mailer archives in researching this essay.''
| | |url= |
| | | |journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume== |
| ==== Notes ==== | | |issue= |
| {{notelist|20em}}
| | |date=2002 |
| ==== Citations ====
| | |pages=193-6 |
| {{reflist}} | | |location=New York |
| ==== Works Cited ==== | | |publisher=Carroll & Graf |
| {{refbegin|40em|indent=yes}}
| | |access-date= |
| *{{cite book|last=Bailey|first=Jennifer. |date=1979|title= Norman Mailer: Quick-Change Artist|location=London |publisher=Macmillan|pages=|type=Print. |ref=harv}}
| | |ref=harv }} |
| *{{citation|last=Bengis|first=Ingrid|orig-year=first published 2 Oct 1973|chapter=Monroe According to Mailer: One Legend Feeds on Another (''MS.'')|others=pp. 44-47|title=''Rpt. In'' Critical Essays on Norman Mailer|editors=J. Michael Lennon|location=Boston |publisher=G.K. Hall & Co.|publication-date=1986|type=Print|pages=71-78.|ref=harv}} | | * {{cite book |
| * {{cite journal|last=Berger|first=Joseph|title=Norman Mailer’s Electric Life, as Seen Through His Last Home|journal=New York Times |publication-date=3 May 2011|publisher=New York Times|type=Web|date=June 2011|ref=harv}} | | |last=Hemingway |
| * {{citation|last=Carlyle|first=Kitty|chapter=Letter to Norman Mailer (MS.)|date=n.d.|title=Norman Mailer Collection|location=Harry Ransom Center Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin|ref=harv}} | | |first=Ernest |
| * {{cite book|last=Dearborn|first=Marilyn V.|date=1999|title=Mailer: A Biography|location=New York|publisher=Houghton Mifflin|pages=|type=Print|ref=harv}} | | |author-mask=1 |
| * {{cite news|last=Dowd|first=Maureen |date=24 Oct 2010|title=Making Ignorance Chic|newspaper=El Paso Inc|type=Print|page=18A|ref=harv}} | | |date=10 May 1937 |
| * {{cite journal|last=Gladstein|first=Mimi|date=2010|title=Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman|journal=The Mailer Review 4.1|pages=288-302|type=Print |ref=harv}} | | |chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win |
| * {{cite journal|last=Glenday|first=Michael K.|date=2008|title=From Monroe to Picasso: Norman Mailer and the Life-Study|journal=The Mailer Review 2.1|pages=348-363|type=Print|ref=harv}} | | |title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection |
| * {{cite book|last=Guiles|first=Fred Lawrence|date=1984|title=Legend: The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe |location=Lanham, MD|publisher=Scarborough House|ref=harv}} | | |url= |
| * {{citation|last=Kazan|first=Elia|chapter=Letter to Norman Mailer (MS.)|date=n.d.|title=Norman Mailer Collection|location=Harry Ransom Center Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin|ref=harv}}
| | |location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston |
| * {{cite book|last=Leeds|first=Barry H. |date=2002|title=The Enduring Vision of Norman Mailer|location=Bainbridge Island, WA|publisher=Pleasure Boat Studio: A Literary Press|pages=|type=Print|ref=harv}} | | |publisher= |
| * {{cite journal|last=Lehmann-Haupt|first=Christopher|title=Aquarius ON Gemini - I|url=|journal=New York Times |volume=27|issue=|date=16 July 1973|type=Print|ref=harv}} | | |pages= |
| * {{cite magazine|last=Mailer|first=Norman|date=10 Nov 1980|title=Before the Literary Bar|magazine=New York Magazine|pages=27-46|type=Print|ref=harv}} | | |ref=harv }} |
| * {{citation|last=Mailer|first=Norman|chapter=Letter to Loren Plotkin (''MS.'')|date=7 May 1986|type= MS.|title=Norman Mailer Collection|location=Harry Ransom Center Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin|ref=harv}} | | * {{cite book |
| * {{cite book|last=Mailer|first=Norman|date=1980|title=Of Women and Their Elegance|location=New York|publisher=Simon and Schuster|pages=|type=Print|ref=harv}} | | |last=Hemingway |
| * {{cite book|last=Mailer|first=Norman|date=1973|title=Marilyn|location=New York|publisher=Galahad Books|pages=|type=Print|ref=harv}} | | |first=Ernest |
| * {{cite book|last=Mailer|first=Norman|date=1998|chapter=The Jewish Princess|title=The Time of Our Time|location=New York|publisher=Random House|pages=300-317|type=Print|ref=harv}} | | |author-mask=1 |
| * {{cite book|last=Mailer|first=Norris Church|date=2010|title=A Ticket To The Circus|location=New York|publisher=Random House|pages=|type=Print|ref=harv}} | | |date=nd |
| * {{cite book|last=Manso|first=Peter |date=1985|title=Mailer|location=New York|publisher=Simon & Schuster|pages=|type=Print|ref=harv}} | | |chapter=The Home Front |
| * {{citation|last=Marshall|first=David|title=Rev. of ''Of Women and Their Elegance,'' By. Norman Mailer. ''Marilyn Monroe and the Camera''|date=3 May 2011|type=Web|ref=harv}} | | |title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection |
| * {{cite book|last=Merrill|first=Robert|date=1992|title=Norman Mailer Revisited|location=New York|publisher=Twayne Publishers|pages=|type=Print|ref=harv}}
| | |url= |
| * {{cite book|last=Monroe|first=Marilyn|date=2010|title=Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters|editors=Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment|location=New York|publisher=Farrar, Straus and Giroux|type=Print|ref=harv}} | | |location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston |
| * {{cite journal|last=Morrow|first=Stephan|date=2008|title=The Unknown and the General|journal=The Mailer Review 2.1|location=|pages=273-297|type=Print |ref=harv}} | | |publisher= |
| * {{cite book|last=Rollyson|first=Carl|date=1991|title=The Lives of Norman Mailer: A Biography|location=New York|publisher=Paragon House|page=|type=Print|ref=harv}} | | |pages= |
| * {{cite book|last=Slatzer|first=Robert F.|date=1974|title=The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe|location=New York |publisher=Pinnacle Books|type=Print|ref=harv}} | | |ref=harv }} |
| * {{citation|last=Stevens|first=Carol|chapter=Letter to Norman Mailer (TS.)|date=31 Jan 1986|title=Norman Mailer Collection|location=Harry Ransom Center Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin|ref=harv}} | | * {{cite book |
| * {{citation|people=By. Norman Mailer, Dir. Norman Mailer. Perf. Norris Church Mailer, Robert Heller and Mickey Knox|title=Strawhead|medium=Performance|others=Actor’s Studio|location=New York|date=January 1986|ref=harv}} | | |last=Hemingway |
| * {{cite magazine|last=Wright|first=Lawrence|date=June 1981|title=Shades of Gray|magazine=Texas Monthly|pages=196-207|type=Print|ref=harv}}
| | |first=Ernest |
| {{refend}}
| | |author-mask=1 |
| {{Review}}
| | |date=10 Dec 1938 |
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| | |ref=harv }} |
| | * {{cite book |
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| | |author-mask=1 |
| | |date=2 June 1938 |
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| | |title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection |
| | |url= |
| | |location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston |
| | |publisher= |
| | |pages= |
| | |ref=harv }} |
| | * {{cite book |
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| | |date=14 Feb 1939 |
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| | * {{cite book |
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| | * {{cite book |
| | |last=Ivens |
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| | * {{cite book |
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| | * {{cite book |
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| | * {{cite book |
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| | * {{cite book |
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| | * {{cite book |
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| | * {{cite book |
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| | * {{cite book |
| | |last=Matthews |
| | |first=Herbert |
| | |author-mask= |
| | |date=9 Apr 1937 |
| | |chapter=Letter to Edwin James |
| | |title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3 |
| | |url= |
| | |location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin |
| | |publisher= |
| | |pages= |
| | |ref=harv }} |
| | * {{cite book |
| | |last=Matthews |
| | |first=Herbert |
| | |author-mask=1 |
| | |date=11 Apr 1937 |
| | |chapter=Letter to Edwin James |
| | |title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3 |
| | |url= |
| | |location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin |
| | |publisher= |
| | |pages= |
| | |ref=harv }} |
| | * {{cite book |
| | |last=Matthews |
| | |first=Herbert |
| | |author-mask=1 |
| | |date=6 July 1937 |
| | |chapter=Letter to Edwin James |
| | |title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3 |
| | |url= |
| | |location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin |
| | |publisher= |
| | |pages= |
| | |ref=harv }} |
| | * {{cite book |
| | |last=Matthews |
| | |first=Herbert |
| | |author-mask=1 |
| | |date=July 1937 |
| | |chapter=Letter to Edwin James |
| | |title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4 |
| | |url= |
| | |location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin |
| | |publisher= |
| | |pages= |
| | |ref=harv }} |
| | * {{cite book |
| | |last=Matthews |
| | |first=Herbert |
| | |author-mask=1 |
| | |date=22 March 1939 |
| | |chapter=Letter to Sulzberger |
| | |title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9 |
| | |url= |
| | |location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin |
| | |publisher= |
| | |pages= |
| | |ref=harv }} |
| | * {{cite book |
| | |last=McCaw |
| | |first=Raymond |
| | |author-mask= |
| | |date=20 May 1937 |
| | |chapter=Letter to Edwin James |
| | |title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3 |
| | |url= |
| | |location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin |
| | |publisher= |
| | |pages= |
| | |ref=harv }} |
| | * {{cite book |
| | |last=McCaw |
| | |first=Raymond |
| | |author-mask=1 |
| | |date=20 Dec 1937 |
| | |chapter=Letter to Edwin James |
| | |title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5 |
| | |url= |
| | |location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin |
| | |publisher= |
| | |pages= |
| | |ref=harv }} |
| | * {{cite book |
| | |last=McCaw |
| | |first=Raymond |
| | |author-mask=1 |
| | |date=23 Sep 1937 |
| | |chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews |
| | |title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4 |
| | |url= |
| | |location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin |
| | |publisher= |
| | |pages= |
| | |ref=harv }} |
| | * {{cite book |
| | |last=Moorehead |
| | |first=Caroline |
| | |date=2003 |
| | |title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life |
| | |url= |
| | |location=New York |
| | |publisher=Henry Holt |
| | |pages= |
| | |ref=harv }} |
| | * {{cite book |
| | |last=Moreira |
| | |first=Peter |
| | |date=2006 |
| | |title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn |
| | |url= |
| | |location=Washington D.C. |
| | |publisher=Potomac Books |
| | |pages= |
| | |ref=harv }} |
| | * {{cite book |
| | |last=NANA |
| | |first= |
| | |date=5 Feb 1937 |
| | |chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release |
| | |title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection |
| | |url= |
| | |location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston |
| | |publisher= |
| | |pages= |
| | |ref=harv }} |
| | * {{cite book |
| | |last=NANA |
| | |first= |
| | |author-mask=1 |
| | |date=4 Apr 1938 |
| | |chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents |
| | |title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection |
| | |url= |
| | |location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston |
| | |publisher= |
| | |pages= |
| | |ref=harv }} |
| | * {{cite book |
| | |editor-last=Nelson |
| | |editor-first=Card |
| | |date=1994 |
| | |title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade |
| | |url= |
| | |location=Urbana |
| | |publisher=U of Illinois |
| | |pages= |
| | |ref=harv }} |
| | * {{cite book |
| | |last=Reynolds |
| | |first=Michael |
| | |date=1989 |
| | |title=Hemingway: The Paris Years |
| | |url= |
| | |location=New York |
| | |publisher=Norton |
| | |pages= |
| | |ref=harv }} |
| | * {{cite book |
| | |last=Stott |
| | |first=William |
| | |date=1986 |
| | |title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America |
| | |url= |
| | |location=Chicago |
| | |publisher=U of Chicago P |
| | |pages= |
| | |ref=harv }} |
| | * {{cite book |
| | |last=Thomas |
| | |first=Hugh |
| | |date=2001 |
| | |title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed. |
| | |url= |
| | |location=New York |
| | |publisher=Modern Library |
| | |pages= |
| | |ref=harv }} |
| | * {{cite magazine |
| | |last=''Two Wars and More to Come'' |
| | |first= |
| | |date=24 Jan 1938 |
| | |title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere |
| | |type=Advertisement |
| | |url= |
| | |magazine=New York Times |
| | |pages= |
| | |access-date= |
| | |ref=harv }} |
| | * {{cite journal |
| | |last= |
| | |first= |
| | |title=United States. Dept. of State |
| | |url= |
| | |journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume==1 |
| | |issue=General |
| | |date=1954 |
| | |pages= |
| | |location=Washington |
| | |publisher=GPO |
| | |access-date= |
| | |ref=harv }} |
| | * {{cite journal |
| | |last=Watson |
| | |first=William Braasch |
| | |title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches |
| | |url= |
| | |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume==7.2 |
| | |issue= |
| | |date=1988 |
| | |pages=4-121 |
| | |access-date= |
| | |ref=harv }} |
| | * {{cite book |
| | |last=Wheeler |
| | |first=John H. |
| | |author-mask=1 |
| | |date=10 Dec 1938 |
| | |chapter=Letter to Hemingway |
| | |title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14 |
| | |url= |
| | |location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin |
| | |publisher= |
| | |pages= |
| | |ref=harv }} |