The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself: Difference between revisions

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+fawning (but still condescending) editor was more subtle and more public and its effects far longer-reaching. It would play out in the first third of Death in the Afternoon in the form of a series of nine dialogues between an Author, who emerges out of the voice of the first-person narrator but is distinguished by the labeling conventions of dramatic dialogue, and an Old Lady. Unfortunately for the book’s reception and thus for Hemingway’s reputation, the only one who understood the purpose of the dialogues was Hemingway (and perhaps, much later, Norman Mailer, whose discussion of the problems of authorship refers readers to ''Death in the Afternoon'' in the first three pages of ''Advertisements for Myself'').
+Hemingway Hemingway had long wanted to write “the bullfighting book.” He first mentions the idea in his first letter to Maxwell Perkins, written when he was entering into contract with Boni & Liveright for his 1925 collection ''In Our Time''. (By 1926, he would switch allegiance to Perkins’s house, Charles Scribners’
+Sons, with ''Torrents of Spring'' and ''The Sun Also Rises''.) After three of his first four books met with critical acclaim (''Torrents'' was universally considered negligible, a brutish and immature attack on former mentor Sherwood Anderson), he felt he finally had the professional cachet to write the nonfiction book on bullfighting.
+No one knows whether Leach’s letter interrupted Hemingway’s actual writing or merely his preliminary thinking about his next book. Although Hemingway establishes on the first page of ''Death in the Afternoon'' that this so-conceived “bullfighting book” will be as much about writing and authorship as bullfighting (the analogy is thoroughly developed throughout
+the book, hinging on the similarities in the economic, institutional and cultural mechanisms by which any art form is produced for a paying public), the first several chapters merely introduce the milieu, the spectacle, and its value to the writer, who tries in the night to remember which amongst thousands of details results in a feeling—for it is by strict focus on and adherence to such details, the narrator believes, a writer can convey real feeling and avoid cheap tricks and sentiment. The detail is the contrast between a gored matador’s thighbone and his dirty underwear {{sfn | Hemmingway | 1932 | p= p20}}. Mailer would approve.
+For the first six chapters, Death in the Afternoon promises to unfold as the observations of a writer (the narrative “I”) engaging with the culture, history, form, and presentation of the Spanish bullfight and, by extension, the character of the Spanish nation and people. Even had Hemingway not delivered something far more difficult, problematic, and admittedly obscure,
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 === Notes ===
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 {{cite letter |last= Leach|first= Henry Goddard |date= 2 May 1930|title= Letters to Hemingway|location= Boston, John F. Kennedy Library|publisher= TS. Hemingway Collection|pages= |ref=harv }}
-{{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1959|title= Advertisments for Myself|location= New York|publisher= G.P. Putnam's Sons|ref=harv }}
+{{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1959|title= Advertisments for Myself|location= New York|publisher= G.P. Putnam's Sons|ref=harv}}
 {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 2003|title= The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing|location= New York|publisher= Random House|ref=harv }}