The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing: Difference between revisions

{{dc|dc=I|n a 1964 interview published in ''The Paris Review''}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to“try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique“affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.

At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true”(Death 1).Echoing Hemingway’s standards,Mailer believes a writer must write“to the limit of one’s honesty”(“Hazards” 399). But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes,“Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good” (354). According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is” (354). Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”

If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to,this“point of purity,”the author succeeds in showing life“as it really is”(“Letter to John”). Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity”when he defines what he calls“the real thing”in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon (). Hemingway writes,

In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. ()

Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely enough,”captures the“motion and fact”of life as it really happens,then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader (). Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that“we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest” (“Hazards” ). Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and,correlatively, art and writing,life and death,and the violence,brutality,and cruelty of the bullfight and life ().

Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards,yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”

You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—  dimensions and if possible  that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker )

The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer:“I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing” (qtd. in Baker ). Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,

I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself,but rather effects which come from being truly radical,from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster )