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“The burden of government,” [Samuel] Johnson brooded,“is increased upon princes by the virtues of their immediate predecessors,” and he added: “He that succeeds a celebrated writer, has the same difficulties to encounter.” We know the rancid humor of this too well, and any reader of Advertisements for Myself may enjoy the frantic dances of Norman Mailer as he strives to evade his own anxiety that it is, after all, Hemingway all the way, emphasis added{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=28}}
“The burden of government,” [Samuel] Johnson brooded,“is increased upon princes by the virtues of their immediate predecessors,” and he added: “He that succeeds a celebrated writer, has the same difficulties to encounter.” We know the rancid humor of this too well, and any reader of Advertisements for Myself may enjoy the frantic dances of Norman Mailer as he strives to evade his own anxiety that it is, after all, Hemingway all the way (emphasis added).{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=28}}


Oddly, in “First Advertisement for Myself,” the introductory piece to ''Advertisement for Myself,'' what Bloom perceives as “frantic dances” would seem like ritualistic dances. Mailer performs them as he prepares to affect a kind Jungian metanoia to re-form his divided psyche to bring about self-healing and renewed creative energy. The “rancid humor” of it derives from the struggles of the psyche of a writer torn apart between a sense of utter defeat and megalomania. “Defeat has left my nature divided,” declares Mailer, “my sense of timing is eccentric, and I contain within myself the bitter exhaustions of an old man, and the cocky arguments of a bright boy. So I am everything but my proper age of thirty-six, and anger has brought me to the edge of the brutal.”{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=17}} On the other hand, he immediately confesses, “In sitting down to write a sermon for this collection, I find arrogance in much of my mood,” which is an understatement.{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=17}}
Oddly, in “First Advertisement for Myself,” the introductory piece to ''Advertisement for Myself,'' what Bloom perceives as “frantic dances” would seem like ritualistic dances. Mailer performs them as he prepares to affect a kind Jungian metanoia to re-form his divided psyche to bring about self-healing and renewed creative energy. The “rancid humor” of it derives from the struggles of the psyche of a writer torn apart between a sense of utter defeat and megalomania. “Defeat has left my nature divided,” declares Mailer, “my sense of timing is eccentric, and I contain within myself the bitter exhaustions of an old man, and the cocky arguments of a bright boy. So I am everything but my proper age of thirty-six, and anger has brought me to the edge of the brutal.”{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=17}} On the other hand, he immediately confesses, “In sitting down to write a sermon for this collection, I find arrogance in much of my mood,” which is an understatement.{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=17}}
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Later, as it was his inclination, Mailer extravagantly predicts, “it is my present and future work which will have the deepest influence of any work being done by an American novelist in these years.”{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=17}} His contradictory statements make intelligible a psychological swing between defeat and a sense of manic exaltation, a type of bipolar depression that he may have shared for sometime and to some degree with Hemingway. They detract from his confidence in his claim of eventual superior influence and puts it in question. But I would say his vacillations in self-assurance are much to his credit. Because, sad to say for him and for us, Mailer came to acknowledge later in life that his prediction that his work will have “the deepest influence of any work being done by an American novelist in these years” did not transpire—at least not in any appreciable way.
Later, as it was his inclination, Mailer extravagantly predicts, “it is my present and future work which will have the deepest influence of any work being done by an American novelist in these years.”{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=17}} His contradictory statements make intelligible a psychological swing between defeat and a sense of manic exaltation, a type of bipolar depression that he may have shared for sometime and to some degree with Hemingway. They detract from his confidence in his claim of eventual superior influence and puts it in question. But I would say his vacillations in self-assurance are much to his credit. Because, sad to say for him and for us, Mailer came to acknowledge later in life that his prediction that his work will have “the deepest influence of any work being done by an American novelist in these years” did not transpire—at least not in any appreciable way.


On a certain plane of critical thought, one may argue ''Advertisements for Myself'' constitutes Mailer’s own treatise on influence. In a letter to George Plimpton, Hemingway refers to the book as “the sort of ragtag assembly of his [Mailer’s] rewrites, second thoughts and ramblings ''shot through with occasional brilliance”'', emphasis added.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=912}} If by “ragtag” Hemingway meant that the books contents were diverse and lacking in cohesion in appearance or composition, that might well have been true. But the fact remains that Mailer intentionally structured it as such, as he did, say, in ''Cannibals and Christians.'' But Hemingway’s remark on the text being “shot through with occasional brilliance” is right on the mark. Hardly noticeable, Mailer’s attempts in this text culminate in discovering and establishing a viable, working out a dialectical synthesis between himself and Hemingway as men and writers. Mailer’s articulation of the subject falls into that hard earned occasional brilliance of the text. Did Hemingway realize this in his own way? It is entirely possible.
On a certain plane of critical thought, one may argue ''Advertisements for Myself'' constitutes Mailer’s own treatise on influence. In a letter to George Plimpton, Hemingway refers to the book as “the sort of ragtag assembly of his [Mailer’s] rewrites, second thoughts and ramblings ''shot through with occasional brilliance”'' (emphasis added).{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=912}} If by “ragtag” Hemingway meant that the books contents were diverse and lacking in cohesion in appearance or composition, that might well have been true. But the fact remains that Mailer intentionally structured it as such, as he did, say, in ''Cannibals and Christians.'' But Hemingway’s remark on the text being “shot through with occasional brilliance” is right on the mark. Hardly noticeable, Mailer’s attempts in this text culminate in discovering and establishing a viable, working out a dialectical synthesis between himself and Hemingway as men and writers. Mailer’s articulation of the subject falls into that hard earned occasional brilliance of the text. Did Hemingway realize this in his own way? It is entirely possible.


Mailer’s own sense of “defeat” will not cease tormenting him unless and until this Hemingway matter is truly settled once and for all. “Every American writer,” writes Mailer plainly, “who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=19}} “Faena” is an unusual but pertinent word to use here in connection to Hemingway and the way Mailer proposes to deal with his contemporaries. Faena denotes a series of final ritual passes at the bull that a matador carries out in bullfighting. It occurs immediately before the ''kill,'' the moment of truth, to highlight a matador’s skill. On the other hand, to perform “a faena which borrows from the self-love of a{{pg|180|181}}
Mailer’s own sense of “defeat” will not cease tormenting him unless and until this Hemingway matter is truly settled once and for all. “Every American writer,” writes Mailer plainly, “who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=19}} “Faena” is an unusual but pertinent word to use here in connection to Hemingway and the way Mailer proposes to deal with his contemporaries. Faena denotes a series of final ritual passes at the bull that a matador carries out in bullfighting. It occurs immediately before the ''kill,'' the moment of truth, to highlight a matador’s skill. On the other hand, to perform “a faena which borrows from the self-love of a{{pg|180|181}}
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The more I know about writing, the more of an achievement Hemingway’s style becomes to me. I know his flaws inside out. I’ve loved and hated him ''as if he were my own father'' for years. There is so much he did for one, so much he didn’t do. ''Truly the relationship you have to him is as a father.'' But he is a remarkable writer. His sense of the English language, I’d say, is virtually primitive in its power to evoke mood and stir the senses, emphasis added.{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=161}}
The more I know about writing, the more of an achievement Hemingway’s style becomes to me. I know his flaws inside out. I’ve loved and hated him ''as if he were my own father'' for years. There is so much he did for one, so much he didn’t do. ''Truly the relationship you have to him is as a father.'' But he is a remarkable writer. His sense of the English language, I’d say, is virtually primitive in its power to evoke mood and stir the senses (emphasis added).{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=161}}
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As a relatively young writer, Hemingway wrote, “A thousand years make economics silly and a work of art endures forever, but it is very difficult to do and now it is not fashionable.” But he added, “those who practice it now wish to cease their work because it is too lonely, too hard to do, and it is not fashionable”{{sfn|Mailer|1935|p=109}}{{pg|184|185}}
As a relatively young writer, Hemingway wrote, “A thousand years make economics silly and a work of art endures forever, but it is very difficult to do and now it is not fashionable.” But he added, “those who practice it now wish to cease their work because it is too lonely, too hard to do, and it is not fashionable”{{sfn|Mailer|1935|p=109}}{{pg|184|185}}
oneself within the long line of language artists and still remain free and work out one’s own identity as a unique creative writer. Furthermore, Mailer could not remain passive to the pressure of new visual arts such as the cinema and particularly television and later the internet, all vying for popular attention. They have tended to make serious creative writing less fashionable.
Mailer was most desirous to do creative writing that would simultaneously find a large readership and still shed light on matters hitherto unknown, therefore incomprehensible, even the unknowable.His tendencies to tackle such phenomena generate a knotty problematics for any writer. I would propose that Mailer’s solution to the problematics as well as the troublesome notions of the new versus the traditional was to conceive literature as a type of advanced evolutionary process. There would be stages of development within which each writer finds himself or herself, working out a proper strategy of creative survival. From his vantage point, what would set apart such developmental stages was the difficulty to choose between essential and nonessential among the constitutive elements of the inherited
literary culture and the present literary trends. Therefore, in tandem, he would take from tradition what was essential to him as a starting point. He would then embark upon remaking the inherited literary tradition in his own novel ways. It is a bit similar to the ways that one may receive and dispense of one’s inheritance. In ''Advertisements for Myself,'' Mailer writes,
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[I]f I have one ambition above all others, it is to write a novel which Dostoyevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even old moldering Hemingway might come to read, for it would carry what they had to tell another part of the way.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=477}}
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His gratuitous quick jab at Hemingway not withstanding, in this passage Mailer makes an effort to position himself in the canonical ranks of his literary forbearers and contemporaries. Persuasively, they also include the historian Oswald Spengler and two towering figures of nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectual history—Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. There is an evident suggestion in this selection of illustrious names of the necessity Mailer finds in having a vision of the human world as an integral whole. In the interview “Literary Ambitions,” he tells Lennon,{{pg|185|186}}
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I grew up under the shadow of Marx and Freud. Both men, independently, created an entire world system. They had a vision of all existence. That impressed me immensely. I was nothing if intellectually ambitious when I was young and wanted to come up with similar vision that would comprehend everything (emphasis added).{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=169}}
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Here, Mailer the creative writer meets Mailer the intellectual and putative theoretician. Be that as it may, he was neither a philosopher nor a psychoanalyst, certainly not in their restrictive academic classifications. But as a novelist, he discovered the imaginative unity of the world of fiction, with its unifying imaginative logic and “worldmaking” powers, to use Nelson Goodman’s apt language. In Tolstoy and Stendhal, the imaginal geographies and histories of Russia and France found their well-integrated expressions in the melancholy accounts of war and peace. Spengler traced the history of the Western world in what he considered to be its downward spiral. Proust made the rich domain of memory of things past his own. James Joyce made Dublin the capital of the world through lingual, linguistic, and fictional magic. Karl Marx attributed to the dialectics of matter and history materialism Godlike powers; and Sigmund Freud rendered the unconscious the all but supernatural ruling principle of the psyche.
Each one of the writers cited by Mailer attempted to “totalize” their world, to use a more technical term introduced by Jean-Paul Sartre. In one way or
another, they all allowed Mailer to have a steady view of the world in its totality albeit on the plane of the fictional. In this way, for Mailer, the logic of this literary conception is at one with that of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and history. He believed he had “a coherent philosophy,” as he told Lennon,
adding, “I believe we could start talking about virtually anything, and before we were done I could connect our subject to almost anything in my universe.”{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=170}} For Mailer, this coherent literary philosophy eventually shapes up as a cosmology in ''On God: An Uncommon Conversation.''
Among his contemporaries, Mailer mentions novelists William Faulkner and Hemingway. They too, each in his own way, valiantly sought to create an imaginal vision of the world that was entire onto itself. Faulkner’s goal was to represent the entire history of a region, the American South, by his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, which simultaneously transcended all historical and geographical boundaries and became universal in its wide array{{pg|186|187}}


=== Notes ===
=== Notes ===
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