User:JBrown/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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Harry Hubbard is only half Hubbard, of course—his mother is a Silberzweig—and as well as reading Hemingway, he enjoys Irwin Shaw’s ''The Young Lions'' because “Noah Ackerman, the Jew, had appealed to me” (145).

Harry also reflects upon the character of Robert Cohn (422)—whose upper class New York background he shares—and to some extent, he belongs to the ranks of Cohn’s literary “avengers” (Fiedler 71). ''Harlot’s Ghost'' reveals the limits of methodology and “purity of intent” (1021) and instead asserts the virtues of division and dialectic, of ongoing “war”and “relation”(594).

And yet, in Mailer’s eyes Hemingway was divided, too. He may have been a craftsman but he was not a ''mere'' craftsman. As much as D.H. Lawrence or Henry Miller—indeed, every major figure in the Mailer pantheon—Hemingway was a “great writer, for he contained a cauldron of boiling opposites” (Mailer, ''Prisoner'' 137). Reviewing Morley Callaghan’s ''That Summer in Paris'' in 1963, Mailer declared that Hemingway’s bravery was “an act of will”; the “heroic”product of a lifelong struggle with “cowardice” and an ability to carry “a weight of anxiety within him” which would have “suffocated any man smaller than himself" (''Cannibals'' 159). His decision to reprint these comments as the first “prelude” to ''The Time Of Our Time'' suggests that they should be thought of, in some way, as initiating his own work (''Time'' 4). What Hemingway’s example initiated was not a style or methodology—not camp—building—but a fascination with the futile effort involved in such constructions and an awareness of the incapacity of all camps to remain secure, to keep the river away.

For all that Hemingway strove to be “classic,” “sophisticated,” “purer,” and “graceful,” for all that he represented the ideals of “scrupulosity,”“manners,” and “gravity” (''Pieces'' 912), the chaos of his “inner” life was still apparent to Mailer (''Existential'' 10). In other words, like Cal Hubbard,"[t]he two halves of his soul were far apart" (''Harlot’s'' 117). The question was one of balance. At his best, like Hubbard, Hemingway’s “strength was that he had managed to find some inner cooperation between these disparate halves” (''Harlot’s'' 117). At “his worst” (''Advertisements'' 474) shortly before his death, the “old moldering” (477) writer was adding to “the nausea he once cleared away” (474).

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 Harry Hubbard is only half Hubbard, of course—his mother is a Silberzweig—and as well as reading Hemingway, he enjoys Irwin Shaw’s ''The Young Lions'' because “Noah Ackerman, the Jew, had appealed to me” (145).
 Harry also reflects upon the character of Robert Cohn (422)—whose upper class New York background he shares—and to some extent, he belongs to the ranks of Cohn’s literary “avengers” (Fiedler 71). ''Harlot’s Ghost'' reveals the limits of methodology and “purity of intent” (1021) and instead asserts the virtues of division and dialectic, of ongoing “war”and “relation”(594).
+And yet, in Mailer’s eyes Hemingway was divided, too. He may have been a craftsman but he was not a ''mere'' craftsman. As much as D.H. Lawrence or Henry Miller—indeed, every major figure in the Mailer pantheon—Hemingway was a “great writer, for he contained a cauldron of boiling opposites” (Mailer, ''Prisoner'' 137). Reviewing Morley Callaghan’s ''That Summer in Paris'' in 1963, Mailer declared that Hemingway’s bravery was “an act of will”; the “heroic”product of a lifelong struggle with “cowardice” and an ability to carry “a weight of anxiety within him” which would have “suffocated any man smaller than himself" (''Cannibals'' 159). His decision to reprint these comments as the first “prelude” to ''The Time Of Our Time'' suggests that they should be thought of, in some way, as initiating his own work (''Time'' 4). What Hemingway’s example initiated was not a style or methodology—not camp—building—but a fascination with the futile effort involved in such constructions and an awareness of the incapacity of all camps to remain secure, to keep the river away.
+For all that Hemingway strove to be “classic,” “sophisticated,” “purer,” and “graceful,” for all that he represented the ideals of “scrupulosity,”“manners,” and “gravity” (''Pieces'' 912), the chaos of his “inner” life was still apparent to Mailer (''Existential'' 10). In other words, like Cal Hubbard,"[t]he two halves of his soul were far apart" (''Harlot’s'' 117). The question was one of balance. At his best, like Hubbard, Hemingway’s “strength was that he had managed to find some inner cooperation between these disparate halves” (''Harlot’s'' 117). At “his worst” (''Advertisements'' 474) shortly before his death, the “old moldering” (477) writer was adding to “the nausea he once cleared away” (474).