The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer: Difference between revisions

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 In “Prisoner of Success,” an interview with Paul Attanasio, Mailer stated with
 exceptional lucidity:{{pg|168|169}}
+<blockquote>
+Hemingway occupied the center in every way, not only coming from the Midwest, but he occupies the very center of writing itself. Anyone who’s ever read a newspaper can feel how good a writer he is—he uses a vocabulary that if anything is smaller than the average newspaperman’s vocabulary. And he does wonderful things with it. So no matter how serious or superficial a reader you are you sense very quickly that you are in the hands of someone who truly can write well. Then, of course, he wrote about things that are very, very interesting to men. There aren’t very
+many women going around saying Hemingway is a great writer. I am willing to bet more American women who are good writers have been influenced by Proust than by Hemingway. But for men he’s central: the anxieties he feels about being a man cover
+all the anxieties; it’s almost impossible not to identify with his work.{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=187}}(Pontifications 131-32)
+</blockquote>
+Clearly, this citation is long, but well worth providing. It is well conceived, admirably stated, and far-reaching. As the most stridently ambitious writer of his generation, one can unquestionably see the implications of Mailer’s awareness of all things Hemingway. Mailer shows a keen sense of the truth and the astonishing expanse of the influence Hemingway exercised during his lifetime. Hemingway’s work went beyond regional influence and extended itself to national and international levels.
+With striking insight Mailer goes to the very mysterious heart of Hemingway’s magical influence as a creative writer: mastery of the alchemical power of everyday American speech as poetry. With remarkable accuracy, he perceives that the prominence of Hemingway as a writer resides in the wonderful things he does with the English language or, more precisely, with the American colloquial speech. Mailer sees the rare enchantment that Hemingway can work by eliciting a feeling in the reader that true wonders await him or her merely by reading on. He also hints at his appreciation of Hemingway’s meiotic style, and what he could achieve with a minimal poetic diction at the lexical and semantic levels of the language. It is little wonder that Mailer also liked to read the Belgian born French writer Georges Simenon’s detective Jules Maigret series. Simenon, too, practiced a totally unornamented, uncluttered, minimalist style that approached Hemingway’s.{{efn|On Mailer’s appreciation of Georges Simenon’s detective fiction, please see Dwayne Raymond’s ''Mornings with Mailer.''{{sfn|Raymond|2010}} For more extensive discussions of Hemingway’s meiotic stylistics and the role that the concepts of primal silence and the invisible plays in it please see my articles “The Aesthetics of Silence,” and “The Aesthetics of the Visible and the Invisible.}} Hemingway, too,{{pg|169|170}}
 === Notes ===