The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Hemingway Revisited

Written by
Norman Mailer

Ernest Hemingway’s later work did not impress Mailer. For example, he thought The Old Man and the Sea (1952) was ruinously sentimental. But the early work marked him. At Harvard, Mailer wrote parodies of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) for two initiations into college organizations. He quoted from Death in the Afternoon (1932) in Of a Fire on the Moon (1971), and discussed The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) in The Spooky Art (2003). Innumerable comments on Hemingway’s style and persona appear in Mailer’s in-terviews. In a March 14, 2002 letter to the Boston Globe, he lambasted George F. Will for comparing the prose of President Bush to that of Hemingway, saying that “to put George W. Bush’s prose next to Hemingway is equal to saying that Jackie Susann is right up there with Jane Austen.” To drive his point home, he went on to quote the famous passage from chapter 28 of A Farewell to Arms: “Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete [...] numbers of regiments and the dates.”

The following suite of poems shows that Catherine Barkley and Jake Barnes were on Mailer’s mind toward the end of his life. It appeared first in the Paris Review 50 (Fall 2003) under the title, “A Riff on Hemingway.” They were numbered 1-7. When he reprinted them the same year in Modest Gifts: Poems and Drawings, he changed the title to “Hemingway Revisited,” and dropped the numbers. He also reversed the order of poems three and four and made a number of changes in the way the stanzas were divided and placed out on the page. And he added this stanza: “Slack the yaws/tight the jaws/hurricane/the air/of waiting.” He never commented on why he made the changes, but he took the placement of his poems seriously, and they were not happenstance. “Hemingway Revisited” is Mailer’s last word on the writer who, arguably, influenced him more than any other. Our thanks to the Mailer Estate for permission to reprint these poems.

—J. Michael Lennon

Jake pissed with stern loneliness leaving a fierce smell of the past. His future was not so empty as he declared, a girl with music and grace tender of face was waiting for him.

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Hey—    you       sleep       deep—    but what a sight       see       you          soon       beautiful       I hope Catherine found this note by her telephone on awakening in an empty bed after a one night stand and she called her best friend to say;          Guess what?          I feel like                Earth                Mother.

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page 25

Catherine never blushed          until          she smelled the fine cheat          in          the line          of the succession and then          she flushed          furiously for she thought          the smell          adorable,          it was          so          rich          to rise                from                the poor.

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page 26

We really ought, Catherine said to be able to stay together without making love all the time. Yes, said Jake, I’m sure it’s my fault. Yes, she said smugly you smell so greedy                and good Swarms and swarms    of love    smug, smug, smug

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page 27

You may not love me                                     Jake said                   but I love you. Well, I love you,                   said Catherine                   so                   bad luck. They loved each other                   very much. They had not taken                   a good wash                   in three weeks. It would have been                   the next wrong                   to murdering                        a child. What the hell                   they were both                   thirty                   forty                   tired, tried,                   sad, foul They thought they                   had betrayed                   something                   forever, And She forgave them. Or thus they hoped.                   So, bad luck                   muttered the                        horror                        of old                        habit,                        We will die                        if we lose                        our love.

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page 28

Mangled, morgued birched and bruted                        they were                        hawks                        upon the mood                           of their                           own blessing. So they scattered,                           waiting                                for the                                curse.                                                     Slack the yaws                                                                             tight the jaws                                                                             hurricane                                                                             the air                                                     of waiting