User:NrmMGA5108/sandbox: Difference between revisions

Kretchmer classified ‘’Playboy’’’s “dynamics” with Mailer as “interesting” because ‘’Playboy’’ did not publish his fiction “for direct sales” (Manso 561). Unlike other writers, such as Ian Fleming or Joseph Heller, who were understood as more commercial, ‘’Playboy’’ published Mailer “simply” because he is “the most interesting writer, a writer you want to publish if you’re editing a magazine, and whether or not all of ‘’Playboy’’’s readers are going to line up eagerly to buy the issue doesn’t really come into play” (Manso 561). Therefore, including Mailer in the magazine was more about building the ‘’Playboy’’ brand than selling copies. Editors commissioned Mailer, like Hemingway, for his cultural status rather than his literature.

‘’Playboy’’ published only three true fiction selections from Mailer: “Trial of the Warlock” (Dec. 1976), excerpts from ‘’Ancient Evenings’’ (April and May 1983), and “The Changing of the Guard,” (Dec. 1988). Out of these three pieces, ‘’Ancient Evenings’’ is the only work to have received critical attention, much of it mixed. Scholars have often overlooked the “Trial” and “The Changing of the Guard” but ‘’Playboy’’ praised them both as quality, literary selections, even offering the “Trial” the annual $1,000 prize for Best Fiction for 1976 and later republishing the story in its anthology—Playboy ‘’Stories: The Best of Forty Years of Short Fiction’’, edited by Alice K. Turner. And because his machismo fueled much of his fiction, Mailer’s fiction appear to fit Spectorsky’s stringent guidelines for ‘’Playboy’’’s literary selections—masculine, Hemingway heroes, and clear, intellectual prose.

Mailer’s third literary contribution to ‘’Playboy’’, “The Changing of the Guard,” complements all of Spectorsky’s original criteria for quality, virile fiction. The five-page feature represents intellectual machismo at its best: with lines like “it would have blasted her panties clear off her pubes” mingled with literary allusions to Hawthorne, Chaucer, and Fitzgerald, the narrator presents himself as an intellectual who enjoys “getting it on” with his mistress as well as cunnilingus with his wife (197, Dec. 1988). The simple plot, a nameless, first person narrator driving to his wife’s bed after a tryst with his mistress, allows for commentary on word choice, the Cold War, class, love, sex, masculinity, and ethics. The narrator constantly relays his relationship to certain words such as backside (for back of the shore), incest (his wife is his distant cousin), and distinguished (his wife, Kittredge, is “beautiful” in comparison to his “cheerful,” “common” mistress, Chloe). He even clarifies with a parenthetical aside that the “Yankee inn” in which he met his mistress is really “(Let us say: a Yankee-inn-type restaurant run by a Greek)”