The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Jive-Ass Aficionado: Why Are We in Vietnam? and Hemingway's Moral Code: Difference between revisions

← Older edit Newer edit →

@@ Line 6: / Line 6: @@
 language play as we saw in ''Ulysses'', all tinged with the “color” that put "Ulysses" on trial in America for obscenity. But Mailer’s novel is also richly evocative of that other great modernist writer, Ernest Hemingway.
-Hemingway was conspicuously singled-out with a few adjectives when
+Hemingway was conspicuously singled-out with a few adjectives when Mailer told an interviewer six years earlier that if he has “one ambition above all others, it is to write a novel which Dostoevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even old moldering Hemingway might come to read” (''Conversations'' 76).A close reading reveals
-Mailer told an interviewer six years earlier that if he has “one ambition above
+that Why Are We in Vietnam? may actually be that novel, but I’ll leave it to future critics to explore how it would have appealed to the sensibilities of the other writers mentioned. I’m going to focus on Hemingway, because apart from echoes of Joyce’s style, his influence here seems most prevalent.
-all others, it is to write a novel which Dostoevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud;
-Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even old moldering
+As Laura Adams observes, “three of the most powerful influences on Mailer’s scheme of things have been war and Ernest Hemingway and the intersection of the two” (173). Mailer told an interviewer that Hemingway’s death made him feel “a little weaker” (''Conversations'' 71), no doubt because he had felt a connection. Like Hemingway, Mailer wrote about boxing, he
-Hemingway might come to read” (''Conversations'' 76).A close reading reveals
+wrote about bullfighting, he talked tough, he hung out with tough friends, he went to war, he wrote about war, he backed the underdog, he infuriated feminists, he was suspicious of governmental structures, and he seemed to
-that Why Are We in Vietnam? may actually be that novel, but I’ll leave it to
-future critics to explore how it would have appealed to the sensibilities of
-the other writers mentioned. I’m going to focus on Hemingway, because
-apart from echoes of Joyce’s style, his influence here seems most prevalent.
-As Laura Adams observes, “three of the most powerful influences on
-Mailer’s scheme of things have been war and Ernest Hemingway and the in�tersection of the two” (). Mailer told an interviewer that Hemingway’s
-death made him feel “a little weaker” (Conversations ), no doubt because
-he had felt a connection. Like Hemingway, Mailer wrote about boxing, he
-wrote about bullfighting, he talked tough, he hung out with tough friends,
-he went to war, he wrote about war, he backed the underdog, he infuriated
-feminists, he was suspicious of governmental structures, and he seemed to