User:JBrown/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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'''BOXING WITH HEMINGWAY'''

So what does it mean to box with another writer? For Hemingway, at least in his youth, the analogy expressed the inevitability of succession. Once a great boxer or writer had lost his crown, there was no reclaiming it. The old must give way to the new. So in 1924 he complained to Ezra Pound that the writers Ford Madox Ford was selecting for transatlantic review were the literary equivalents of Great White Hope Jim Jeffries, dragged out of retirement for one last fight: “''The thing to do with Ford is to kill him.... I am fond of Ford. This ain’t personal. It’s literary''” (''Ernest'' 116). Killing is also what Hemingway envisaged for Sherwood Anderson, reimagined as the has-been heavyweight Ole Andreson in “''The Killers''”; “''a sock on the jaw''” was not enough to settle the score.In an early draft of the story, the fighter was called Nerone; Hemingway changed the name to Anderson and then, finally, to Andreson.

For all that he joshed about minor and major contenders, Mailer’s sense of literary influence was—like everything else in his worldview—less teleological than dialectical, less a matter of drastic, once-and-for-all Oedipal action than a conversation between competing tastes and loyalties (Mailer, ''Pontifications'' 149). To develop as a writer, Mailer did not want to kill Hemingway off so much as to continue to spar with him, while also sparring with (among many others along the way) Henry Miller and Herman Melville. If “''Prelude—I''” of ''The Time of Our Time'' evokes Hemingway, the presiding figure of its concluding “''Acknowledgments and Appreciations''” is Dos Passos, whose 1936 trilogy ''USA'' Mailer once described as “''the most successful portrait of America in the first half of the twentieth century''” (Bruce and Webster 173). Setting up one “''great American author''” (Mailer, ''Pieces'' 87) or “''literary athlete''” (92) against another while, at the same time, looking forward to other juxtapositions—that was what boxing meant to Mailer: a way of exposing the truth that, in the ring or on the page, “''no two Americas will prove identical''” (''Time'' x). Nothing, as he liked to say, “''is settled after all''” (''Pieces'' 86).

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 '''BOXING WITH HEMINGWAY'''
 So what does it mean to box with another writer? For Hemingway, at least in his youth, the analogy expressed the inevitability of succession. Once a great boxer or writer had lost his crown, there was no reclaiming it. The old must give way to the new. So in 1924 he complained to Ezra Pound that the writers Ford Madox Ford was selecting for transatlantic review were the literary equivalents of Great White Hope Jim Jeffries, dragged out of retirement for one last fight: “''The thing to do with Ford is to kill him.... I am fond of Ford. This ain’t personal. It’s literary''” (''Ernest'' 116). Killing is also what Hemingway envisaged for Sherwood Anderson, reimagined as the has-been heavyweight Ole Andreson in “''The Killers''”; “''a sock on the jaw''” was not enough to settle the score.In an early draft of the story, the fighter was called Nerone; Hemingway changed the name to Anderson and then, finally, to Andreson.
+For all that he joshed about minor and major contenders, Mailer’s sense of literary influence was—like everything else in his worldview—less teleological than dialectical, less a matter of drastic, once-and-for-all Oedipal action than a conversation between competing tastes and loyalties (Mailer, ''Pontifications'' 149). To develop as a writer, Mailer did not want to kill Hemingway off so much as to continue to spar with him, while also sparring with (among many others along the way) Henry Miller and Herman Melville. If “''Prelude—I''” of ''The Time of Our Time'' evokes Hemingway, the presiding figure of its concluding “''Acknowledgments and Appreciations''” is Dos Passos, whose 1936 trilogy ''USA'' Mailer once described as “''the most successful portrait of America in the first half of the twentieth century''” (Bruce and Webster 173). Setting up one “''great American author''” (Mailer, ''Pieces'' 87) or “''literary athlete''” (92) against another while, at the same time, looking forward to other juxtapositions—that was what boxing meant to Mailer: a way of exposing the truth that, in the ring or on the page, “''no two Americas will prove identical''” (''Time'' x). Nothing, as he liked to say, “''is settled after all''” (''Pieces'' 86).