User:JFordyce/sandbox

interpret the tragic end of Hemingway? The angst that Hemingway fought against would eventually catch up with him. Yet the demons that Hemingway fought were both part of his humanity and an in- tegral part of his genius. Jackson Benson, referring to the wound that Hem- ingway received on the Italian Front, makes this important point,

It may be that the wounding itself led to the dark thoughts that characterize Hemingway’s best fictions (a canon in which the centerpieces would be “Big Two-Hearted River” and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”). But the shock of a lost immortality seems to have been magnified by an inherited depressive, paranoid per- sonality. The latter was part of his genius, although it was an in- heritance that at last he could not bear..

I return to my opening thought: it is not easy being a great writer. Nor is it easy, living with a great writer. There is a profound cost to be paid—by the authors themselves but also by their wives, children, lovers, and friends. That appears undeniable. In these three works, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Mailer all sought to overcome their angst and translate it into art. The source of that angst was not only an alienation between writer and author , but also—and more profoundly, I suggest—an alienation between us as human beings. Their art, like that of all great artists, was a long search to “bridge the gulf,” to overcome the estrangement, to communicate truthfully with other human beings. As was said of another great author, Vladimir Nabokov: “[I]t is a representative search, a heightened emblem of all our at- tempts to communicate . . . the distance between people, the distance sepa- rating love from love-making, mirage from reality—the desperate extent of all human need and desire” .