The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Hemingway Revisited
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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
