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THE MAILER “SEEDS” STIRRED, as the Twentieth Century dawned and American literature soared. The last century would climax in the late 1920s, and achieve its final “coming of age,” now superior to its English and European counterparts, soon to be the new superpower’s final word.
An early starting line indicator in the history of literary legacy—the birth of Ernest Hemingway in 1899.As an unknown expatriate in early 1920s Paris, America’s future “Papa” was, probably, its first to orbit into international literary recognition and power. Meanwhile, on the home grounds, Walt Whitman, in 1892, died.
In his monumental Leaves of Grass, nine editions in total, Walt Whitman became the archetypal American Idealized Poet, the lover of the Universe, and the singular Bard of Selfhood, Freedom and Democracy, with a Vision of a Potential Utopian America. All his fresh idiomatic verse showered down in future generations of writers and shaped their artistic, cultural and political beliefs, mostly “Leftist,” or “Liberal” or “Progressive” or any other relevant “ism.”
Whitman died amid minimal “cult” media (no Mark Twain sensational funeral). Whitman’s legacy was powerful and sometimes underground, but clearly many contemporary and later writers were inseminated with Whitman “seeds.”And Norman Mailer was one of those who had more than his share. For the Mailer scholar, legacy quotient is based more on his authorial singularity and less on the common characteristics of his generation of contemporary writers. Whitman’s death announced that the nineteenth-century American Realism of Howells and James had ended. In its wings (awkward space?)
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was formed the new Literary Naturalism that might be called the “dynamic male quintet.”
These five new literary figures—Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, and the lesser writer, Richard Harding Davis, a power-packed Quintet—personified the Mailer “seed womb” that gave rise to the man from Brooklyn and his subsequent place on the international literary scene.
The new literary generation, post-Civil War Realism, was Naturalism, a French import, and its chief spokesman was Emile Zola (1840-1902), author and activist, with a postmortem solution to the cultural ashes of the Darwinian era in which “revealed religion” had suffered a downward slide. In its place loomed Scientism and its cousin, Technology, which was clearly related to Industrialism. The spirit of objectivity was ushered in and the arts were forced to adapt to this new cultural reality. Thus, there could be no more significant aesthetic apartheid. Zola insisted on a remedial “cultural marriage.” The new union was a merging of arts and sciences.