The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

From Project Mailer
« The Mailer Review • Volume 13 Number 1 • 2019 »
Written by
Raymond M. Vince
Abstract: Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.
Note: An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.
URL: http://prmlr.us/mr13vin

It is not easy being a great writer. Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of angst. In using the term angst, I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”[1] experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.[a]

Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.[2]

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”[1] would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work Advertisements for Myself (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)

In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”[3] a search that occupied him to the end of his life.[b] The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.[5]

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.[c] So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of what might have been. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about counterfactuals.

The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.[7]

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”[8] He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in Esquire. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.[8] True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.[d] Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in Esquire, Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.[9]

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.[e] Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena[11] is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”[12] found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche” [13], so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.7 In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears quantum-entangled with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II, “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next” [14].8 For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of place in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain” [15]. Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his

work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself. [16].

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle

. . .

Notes

  1. ↑ In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon (1932) with Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than Death in the Afternoon, and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.
  2. ↑ Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”[4]
  3. ↑ Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”[6] He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since A Farewell to Arms (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.
  4. ↑ Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.
  5. ↑ “The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”[10]

Citations

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Justice 2010, p. 260.
  2. ↑ Justice 2010, p. 230.
  3. ↑ Burwell 1996, p. 1.
  4. ↑ Burwell 1996, pp. 1–2.
  5. ↑ Hemingway 2003, p. 17.
  6. ↑ Johnston 1984, p. 223.
  7. ↑ Harding 2011, pp. 21–22.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Reynolds 1997, p. 222.
  9. ↑ Reynolds 1997, pp. 222–223.
  10. ↑ Baker 1972, pp. 193–194.
  11. ↑ Hemingway 2003, p. 15.
  12. ↑ Hemingway 2003, p. 3.
  13. ↑ Baker 1972, pp. 206.
  14. ↑ Baker 1972, pp. 178.
  15. ↑ Kennedy 1999, pp. 325.
  16. ↑ Kennedy 1999, pp. 328-329.

Works Cited

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