The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself

Written by
Hilary K. Justice

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Abstract: TBD

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Note: TBD

Authorship and Alienation in Depth in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself”

In 1930, still smarting from compromises required of him by the publishing industry, Ernest Hemingway received a letter from an editor and puller the "emergency stop" cord on the speeding train of his career. Crumpling the letter in his fist, he stepped out of the car and onto the platform of non-fiction; he stood there, in this empty page of a place, his eyes focused in the distance as though there he saw the Spanish bullfights he had long wanted to capture in words. But a shadow passed between his eyes and his object - a Hemingway-shaped shadow, both him and not him, though which he could not see clearly.

He admitted the shadow to his work, naming it "Author," as if a separate identity might contain and isolate it, trying to preserve the kind of clarity on which he had earned his reputation as a writer. He tied it up neatly and stuffed it into Hell, leaving its figure slumped, presumed dead, on the platform behind him.

The train changed course for Purgatory.

In 1959, Norman Mailer, in whose baggage rested eight rejection letters for his last novel, alighted at the same station, and the shadow greeted him or perhaps alighted with him. He already knew its name; he had used it well enough. He could no more shake it than Hemingway before him. He challenged it to debate, or perhaps a boxing match - perhaps, maybe letter, to a bullfight.

The course changed again.

AS TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN WRITERS, Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer each strove to achieve lasting success and power as novelists, two of

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These works, Death in the Afternoon (1932) and Advertisements for Myself (1959), occur at almost precisely the same point in their careers — after initial critical success for quasi-autobiographical war novels, after the consequent achievement of celebrity, and after a major disappointment when that celebrity alone was not enough to overcome the restrictive vicissitudes of their respective moments in publishing culture. Although their disappointments differed in degree — Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms was published with missing profanity and an enforced blurring of the direct, explicit prose that he preferred.

Mailer’s The Deer Park was rejected by eight publishing houses before a ninth (Putnam) picked it up solely because he was Norman Mailer and with their next full-length books, both writers took urgent stances against the capitalist imposition of the social, implicitly performative role of “authorship” over and against their shared goals as writers who sought to capture truth in language as a prerequisite to presenting their works publicly.

Their stances in response to the writer/author alienation would initially differ thus: 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. Neither approach solved or could resolve the problems faced by the creative writer who must by definition become public property once he or she achieves publication, let alone critical or popular success. Consciousness of this problem and their ensuing struggles with it, expressed in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself, seems to have prevented both Hemingway and Mailer from publishing a fully formed novel for a decade (Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not [1938] was initially two long short stories, which he lumped together and published as a “novel” to quiet his critics). 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.

What is most curious is that both writers sought to address the question of authorship in such structurally complex, generically ambivalent works—so curious that the complexity and ambivalence themselves require critical scrutiny. Neither Death in the Afternoon nor Advertisements for Myself fit

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neatly into any particular generic category. Both can be described as “nonfiction,” although that classification is at best reductive. They are problematic, difficult-to-classify works whose generic hybridity is intrinsic to their internal and external logics; in both cases, though, that fundamental pertinence defies ready legibility.

Both works include multiple genres. Death in the Afternoon presents readers with non-fiction reporting (on bullfighting), non-fiction self-reflection (on writing), short fiction (told by a character named “Author” to a character named “Old Lady”), dramatic dialogue (which reveals the drama as a morality play), and literary criticism (a pugilistic response to a critical piece by Aldous Huxley). All of the genres in Death in the Afternoon, save the nonfiction, occur within the frame of the Author/Old Lady dialogues. Advertisements for Myself includes both new and previously published material in the forms of non-fiction essays, polemics, poetry, a play, excerpts of fictional works-in-progress (and abandoned works), a facsimile of an advertisement (placed by Mailer himself in The Village Voice), and meditations and musings on all of the above plus the thousand or so other things that attracted Mailer’s attention during the writing and made it into the words.

Both works thus appear to be generic train-wrecks, the cacophony of a once-single voice and genre fractured and turned against itself by competing, unrelenting, and mutually exclusive internal and professional expectations. The cacophony was too great, the fracturing of their structural lenses too kaleidoscopic for either writer to produce a full-length novel for years.

On May 2, 1930, Forum editor Henry Goddard Leach approached Ernest Hemingway, requesting a celebrity statement on life, the universe, and everything: “To put it briefly, what we want from you is a statement of your personal credo, your convictions and beliefs concerning the nature of the world and of man . . . it would have to touch intimately on your own hopes and fears, the mainspring of your faith or the promptings of your despair.” In exchange, Leach offered the author of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms—and future Nobel prize-winner—$500.

Hemingway was furious. He already had held Leach in contempt for the latter’s 1929 request for a short story of “about two-thousand words,” which Leach condescendingly reminded him must contain “narrative, or at least plot.” Hemingway’s response in 1929 had been to scribble angrily in the margins of stories in progress several pointed responses, including a never used story collection title, Unsuited to Our Needs. In 1930, his response to the more

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fawning (but still condescending) editor was more subtle and more public and its effects far longer-reaching. It would play out in the first third of Death in the Afternoon in the form of a series of nine dialogues between an Author, who emerges out of the voice of the first-person narrator but is distinguished by the labeling conventions of dramatic dialogue, and an Old Lady. Unfortunately for the book’s reception and thus for Hemingway’s reputation, the only one who understood the purpose of the dialogues was Hemingway (and perhaps, much later, Norman Mailer, whose discussion of the problems of authorship refers readers to Death in the Afternoon in the first three pages of Advertisements for Myself).

Hemingway Hemingway had long wanted to write “the bullfighting book.” He first mentions the idea in his first letter to Maxwell Perkins, written when he was entering into contract with Boni & Liveright for his 1925 collection In Our Time. (By 1926, he would switch allegiance to Perkins’s house, Charles Scribners’ Sons, with Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises.) After three of his first four books met with critical acclaim (Torrents was universally considered negligible, a brutish and immature attack on former mentor Sherwood Anderson), he felt he finally had the professional cachet to write the nonfiction book on bullfighting.

No one knows whether Leach’s letter interrupted Hemingway’s actual writing or merely his preliminary thinking about his next book. Although Hemingway establishes on the first page of Death in the Afternoon that this so-conceived “bullfighting book” will be as much about writing and authorship as bullfighting (the analogy is thoroughly developed throughout the book, hinging on the similarities in the economic, institutional and cultural mechanisms by which any art form is produced for a paying public), the first several chapters merely introduce the milieu, the spectacle, and its value to the writer, who tries in the night to remember which amongst thousands of details results in a feeling—for it is by strict focus on and adherence to such details, the narrator believes, a writer can convey real feeling and avoid cheap tricks and sentiment. The detail is the contrast between a gored matador’s thighbone and his dirty underwear . Mailer would approve.

For the first six chapters, Death in the Afternoon promises to unfold as the observations of a writer (the narrative “I”) engaging with the culture, history, form, and presentation of the Spanish bullfight and, by extension, the character of the Spanish nation and people. Even had Hemingway not delivered something far more difficult, problematic, and admittedly obscure,

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the reading public (expecting something more in line with his war novels and Nick Adams stories) would have been surprised by this strange departure from fiction by the already restrictively codified “Ernest Hemingway.” Mailer mentions his own experience with such codification—one of many aspects of authorship—and how it can intrude into and contaminate the space of writing in The Spooky Art, when he reflects on this very intrusion:

“Sometimes, you can tell in advance you’re headed for trouble. Obviously, with a book about ancient Egypt, everyone would have been happier if some unknown author had written it. There might have been then a lively curiosity about the author. Who is this unknown and most curious talent? One hurdle I had to overcome with Ancient Evenings was knowing in advance that a lot of people would pick it up and spend the first fifty pages saying, ‘What is Norman Mailer up to?’”

Hemingway, spurred on by Leach’s insulting request as well as Aldous Huxley’s derogatory critique of him as uneducated and boorish (“Foreheads Villainous Low”), twisted his book into something more, which critics felt rendered it less: a tangential descent into a wildly allusive and allegorical discussion of the problems with art production, specifically the distraction and alienation forced on a working writer who must function as author (a discursive role as well as an object for consumption) before an obtuse and increasingly hostile public. This discussion takes the form of nine Dantean dialogues between an Author who, if you distinguish him from the narrator and from Hemingway at all (which initial reviewers, with the exception of Malcolm Cowley, did not) seems to come out of nowhere in order to ridicule and verbally abuse a prudish and hypocritical Old Lady, who emerges out of an imagined “crowd” to become, temporarily, a character, who allegorically stands for “the public.” The dialogues intrude seemingly at random in the first third of the book, after which they disappear entirely, where upon Hemingway returns his focus to the writing/ bullfighting/ art/ production conceit for the remainder of the book.

With the sudden intrusion of characters (the Old Lady and the Author her presence creates), the ostensibly non-fiction Death in the Afternoon takes on the first of several additional genres: dramatic fiction—more specifically, a morality play in nine acts (or nine circles) in which the Author, in return

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for being rendered schizophrenic by the presence of Old Lady, drags her through Hell. The characters are very much mutual and mutually interdependent constructs (without the Old Lady, there is no Author), something else the book’s initial critics missed, lacking access to Leach’s letter, or perhaps predisposed to agree with Huxley’s assessment of Hemingway’s lack of education and subtlety.

Death in the Afternoon’s nine Author/Old Lady dialogues function as a kind of Greek chorus, as each provides a space for reflection on the nonfiction bullfighting discussion that precedes it. These sections each describe a specific kind of danger to which both art and artist are susceptible within capitalist production; by content and structure these sections echo, with minimal fanfare, the nine circles of Hell from Dante’s Inferno.

The fanfare is minimal but literal. The entrance of the Old Lady and the descent into hell are heralded by a trumpeter at the end of Chapter 6: “[T]he trumpet sounds and the very serious, white-haired, wide old man, his name is Gabriel, in a sort of burlesque bullfighter’s suit . . . unlocks the door of the toril and pulling heavily on it runs backward to expose the low passageway" In the next chapters, Hemingway will literally burlesque the Armageddon wrought on art by the capitalist system of production, performing his erudition (in what he will reveal as a direct response to Huxley) by alluding to several dramatic forms and specific dramatic texts, including the morality play (one more burlesque than apostrophic), tragedy, and Romeo and Juliet (specifically the line “He jests at scars who never felt a wound”). His purpose, although never more overt than the passing reference to Gabriel and the Café Fornos (from forno, Italian for “Hell”) (105), is to illustrate that authorship (as opposed to writing) is a burlesque performance, a low-comedy, symptomatic of a system of decay and putrefaction. He invites the careful reader to compare his Author to Dante’s Virgil (addressed as “guide,” “Master,” and “Author” [1.85]) and to thus perceive the analogy and its scathing commentary on the degradation wrought on art and artist by the mechanisms of popular consumption

Although Hemingway lifts the structure of his dialogues from Dante, the specific sins do not map exactly. Most of Hemingway’s “sins” correspond directly to those described in Inferno’s circles, but he orders them differently as required by his own analysis. Once past the “Limbo” of the uncommitted (Chapters 1–6) , the narrator states that, “At this point it is necessary that you

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see a bullfight” (63), and the Old Lady emerges from the imaginary public “crowd,” and they begin their descent through the following circles:

Chapter 7: Decadent Artists (Dante 3: Gluttons)

Chapter 8: The Mean (Dante 4: Misers)

Chapter 9: False Messiahs, including Authors (Dante 6/8: Heretics/ Fraud)

Chapter 10: The Lustful (Dante 2: The Carnal)

Chapter 11: Husbands who lead dangerous lives (no correspondence)

Chapter 12: Literary Critics (Dante 5: The Wrathful/ Sullen)

Chapter 14: Impresarios, traitors to art (Dante 8/9: Flatterers/ Traitors)

Chapter 15: Crimes against nature (Dante 7: The Violent)

What Hemingway does not say, does not seem to need to say, is that the decadent system of art, artist, and audience is always measurable against a Platonic ideal reality in which the artist performs for the aficion. His approach is clever—too clever by half—and pugilistic, rendered palatable only when revealed (a la the man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz) as a deliberately contemptible construct: “What about the Old Lady? She’s gone. We threw her out of the book, finally. A little late, you say. Yes, perhaps a little late . . . Shall we try to raise the general tone? What about higher things?” (190). The “we” in the narrative voice is telling vis à vis the contamination of the writer, he who occupies the space of observer and from it crafts his narratives, by the Author, revealed finally as a performance required by the system.

Once again in the voice of the singular, “I,” the text responds directly and specifically to Aldous Huxley’s accusation that Hemingway was too concerned with “Lower Things” and not nearly well educated enough to speak as a public authority (190). Countering Huxley’s critique, the narrator employs the words “writer” and “writing” twenty two times in the next two pages as though it offers an antidote to the poison of authorship (191–2). By comparison to the kind of performance required by Huxley and, by extension, the entire economic system of cultural capital, the “importance” the writer locates in the contrast between Domingo Hernandorena’s dirty underwear and the “clean, clean, unbearably clean "whiteness" of his exposed thighbone is a "higher thing" indeed.

Works Cited

Bruccoli, Matthew J. (1996). The Only Thing That Counts: Ernest Hemingway-Maxwell Perkins Correspondence. New York: Scribner.

Costronovo, David (2003). "Norman Mailer as Mid-Century Advertisment". The New England Review. pp. 174–194.

Dante, Alighieri (1994). The Divine Comedy: Inferno. Translated by Pinsky, Robert. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Hemingway, Ernest (1932). Death in the Afternoon. New York: Scribner's.

Justice, Hilary K. (2006). The Bones of the Others. Kent: Kent State UP.

Leach, Henry Goddard (28 June 1929). "Letters to Hemingway" (Letter). Letter to. Boston, John F. Kennedy Library: TS. Hemingway Collection.

Leach, Henry Goddard (2 May 1930). "Letters to Hemingway" (Letter). Letter to. Boston, John F. Kennedy Library: TS. Hemingway Collection.

Mailer, Norman (1959). Advertisments for Myself. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.

Mailer, Norman (2003). The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing. New York: Random House.

McGann, Jerome (1993). A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. Charlottesville: U of Virginia.