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

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

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 :Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg (Burwell –).
 So it was that, losing his “final control of the text” (Harding ) and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway would on July ,  take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,
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+:The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing. ()
-The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing. ()
+Fitzgerald’s three revealing Esquire essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in . Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger  book, The Crack-Up, appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three “The CrackUp” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (), “My Lost City” (), and “Early Success” (), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,
+:The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between  and . They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life. (“Autobiographical Pieces.” The Crack-Up, )
+This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the  essays. My intention is to highlight a particular moment—the year —and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that The Crack-Up collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.
+So what was the response to the “Crack-Up” articles in Esquire? Scott Donaldson, writing in , says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression” (“Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction,” ). Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of angst, but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in . Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression” (Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction,” ), as Donaldson has said? Is there little else?
+Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness” (). She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:
+:The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’ (Hampl )
 . . .