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| ===The Cultural Context of the 1930s=== | | ===The Cultural Context of the 1930s=== |
| What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We would answer both, surely. The economic and social ''angst'' of the 1930s—considerable on any metric—cannot easily be divorced from one person’s psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another greater War seemed increasingly inevitable. | | What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We would answer both, surely. The economic and social ''angst'' of the 1930s—considerable on any metric—cannot easily be divorced from one person’s psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another greater War seemed increasingly inevitable. |
| <!--Checked through here.-->
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| On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.<sup>19</sup>
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| What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,
| | On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum.” At the very least, there was “a shared landscape.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.{{efn|“From here—the here of our own autobiographical age—it is possible to see a link between Fitzgerald’s valiant attempts in his essays and the fledging personal documentation (self-narrative without guiding psychotherapist) that is the root of AA and the secret of its enduring success.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }} |
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| {{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had | | What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties.”{{sfn|Barke|Fribush|Stearns|2000|p=565}} The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.”{{sfn|Barke|Fribush|Stearns|2000|p=568}} The article continues, |
| clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}
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| They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
| | {{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary.{{sfn|Barke|Fribush|Stearns|2000|p=568}} }} |
| freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
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| blocked from the 1980s onward.<sup>20</sup> As we have said, there was plenty of angst
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| going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
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| Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning toothbrush to the friend at
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| dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}
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| Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}
| | They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly blocked from the 1890s onward.{{efn|“Medical attacks and legal prohibitions on opiate use, from the 1890s onward, surely reduced some of the chemical supports that had previously conditioned stress.”{{sfn|Barke|Fribush|Stearns|2000|p=575}} From the 1960s onwards, other terms began to replace nervous breakdown, such as depression and PTSD. Our medical understanding of stress was changing, but so were social attitudes to mental illness and the vocabulary that we use.}} As we have said, there was plenty of ''angst'' going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms.”{{sfn|Barke|Fribush|Stearns|2000|p=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at dinner had become an effort.{{' "}}{{sfn|Barke|Fribush|Stearns|2000|p=570}} |
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| It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fitzgerald suffered—severely at times—from what we have been calling angst. It is within that developing sense of dread—cultural “worries about worry."{{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}—that we should place both “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up.” Our understanding of their pain as authors and as men, and the vocabulary we employ to describe it, has of course changed from the 1930s. But their ''angst'' remains—with dimensions that are literary, medical, psychological, and cultural.
| | Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers—and on their families.{{sfn|Barke|Fribush|Stearns|2000|p=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquilizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual'' (DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” <!--Ref missing in WC. I emailed author on 3//2/2021--> |
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| So how do we understand “Snows” and “The Crack-Up” today? Both authors were undergoing a significant and profound transformation—both in spirit and in the psyche. Donaldson suggests there had been an “alienation from self." {{sfn|Donaldson|1980|pp=184}}, which seems plausible. War and the Depression had brought vast amounts of suffering and loss into people’s lives. The actions taken by each author are clear. Fitzgerald commits to be “a writer only,” less the Jazz Age playboy.<sup>21</sup> Hemingway, for his part, decides he will not make Harry’s mistake: he will write the stories.
| | It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fitzgerald suffered—severely at times—from what we have been calling ''angst''. It is within that developing sense of dread—cultural “worries about worry”—that we should place both “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up.” Our understanding of their pain as authors and as men, and the vocabulary we employ to describe it, has of course changed from the 1930s. But their ''angst'' remains—with dimensions that are literary, medical, psychological, and cultural. |
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| Initially, it could appear that Hemingway’s response in “Snows” is more successful in narrative technique, less bound by the particular context of the 1930s, and more timeless as a literary work. That view seems plausible. However, by including Fitzgerald’s other essays from the 1930s to form a wider “autobiographical sequence,” {{sfn|Wilson|1993|pp=11}} his original 1936 articles reveal a mature perspective on that cultural context—the contradictions of America in the 1920s and 1930s—that goes beyond anything Hemingway could have written.
| | So how do we understand “Snows” and “The Crack-Up” today? Both authors were undergoing a significant and profound transformation—both in ''spirit'' and in ''psyche''. Donaldson suggests there had been an “alienation from self,”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=184}} which seems plausible. War and the Depression had brought vast amounts of suffering and loss into people’s lives. The actions taken by each author are clear. Fitzgerald commits to be “a writer only,” less the Jazz Age playboy.{{efn|Fitzgerald claimed, “I have now at last become a writer only.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=83}} }} Hemingway, for his part, decides he will not make Harry’s mistake: he ''will'' write the stories. |
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| So, despite differences in narrative form and intention, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up” share a common landscape—that of authorial anxiety and cultural depression. Both works were written under personal stress, both are revealing, and both proved therapeutic for their authors.<sup>22</sup> To use a handy German phrase, the ''Sitz im Leben'' of both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in 1936 had far more similarity than either author was prepared to admit.
| | Initially, it could appear that Hemingway’s response in “Snows” is more successful in narrative technique, less bound by the particular context of the 1930s, and more ''timeless'' as a literary work. That view seems plausible. However, by including Fitzgerald’s other essays from the 1930s to form a wider “autobiographical sequence,”{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} his original 1936 articles reveal a mature perspective on that cultural context—the contradictions of America in the 1920s and 1930s—that go beyond anything Hemingway could have written. |
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| === MAILER AND ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF (1959) ===
| | So, despite differences of narrative form and intention, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up” share a common landscape—that of authorial anxiety and cultural depression. Both works were written under personal stress, both are revealing, and both proved therapeutic for their authors.{{efn|“Despite the false leads and evasions, however, Fitzgerald did uncover more of himself between the lines of these articles, and particularly of the last article, than anywhere else in his works. And, though the benefits did not surface immediately, the process did him good. “The Crack-Up” does not measure up to the best confessional writing, but it had something of the same therapeutic effect on the man who set it down on paper.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} To use a handy German phrase, the ''[[w:Sitz im Leben|Sitz im Leben]]'' of both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in 1936 had far more similarity than either author was prepared to admit. |
| Two decades on, in 1959, in a genre-bending fusion of retrospective, self-creation, and future strategy, Mailer’s Advertisements appeared. Norman Mailer believed his task was “nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time” Advertisements.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=17}} This bold work would mark a new, controversial era in Mailer’s life and work. ''Advertisements'' has been described by David Castronovo as “an act of defiance—filled with tantrums and inflated rhetoric—but nevertheless a landmark in our literature of protest.'{{sfn|Castronovo|2003|PP=179}} From this moment onward, Mailer would never be “the modernist ''dues absconditus'' . . . vanishing into silence” {{sfn|Braudy|1981|pp=630}} as Leo Braudy has described Thomas Pynchon. Mailer must be both observer of and participant in his times, both author and actor. Mailer would embrace that dual role with enthusiasm.
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| We have seen that Hilary Justice compared Hemingway and Mailer on the issue of “writer/author alienation.” Hemingway, she says, tried to overcome that alienation “through force of will,” whereas Mailer, writing as a Postmodernist, “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage." {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=260}} Indeed he did. We realize, naturally, that Mailer’s postwar world of 1959 was very different from the world of the 1930s. This is evident in the brutal opening words of Mailer’s 1957 article, “The White Negro,” reprinted in ''Advertisements for Myself'' <sup>23</sup>: “Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camp and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. . . . The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=338}} Both Fitzgerald and Mailer sought to understand and record their times, more so perhaps than Hemingway.<sup>24</sup> Richard Foster describes the many similarities between “The Crack-Up” and Advertisements.<sup>25</sup> Mailer seems to agree, confessing toward the end of ''Advertisements for Myself'' that, “Fitzgerald was an indifferent caretaker of his talent, and I have been a cheap gambler with mine.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=477}} Michael K. Glenday also sees the relationship between Fitzgerald and Mailer as close, claiming in his Mailer Review article that “Mailer saw Fitzgerald as seminal and exemplary.” {{sfn|Glenday|2012|pp=121}}<sup>26</sup>
| | ===Mailer and ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959)=== |
| | | Two decades on, in 1959, in a genre-bending fusion of retrospective, self-creation, and future strategy, Mailer’s ''Advertisements'' appeared. Norman Mailer believed his task was “nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=17}} This bold work would mark a new, controversial era in Mailer’s life and work. ''Advertisements'' has been described by David Castronovo as “an act of defiance—filled with tantrums and inflated rhetoric—but nevertheless a landmark in our literature of protest.”{{sfn|Castronovo|2003|p=179}} From this moment onward, Mailer would never be “the modernist ''deus absconditus'' . . . vanishing into silence” as Leo Braudy has described Thomas Pynchon.{{Sfn|Braudy|1981|p=630}} Mailer must be both observer ''of'' and participant ''in'' his times, both author and actor. Mailer would embrace that dual role with enthusiasm. |
| There is, of course, much more in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Just as “Snows” had dozens of potential stories, so Mailer too has an excess of content. In structure and genre terms, Mailer was breaking new ground with ''Advertisements''. Its structure, Justice suggests, “. . . owes nothing to classical literary forms of Western canonical works,”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} for Mailer’s purpose “was to confront alienation head-on.” {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} <sup>27</sup> Alex Hicks has suggested to me that “the big difference between ''Advertisements'' and the Hemingway and Fitzgerald stories is that the latter two are preponderantly diagnostic (if not post mortems) while ''Advertisements'' is aspirational and—as a narrative rather than compilation—constructive” (personal correspondence). <sup>28</sup> The fact that Mailer continued to write and publish for nearly six decades after ''Advertisements'' certainly supports that suggestion. While the writing process did not change that much as the twentieth century progressed, the vocation of the author did. More than many, Mailer realized that salient fact and acted upon it—first in his “The White Negro” (1957), then in ''Advertisements'' (1959), and later in ''The American Dream'' (1965) and beyond.
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| The title of ''Advertisements for Myself'' seems to connect Mailer’s work to
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| Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” the first poem in ''Leaves of Grass'' (1st Ed. 1855) a work that changed the direction of American poetry. Whitman “celebrated” a first-person poetic voice, creating himself as a kind of bard—or, in the Old English poetic tradition, a ''scop''. The poem opens thus,
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| {{quote| I celebrate myself,<br>
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| And what I assume you shall assume,<br>
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| For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.<br>
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| I loafe and invite my soul,<br>
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| I lean and loafe at my ease. . . . Observing a spear of summer grass<br>
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| (1st ed. 1855, lines 1– 5) }}
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| It is important to realize that the “I” of the poem—the apparent hero—is not
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| the same as Walt Whitman (1819–1892), even though a frontispiece in the 1855 First Edition of ''Leaves of Grass'' suggested the identification.<sup>29</sup> As Malcolm Cowley has written in his Introduction, “The hero as pictured in the frontispiece—this hero named ‘I’ or ‘Walt Whitman’ in the text—should not be confused with the Whitman of daily life. He is, as I said, a dramatized or idealized figure, and he is put forward as a representative American workingman, but one who prefers to loaf and invite his soul” (xv). Cowley argues that “Song of Myself” is “Whitman’s greatest work, perhaps his one completely realized work, and one of the great poems of modern times” (x).
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| It is also, as many have seen, a significant forerunner to Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself''. Mailer would create other incarnations of such a “dramatized or idealized figure.”
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| Mailer saw clearly the problem of writer/author alienation in the mid-twentieth-century. However, in contrast to Hemingway, he “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage.”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=206}} We can also see a contrast with the kind of heroes that Mailer creates in his writing, compared with the heroes of the earlier Modernist era. In an older article from the 1960s, Frederick J. Hoffman suggests that Mailer’s heroes, such as Sergius O’Shaugnessy, seem to be polar opposites to T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock. They act with passion, and they act without inhibitions.
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| {{quote|Mailer’s writings explicitly state the terms of the modern revolt
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| against conventional society. It is very different from past literary rebellions: it begins in the instinctual life, and it is free both
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| from established conventions and ideological complications.
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| Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s favorite hero, as a personality,
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| stands at the opposite pole from Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock. He
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| acts independently of all the inhibitions which allowed Prufrock
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| to postpone action; his major impulse is both to murder and to
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| create, to express passion through instinctive acts. He is the
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| “marginal ego,” the dislocated and “disaffiliated” self, who tries
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| to make a way of life from the energy and strategy of pure rebellion.{{sfn|Hoffman|pp=12}} }}
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| In a recent article, Alex Hicks has made a strong case that we should see Advertisements as Mailer’s Künstlerroman or artist-novel—similar in scope to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and other examples. His the- sis is “that Advertisements for Myself is better appreciated as a novelistic autobiography than as an anthology-like collection of writings,” and he finds support for this view from Bloom, Frye, Jonathan Lethem and many others (Advertisements). The quotation from Lethem is particularly powerful, “Advertisements for Myself is Mailer’s greatest book, simply because it frames the drama of the construction of this voice, the thrilling resurrection of his personality as his greatest asset after the public pratfalls accompanying his second and third novels”{{sfn|Lethem|2013|p=14}}. Lethem saw Mailer “in the late fifties to have become a radar detector for the onset of . . . the post-modern cultural condition generally”{{sfn|Lethem|2013|p=13}} I find the arguments of both Hicks and Lethem cogent and persuasive, but I do wonder if elements of this artist-novel mode are not also found in Hemingway’s “Snows” and Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up”—albeit in a rudimentary form.
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| I am also reminded of Burwell’s poignant description, quoted earlier, of the late Hemingway wrestling with the four narratives that he could not complete:
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| {{quote|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.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1-2}} }}
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| Whenever we see an author creating as a character within his or her fiction an artist—any kind of artist—we should pay attention. In this literary phenomenon, we may see aspects of the Künstlerroman or artist-novel, certainly. But we may also regard it as a skillful use of aesthetic distance—as an example of Malcolm Cowley’s “double vision”—that is “the ability to participate emotionally in the experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively” {{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=20}}. That ability, Mailer certainly possessed, as did, in an earlier age, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. {{efn|These two perspectives—Künstlerroman and aesthetic distance—are not incompatible, of course. They are, perhaps, two sides of the same coin, and we should learn from both.}}
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| === GREAT AUTHORS TRANSFORM ANGST INTO ART ===
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| These three authors were dealing with their own angst in their writing, but
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| they also were creating art. In a dramatically changing America, Hemingway,
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| Fitzgerald, and Mailer each faced the “inescapable alienation of writer from
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| author.”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=260}} Each was trying to work out what we could call a
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| proper authorial distance in their narratives.
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| In his article on Hemingway called “The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as
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| Life,” Jackson Benson writes, “One’s life, after all, is not a drama, nor should
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| a drama ever be confused with a life. Both at the bottom are mysterious, but
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| each is different in kind from the other.” {{sfn|Benson|1989|pp=358}} This is an important point in interpreting the work of each author. Writing about Hemingway, but applicable, I would argue, also to Fitzgerald and Mailer, Benson says this:
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| {{quote| Out of his emotions and needs, as well as out of a conscious s desire to create and win approval, the author projects, transforms, exaggerates, and a drama emerges which is based on his life but which has only a very tenuous relationship to the situation, in its facts, that might be observed from the outside. That is to say, he writes out of his life, not about his life. So that one can say, yes, Hemingway’s life is relevant to his fiction, but only relevant in the way that a dream might be relevant to the emotional stress that might have produced it.{{sfn|Benson|1989|pp=350}} }}
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| Benson has warned us of the dangers of the biographical fallacy.<sup>31</sup> That
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| the warning is timely but needs to be balanced by an awareness of a proper authorial distance. There is always a complex relationship between author and work. The three authors used different narrative strategies, but their ''Sitz Im Leben'', I would argue, were similar. The crucial part of that life situation was simply being human. As great artists, they understood what human nature involved. They knew how to show humanity in and through the art of fiction. That remains their lasting achievement.
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| For instance, only one of their works was set on a hot plain under Kilimanjaro, but all three were set in “a landscape of human mortality.” If part of our angst arises from our individual psyche, part comes from the awareness—indeed the dread—of both our human freedom and our mortality. Surely, Kierkegaard and Sartre have taught us that existential perspective, and Ben Stoltzfus has reminded us of the links between Sartre and Hemingway.<sup>32</sup> So, whether creating fiction or nonfiction, each man wrote “out of his life, not about his life.” {{sfn|Benson|1989|pp=350}} Struggling with an alienation both personal and cultural, each took his flawed humanity and transformed it
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| into art.
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| How then should we interpret the tragic end of Hemingway? The angst that Hemingway fought against would eventually catch up with him. Yet the demons that Hemingway fought were both part of his humanity and an integral part of his genius. Jackson Benson, referring to the wound that Hemingway received on the Italian Front, makes this important point,
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| {{quote|It may be that the wounding itself led to the dark thoughts that characterize Hemingway’s best fictions (a canon in which the centerpieces would be “Big Two-Hearted River” and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”). But the shock of lost immortality seems to have been magnified by an inherited depressive, paranoid personality. The latter was part of his genius, although it was an inheritance that at last, he could not bear. {{sfn|Benson|1989|p=352}}. }}
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| I return to my opening thought: it is not easy being a great writer. Nor is it easy, living with a great writer. There is a profound cost to be paid—by the authors themselves but also by their wives, children, lovers, and friends. That appears undeniable. In these three works, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Mailer all sought to overcome their angst and translate it into art. The source of that angst was not only an alienation between writer and author {{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}}, but also—and more profoundly, I suggest—an alienation between us as human beings. Their art, like that of all great artists, was a long search to “bridge the gulf,” to overcome the estrangement, to communicate truthfully with other human beings. As was said of another great author, Vladimir Nabokov: “[I]t is a representative search, a heightened emblem of all our at- tempts to communicate . . . the distance between people, the distance separating love from love-making, mirage from reality—the desperate extent of all human need and desire” {{sfn|Appel|1972|P=456}}.{{efn|Nabokov’s search for the language adequate to Lolita is HH’s search for the language that will reach Lolita; and it is a representative search, a heightened emblem of all our attempts to communicate. “‘A penny for your thoughts,’ I said, and she stretched out her palm at once (p.). It is the almost insuperable distance between those thoughts and that palm which Nabokov has measured so accurately and so movingly in Lolita: the distance between people, the distance separating love from love-making, mirage from reality—the desperate extent of all human need and desire. “I have only words to play with,” says H.H., and only words can bridge the gulf suggested by Lolita’s palm” {{sfn|Appel|1972|456}} }}
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| Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous character, Humbert Humbert, suggests that we possess “only words to play with”{{sfn|Appel|1972|p=456}}. Indeed we do—mere words. Yet, using such frail and fallible words, employing flawed humanity and literary genius, these authors transformed personal angst into great art—creating works that shall abide, like Mount Kilimanjaro. In so doing, each has revealed to us genuine truth—a truth that may speak to our flawed but mutual humanity.
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| ===Notes=== | | ===Notes=== |
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| ===Citations=== | | ===Citations=== |
| {{reflist|15em}} | | {{reflist|20em}} |
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| ===Works Cited=== | | ===Works Cited=== |
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| * {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }} | | * {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }} |
| * {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}} | | * {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}} |
| | * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}} |
| | * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}} |
| * {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }} | | * {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }} |
| * {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}} | | * {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}} |
| * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
| |
| * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
| |
| * {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}} | | * {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}} |
| * {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}} | | * {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}} |