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

I lean and loafe at my ease. . . . Observing a spear of summer grass  

It is important to realize that the “I” of the poem—the apparent hero—is not the same as Walt Whitman (–), even though a frontispiece in the  First Edition of Leaves of Grass suggested the identification.29 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). 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.”

Mailer saw clearly the problem of writer/author alienation in the midtwentieth-century. However, in contrast to Hemingway, he “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” (Justice ). 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 s, 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.

Mailer’s writings explicitly state the terms of the modern revolt against conventional society. It is very different from past literary rebellions: it begins in the instinctual life, and it is free both from established conventions and ideological complications. Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s favorite hero, as a personality stands at the opposite pole from Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock. He acts independently of all the inhibitions which allowed Prufrock to postpone action; his major impulse is both to murder and to create, to express passion through instinctive acts. He is the “marginal ego,” the dislocated and “disaffiliated” self, who tries to make a way of life from the energy and strategy of pure rebellion. (Hoffman )

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 thesis 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” (Lethem xiv). Lethem saw Mailer “in the late fifties to have become a radar detector for the onset of . . . the post-modern cultural condition generally” (xii). 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 CrackUp”—albeit in a rudimentary form.  

In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteenyear 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  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. (Burwell –)

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 experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively” (Mangum, “Introduction” xx). That ability, Mailer certainly possessed, as did, in an earlier age, Hemingway and Fitzgerald.30

These three authors were dealing with their own angst in their writing, but they also were creating art. In a dramatically changing America, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Mailer each faced the “inescapable alienation of writer from author” (Justice ). Each was trying to work out what we could call a proper authorial distance in their narratives.  

In his article on Hemingway called “The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life,” Jackson Benson writes, “One’s life, after all, is not a drama, nor should a drama ever be confused with a life. Both at bottom are mysterious, but each is different in kind from the other” (). 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:

Out of his emotions and needs, as well as out of a conscious 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. ()

Benson has warned us of the dangers of the biographical fallacy.31 That 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 that humanity in and through the art of fiction. That remains their lasting achievement.

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.32 So, whether creating fiction or nonfiction, each man wrote “out of his life, not about his life” (Benson ). Struggling with an alienation both personal and cultural, each took his flawed humanity and transformed it into art.

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,

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 a 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. (Benson )

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 (Justice ), 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 attempts 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” (Appel ).33

Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous character, Humbert Humbert, suggests that we possess “only words to play with” (Appel ). 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.

. In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon () with Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself (), 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” (), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (). 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.

. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, – October, .

. 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  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” (Burwell –).

. Kenneth Johnstone suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing” (). He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since A Farewell to Arms () and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.

. Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom” (Reynolds ), Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.

. “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” (Baker –)

. “He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time” (Baker ).

. There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War (McKena and Peterson ).

. To take just the ten stories in the Hemingway anthology, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories (Scribner ), the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.

. Mailer, in his  essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare” (). Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The OED calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.

. “For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist” (Braudy ).

. “Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves” (Eliot ).

. “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again” (“The Crack-Up,” The Crack-Up, )

. As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (), Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby (), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of Huckleberry Finn and Moby-Dick” ().

. “Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned” (Hampl ).

. “Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.” (Donaldson, “The Crisis,” ).

. Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing” (). Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in Esquire, later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in Advertisements for Myself (). Writing about Fitzgerald in late , critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett” ()” (Batchelor ).

. “But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament” (Hampl ).

. “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” (Hampl ).

. “Medical attacks and legal prohibitions on opiate use, from the s onward, surely reduced some of the chemical supports that had previously conditioned stress” (Barke, et. al. ). From the s 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.

Wilson, Edmund. “Autobiographical Pieces.” The Crack-Up. Edited by Edmund Wilson, New Directions, .