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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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cat’s presence” {{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|pp=224}}. Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write” {{sfn|stoltzfus|2005|pp=224}}. Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons. | cat’s presence” {{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|pp=224}}. Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write” {{sfn|stoltzfus|2005|pp=224}}. Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons. | ||
How do we reconcile the | How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed | ||
in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again | |||
Harding is helpful. | |||
::By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry should have written his stories. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=32}}. | |||
At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was | |||
different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway | |||
recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, | |||
a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal | |||
mistake. | |||
Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence | |||
of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has | |||
flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip | |||
on the story’s ultimate trajectory”{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=33}}, right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly | |||
demonstrated his “own final control of the text” {{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=33}}. Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his angst. Unlike Fitzgerald, he | |||
employed a complex fictive form to do so. | |||
Sadly, however, his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=33}}, as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would | |||
begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of the iceberg. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway, | |||
:: 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 {{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}}. | |||
So it was that losing his “final control of the text” {{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=33}} 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 2, 1961, 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, | |||
:: 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{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|pp=218}}. | |||
=== FITZGERALD AND “THE CRACK-UP” ESSAYS (1936) === | |||
. . . | . . . | ||