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

In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|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 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}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written,

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa—the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“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.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.