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

It is not easy being a great writer. Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), 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” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). 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.}}

<blockquote>Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}}</blockquote>

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place

of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which

each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must

face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche” {{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=206}}, so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam

and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.⁷ In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears quantum-entangled with “Snows,” the

hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II, “we owe God

a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the

next” {{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=178}}.⁸ For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.  

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title

but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate

the crucial role of place in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel

Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain” {{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=325}}. Here is Gerald

Kennedy’s helpful summary,

::As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself. {{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}}.

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle

of memory” {{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328}}. This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the

archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.⁹ We might think

about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare” {{sfn|Sipiora|2013|pp=170}}.¹⁰ Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as refracted through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These

are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people,

events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might

have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives.

They are merely the possibility of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered

imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw

material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the subjunctive mood extends to

the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued

from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun” {{sfn|Scribner|2003|pp=27}}. This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of

Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not

for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from

his chest” {{sfn|Scribner|2003|pp=25}}. Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure

The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—

to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart {{sfn|Scribner|2003|28}}).

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the

beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this

skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus

draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The

epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that

altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the

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 two endings, the first of which, although printed

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

:: 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) ===

. . .Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 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 Crack- Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), 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,

* {{cite journal |last=Braudey |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}

* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snow of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}

* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingay’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005| title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}