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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 {{quote|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|p=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.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, 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.}} We might think
+Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=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.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, 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.}} 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|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} 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.}} 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.
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 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}}
-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-->
+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.”{{sfn|Barke|Fribush|Stearns|2000|p=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|Fribush|Stearns|2000|p=580}}
-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.
+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|Fribush|Stearns|2000|p=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.
 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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 ===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.
+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|p=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'':{{efn|“The White Negro” (1957) essay is reprinted in ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) and also in ''Mind of an Outlaw'' (2013).}} “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|p=338}} Both Fitzgerald and Mailer sought to understand and record their times, more so perhaps than Hemingway.{{efn|Perhaps more than most other writers, Fitzgerald and Mailer each sought to understand the
+American culture of their times—whether the Jazz age, “an age of miracles,”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=14}} or the Cold War era of the 1950s and 1960s and beyond.}} Richard Foster describes the many similarities between “The Crack-Up” and ''Advertisements''.{{efn|“Mailer’s confessional ''Advertisements for Myself'' . . . has much in it about the experience and meaning of ‘crack-up’—the dissipation of intense ambition, energy, and conviction into drink, dope, distraction, and a sick liver.{{sfn|Foster|1968|p=222}} }} 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|p=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|p=121}}{{efn|“It is clear that in the bleak final reckonings of ''Advertisements for Myself'', Mailer saw Fitzgerald
+as seminal and exemplary. Since his death, the landscape of American publishing had become meaner, yet Mailer was still able to find the mediations between Fitzgerald’s fate and his own, for both had played fast and loose with regard to their given pot of artistic talent and both had been imperfect conservationists of the energy remaining to them.”{{sfn|Glenday|2012|p=121}} }}
+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,” for Mailer’s purpose “was to confront alienation head-on.”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=266}}{{efn|“Mailer states that ''Advertisements''’ purpose was to confront alienation head-on in order to “clear a ground”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=8}} for his next novel, which was already underway.”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=266}} }} 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 narrative rather than compilation—constructive.”{{efn|I have appreciated the advice of Alex Hicks, via email and the sharing of articles and ideas, in the writing and revising of this paper.}} 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 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 ''An American Dream'' (1965) and beyond.
+The title of ''Advertisements for Myself'' seems to connect Mailer’s work to 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,
+<blockquote><poem>
+I celebrate myself,
+And what I assume you shall assume,
+For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
+I loafe and invite my soul,
+I lean and loafe at my ease. . . . Observing a spear of summer grass{{sfn|Whitman|1976|loc=ll. 1–5}}</poem>
+</blockquote>
+It is important to realize that the “I” of the poem—the apparent hero—is not the same as Walt Whitman (1819–1892), even though a frontispiece in the 1855 First Edition of ''Leaves of Grass'' suggested the identification.{{efn|“Another calculated feature of the first edition is that the names of the author and publisher—actually the same person—are omitted from the title page. Instead the opposite page contains a portrait: the engraved daguerreotype of a bearded man in his middle thirties, slouching under a wide-brimmed and high-crowned black felt hat that has ‘a rakish kind of slant,’ as the engraver said later, ‘like the mast of a schooner.’ . . . It is the portrait of a devil-may-care American working-man, one who might be taken as a somewhat idealized figure in almost any crowd.”{{sfn|Cowley|1978|p=vii}} }} 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.”{{sfn|Cowley|1978|p=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.”{{sfn|Cowley|1978|p=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 mid-twentieth-century. However, in contrast to Hemingway, he “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage.”{{Sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} 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.
+{{quote|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.{{sfn|Hoffman|xxxx|p=12}} }}
+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.{{sfn|Hicks|n.d.|}} 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=xiv}} 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=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 Crack-Up”—albeit in a rudimentary form.
+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:
+{{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}} }}
+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.”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} 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.}}
+===Great Authors Transform ''Angst'' into Art===
+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.”{{Sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} 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.”{{sfn|Benson|1989|p=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:
+{{quote|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.{{sfn|Benson|1989|p=350}} }}
+Benson has warned us of the dangers of the biographical fallacy.{{efn|“When distinctions are blurred by the too simple merging of author with his/her fiction or the fiction with the author, some type of biographical fallacy results, as nearly all the recent critical biographies give ample evidence.”{{sfn|Benson|1989|p=346}} }} 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.{{efn|Ben Stolzfus, in his 2005 article, “Sartre, Nada, and Hemingway’s African Stories,” is helpful in reading both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber” in the light of Sartre’s Existentialism. He concludes with this: “The African stories were written in 1936, and they embody the ‘objective style’ and the lived experience that Sartre admired and that he believed would express the new sensibilities of men and women in the twentieth century.”{{Sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} }} So, whether creating fiction or nonfiction, each man wrote “out of his life, not about his life.”{{sfn|Benson|1989|p=350}} 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,
+{{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 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.{{sfn|Benson|1989|p=352}} }}
+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 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.”{{sfn|Nabokov|1970|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.”{{sfn|Nabokov|1970|p=208}} 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|Nabokov|1970|p=456}} }}
+Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous character, Humbert Humbert, suggests that we possess “only words to play with.”{{sfn|Nabokov|1970|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.
 ===Notes===