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

«	The Mailer Review • Volume 13 Number 1 • 2019	»

Written by
Raymond M. Vince

Abstract: Mailer,

Raymond Vince to the work of Norman Mailer.

Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.

URL: http://prmlr.us/mr13vin

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”^[1] experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.^[a]

. . .

Notes

↑ 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.

Citations

↑ Justice 2010, p. 260.

Works Cited

{{cite journal |last=Appel |first=Alfred |title=The Annotated Lolita|
{{cite journal |last=Baker |first=Carlos |title=Hemingway:The Writer as Artist|
{{cite journal |last=Barke |first=Megan|date=2013|chapter=Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |title=Journal of Social History|volume=33|issue=3|pages=565-584|
{{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=1989|chapter=Visions of the American Dream:F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea|title=The Mailer Review|volume=7|issue=1|pages=74-89|
{{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989|chapter=Ernest Hemingway:The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life|title=American Literature|volume=61|issue=3|pages=345-358|
{{cite journal |last=Braudey |first=Leo |date=1981|chapter=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel|title=ELH|volume=43|issue=3|pages=619-637|
{{cite journal |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996|title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels|publisher=Cambridge UP|
{{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=2003|chapter=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement|title=New England Review|issue=24|volume=4|
{{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |date=2002|title=Heart of Darkness and other Tales|publisher=Oxford UP|editor-first=Cedric W.|
{{cite journal|last=Cowley |first=Malcolm |date=1955|title=Leaves of Grass|volume=1|edited=Penguin M.C.|
{{cite journal|last=Donaldson |first=Scott|date=1980|chapter=The Crisis of Fitzgerald's Crack-up|title=Twentieth Century Literature|volume=26|issue=2|pages=171-188|

Justice, Hilary K. (2010). "Authorship and". The Mailer Review. 4 (1): 259–272. Text " Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself " ignored (help)

{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

[2] 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.

[FOOTNOTEJustice2010260-1] Justice 2010, p. 260.

[1]

[a]