User:HCooper/sandbox: Difference between revisions

He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would (“Snows,”).  

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.4<br>

So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of what might have been. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about counterfactuals.

In , Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .” (). 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” (Reynolds ). True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.<br>

Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,  

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 won't, 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.6<br>

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 () is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard” () found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.  

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” (), 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” ().8<br>

For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are counterfactuals, one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen— also deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it did happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it did happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the subjunctive mood, written with an excess of content, with dozens 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” (). 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” (). 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 white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second— where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart (“Snows,”).  

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” (). 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” (Stoltzfus ). 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 in a 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. ()

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” (Harding ), 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” (Harding ). Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his angst. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex fictive form to do so.  

So what was the response to the “Crack-Up” articles in Esquire? Scott Donaldson, writing in , says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression” (“Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction,” ). Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of angst, but much of that angst seems focused on the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in . Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression” (Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction,” ), as Donaldson has said? Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signalling “a fundamental change in American consciousness” (). She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in a narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the centre of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’ (Hampl )  

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves” ().12 It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations” (Hampl ).13 Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .” (“The Crack-Up,” ). Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise” (The Crack-Up, ). There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.14 It is also true that while something is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style” (Hampl ), much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.15 Rather than telling omissions, one might say. In his  article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines” (“The Crisis,” ). Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much literary art in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of angst and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations—to characters such as Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby () or Dick Diver in Tender is the Night (). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting  article in The Mailer Review, comparing

Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his s contemporaries and writers ever since (Kazin and Solotaroff ). It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. (–)

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modelled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact” (“The Crisis,” ).16 Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby (.)17

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive chronicler of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his  essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” were—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive post-mortem of the s.

The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand dukes and the casualness of chorus girls. (The Crack-Up, ).

With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in the experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively. (Mangum, “Introduction” xx)

What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the s? Do authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the s— considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.  

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 (Barke et. al. ). In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the s. In , the American Psychiatric Association produced its 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 th century” ().  

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 the psyche. Donaldson suggests there had been an “alienation from self” (“The Crisis,” ), 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.21 Hemingway, for his part, decides he will not make Harry’s mistake: he will write the stories.  

So, despite differences in narrative form and intention, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up” share a common landscape—that of authorial anxiety and cultural depression. Both works were written under personal stress, both are revealing, and both proved therapeutic for their authors.22 To use a handy German phrase, the Sitz im Leben of both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in  had far more similarity than either author was prepared to admit.

Two decades on, in , 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” (Advertisements, ). This bold work would mark a new, controversial era in Mailer’s life and work. Advertisements have 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” (). From this moment onward, Mailer would never be “the modernist deus absconditus . . . vanishing into silence” () as Leo Braudy has described Thomas Pynchon. 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 centre stage” (). Indeed he did. We realize, naturally, that Mailer’s postwar world of  was very different from the world of the s. This is evident in the brutal opening words of Mailer’s  article, “The White Negro,” reprinted in Advertisements for Myself 23: “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” (Advertisements, .) Both Fitzgerald and Mailer sought to understand and record their times, more so perhaps than Hemingway.24 Richard Foster describes the many similarities between “The Crack-Up” and Advertisements.25 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” (). 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” ().26

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” ().27 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- a narrative rather than compilation—constructive” (personal correspondence).<br>

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” (), then in Advertisements (), and later in The American Dream () and beyond.