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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 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|pp=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'' <sup>23</sup>: “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|pp=338}} Both Fitzgerald and Mailer sought to understand and record their times, more so perhaps than Hemingway.<sup>24</sup> Richard Foster describes the many similarities between “The Crack-Up” and Advertisements.<sup>25</sup> 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|pp=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|pp=121}}<sup>26</sup>
+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,”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} for Mailer’s purpose “was to confront alienation head-on.” {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} <sup>27</sup> 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 a narrative rather than compilation—constructive” (personal correspondence). <sup>28</sup> 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 the 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 ''The 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,
 . . .