Mailer on Hemingway

Hemingway’s style affected whole generations of us the way a roomful of men are affected when a beautiful woman walks in ---their night is turned around, for better or for worse. – Norman Mailer

My copy of Mailer’s The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing arrived in the mail yesterday and so, naturally, I immediately skimmed the Table of Contents and flipped to the chapter he wrote on Hemingway. He actually mentions Hemingway fairly often. I was glad to see the statement above because, first of all, it’s true, and second, it is pure Mailer and Hemingway would have liked that analogy.

My first encounter with Hemingway was in an anthology of short stories that my father was reading when I was a kid. For some reason I picked it up and decided to read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, heavy stuff for someone as young as I was and I doubt that I got the story but I loved the way the man wrote, that pure clarity of word use and prose that were so clean and articulate you just had to pay attention. Later, when I read A Moveable Feast for the first of many times, I knew that this was the way a person should write. He could describe so clearly with such an economy of language. I will probably always remember his description of the fruit-flavored liqueurs that Alice B. Toklas made and served. And his travels around Paris on foot in the company of Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Scott Fitzgerald --- I hadn’t read any of those guys then but I knew if they got to live the life Hemingway described they had to have done something extraordinary as a result.

I love that Mailer holds Hemingway up in this light and also that he was so curious about the man behind the words. In the chapter that he wrote Mailer bemoaned the fact that none of Hemingway’s biographers ever give you a real sense of the man until finally Hemingway’s son Gregory wrote Papa. It makes me like Mailer more that he esteemed Hemingway so much.

In my usual fashion I have half a dozen books going at the same time. It’s like I have to give my mind different ideas to chew on and coordinate rather than load it with one thing and then another and then another. Consequently I’ve started reading Ernest Becker’s 1973 Pulitzer Prize winner, The Denial of Death. Becker wrote it heavily influenced by the work of psychiatrist, playwrite, and lover of Anais Nin, Otto Rank. Rank once said about his obsession with creativity, “I must give birth every day or perish.” I’ve always loved that.

Anyway, Becker talks about the longing of all people to be heroes. Deep in our psyche there is a desire to do something wonderful or noble or redemptive that will, in some way, make up for the failings in other parts of our lives. I think this is very true. It doesn’t have to be grand heroism. It can be heroism on a very small scale --- like sitting down to write. To write, as Hemingway always said, “one true thing, to write the truest thing you know”.

So Mailer looks to Hemingway and Becker looks to Rank and I love all of them because I’m no different --- I want to be a hero, too. I want to look at my life and, despite all the messes I’ve made and all the people I’ve neglected and all the things I should have done and just didn’t, I want to feel like I’ve done something good that will seem heroic and meaningful to someone. I guess that’s why I write.

Mailer also said of Hemingway, “No matter how serious or superficial a reader you are you quickly sense that you are in the hands of someone who writes so well that your wits are keyed afterwards to the flaws in the bad writing of others, and worse, yourself.” That is an important point because in this era of self-absorption and self-reference, it is good to be reminded that there are those who do things better --- not that they ARE better but just that they can do something better. Mailer and Hemingway have this in common, they were both men who screwed up a LOT in life. And yet look what they could do. That gives me hope.

Thanks for reading.