Norman Mailer on Ernest Hemingway

The February 12 edition of the New York Review of Books has a series of letters by novelist Norman Mailer to various people (parents, editor, critics). I thought it interesting that he was "a close reader of reviews" according to the footnotes, who "wrote many letters to reviewers and/or their periodicals over the decades." He also received "more than fifty years of predominantly negative reviews ... by [Henry] Luce publications," presumably because of his leftist beliefs.

Mailer wrote the following in 1952 to Lilian Ross of the New Yorker, who had written a profile of Ernest Hemingway in 1950:

I read the Hemingway thing [The Old Man and the Sea] with a chip due mainly to Hemingway's letter about it in Life. I know what it is about him I can't stand. He is always saying in effect I am a man who happens incidentally to be a great writer. I know that all of you will be interested in my noble, strong, and beautiful attempts to exercise myself as a great man, and will be happy when I succeed except for professors, other writers, and assorted cocksuckers.

Anyway, I thought it was good and would have been better if it hadn't been so full of shit. I thought the best thing about it was the conception of the story, but I just can't bear his prose. It sets my teeth on edge. At least Hemingway's prose of 1952 which has lost all of the simplicity it used to have. I think if he had written the story twenty years ago it would have been half as long and twice as good. Finally (and who will listen to me) I know that if I had gotten the idea and know as much about fishing as he did, I would have done it better, because it's the sort of story that needs only to be written without affectation, and I never would have made the mistake of assuming that Norman Mailer as a fisherman is more interesting than the Cuban fisherman himself. I feel very nastily competitive, but it's his own Goddamn fault. There's a kind of strong child (like my daughter) whose will one feels always forced to combat, and the end of it is to be as childish as the child.