A Closeness to Death

Taken from the most current issue of the Paris Review, in an interview with Norman Mailer. This portion is in reference to Ernest Hemingway. (whom I consider a fundamental influence on my writing.)

INTERVIEWER
Do you remember where you were when you heard Hemingway had killed himself?

MAILER
I remember it very well. I was with Jeanne Campbell in Mexico and it was before we got married. I was truly aghast. A certain part of me has never really gotten over it. In a way, it was a huge warning. What he was saying is, Listen all you novelists out there. Get it straight: when you’re a novelist you’re entering on an extremely dangerous psychological journey, and it can blow up in your face.

INTERVIEWER
Did it compromise your sense of his courage?

MAILER
I hated to think that his death might do that. I came up with a thesis: Hemingway had learned early in life that the closer he came to daring death the healthier it was for him. He saw that as the great medicine, to dare to engage in a nearness to death. And so I had this notion that night after night when he was alone, after he said goodnight to Mary, Hemingway would go to his bedroom and he’d put his thumb on the shotgun trigger and put the barrel in his mouth and squeeze down on the trigger a little bit, and—trembling, shaking—he’d try to see how close he could come without having the thing go off. On the final night he went too far. That to me made more sense than him just deciding to blow it all to bits. However, it’s nothing but a theory. The fact of the matter is that Hemingway committed suicide.

First and foremost, please note that I do not have an infatuation with the morbid or macabre, nor do I run that little test of will that Mailer would like to believe Hemingway did to prove his bravery, courage and stupidity. However, I wish that I might stand close to death unblinking -- perhaps that is why I write so much, or bring myself to the wilderness of my thoughts time and again; why I find life in the most absurd, perhaps stupid events of adrenaline-rushing goodness. Perhaps that is why I enjoy love so much, because I feel no more fear, no more joy, no more closer to death than when I am loving a woman unbridled.