“They‘re Not Full of a Lot of Emotional Stuff”: Salinger and Imagism

Part I

Written for and Presented at the International Imagism Conference in Brunnenburg, Austria

Any discussion of Salinger’s relationship with Imagism must begin with Ernest Hemingway. Salinger first met Hemingway at The Ritz in Paris, and because Hemingway was assigned as a war correspondent to the 4^th Division, Salinger’s division, they moved through the European Theater together, and various testimonies have indicated that Salinger sought Hemingway out whenever he could. As a testament to this, Salinger pays tribute to Hemingway in a 1946 letter to “Poppa,” telling him that “the talks I had with you hear were the only hopeful minutes of the whole business.”

Though no one knows extent of Salinger and Hemingway’s “talks,” a dramatic shift occurs in Salinger’s writing that appears to be a direct influence of his meetings with Hemingway. The prose Salinger is writing before meeting Hemingway is closer to that of Sherwood Anderson and Ring Lardner (two writers who also influenced Hemingway’s early prose before he met Pound in Paris), and Salinger’s development of the character Babe Gladwaller in his early stories seems closer to George Willard than Nick Adams. In fact, in a letter to his editor Whit Burnett from 19 March, 1944, shortly before meeting Hemingway, Salinger writes that he always thought that Anderson was better than Hemingway and asks if Burnett if he agrees. After meeting Hemingway for the first time, Salinger writes Burnett in September of 1944 and tells him that they discussed authors and that Hemingway liked all the authors he did, and disproved of the ones he did not like, although Salinger probably withheld his estimation of Anderson as the better writer. However, it is likely that the two discussed Anderson and that this conversation led Hemingway to discuss how it was Anderson’s letter of introduction that led him to Pound. Hemingway’s meeting with Salinger is remarkably congruent with his meeting with Pound on a number of levels. Hemingway met Salinger in Paris roughly two decades after beginning his tutelage there with Pound. In the years that would follow he would begin working on the manuscript of what was to become A Moveable Feast where he writes that Pound “was the most generous writer I have ever known . . . He helped poets, painters, sculptors and prose writers that he believed in.” Pound believed in Hemingway and it was his tutelage that would help Hemingway to break away from Anderson and Lardner in constructing his avant guard masterpiece In Our Time, which established the foundation for the fiction Hemingway would write for the rest of his life. Thus, as Hemingway looked the young Salinger in the eye, it must have been like looking into a mirror of himself twenty years before. With the understanding of how much Salinger wanted to be a writer—so much so that he carried a typewriter with him throughout the war and would write stories and the manuscript of what would become The Catcher in the Rye between battles—it is not hard to imagine what the nature of their “talks” was like and why they gave Salinger such hope.

In this context, it is worth considering the timeline. In his 1946 letter to Hemingway, Salinger writes that the short story collection that he has been working on with Burnett had collapsed but that it was a good thing because he is “still tied up with lies and affectations, and to see [his] name on a dust jacket would postpone any real improvement several years.” Salinger’s “‘real improvement’ would begin with the sequential publication of “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” in January of 1948, “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut” in March, and “Just Before the War With the Eskimos” in June, the three stories which would begin the cycle of Nine Stories. The dramatic evolution of Salinger’s tone and voice in these stories is unmistakable; moreover, with Hemingway and Pound in mind, each story is built around a central image, which follows what Hugh Kenner calls Pound’s “Doctrine of the Image” and expand upon the “intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” The images within the respective stories also operate as conductors, or vortices through which the other images of the stories are transferred. What distinguishes Nine Stories from Winesburg, Ohio and other short story collections is the ability to effectively transfer the imagistic vortex of individual stories through the work as a whole. Hemingway, under Pound’s tutelage, was the first to do it with In Our Time, and in Nine Stories, Salinger distills and makes new all of the tenets of Pound’s school of writing circa 1922.

Central to both In Our Time and Nine Stories is the super-pository technique employed by Pound. Hemingway’s description of his use of this technique (which involved his juxtaposition of stories and vignettes) throughout In Our Time is that was, “like looking with your eyes at something, say a passing coast line, and then looking at it with 15X binoculars.” In Nine Stories, the super-pository effect is less stylistically dramatic, yet it is centered upon the overlaying and contrasting of images such as glass and water. For instance, in the story “Down at the Dinghy,” Lionel Tannenbaum throws a pair of underwater goggles into the water. He then throws a set of keys into the water with the glasses. When his mother, Boo Boo Tannenbaum (Seymour Glass’s sister) tells Lionel that the glasses belonged to his Uncle Seymour Glass (the central protagonist of “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”) Salinger’s use of super-positioned glass images is established. The glass and water images in “Down at the Dingy” correspond with “Bananafish” through Seymour, who is said to “see-more,” as he offers a parable of sorts to a child named Sybil by telling her to look through the surface of the water for bananafish, but it is only when Seymour and Sybil go under the water that Sybil sees a bananafish. Returning to “Down at the Dinghy,” Salinger implies that the “key” is to see under the glass. It is clear that Salinger, however consciously, employs Pound’s doctrine of the image in Nine Stories through his use of super-positioning in such a manner that, as Stanley Coffman conveys of Pound’s super-positioning technique, “the images are so arranged that the pattern becomes an Image, an organic structure giving a force and pleasure that are greater than and different from the images alone.”

In a corresponding manner, Pound began refining the super-positioning (or inter-positioning) technique throughout his poetry, and in his essay “Pound, Haiku and the Image” Earl Miner illustrates Pound’s use of the technique in “L’Art, 1910,”

Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth,

Crushed Strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes.

And “Woman Before a Shop,”

The gew-gaws of false amber and false turquoise attract them.

“Like to nature”: these agglutinous yellows!

Miner writes,

“L’Art, 1910” has reversed the technique of “In a Station at the Metro” by putting the image before the non-imagistic invitation to feast our eyes. The technique of super-position is also slightly modified in “Woman Before a Shop.” The last three words are superposed on the preceding, and, in a sense, the body of the poem is superposed on the title, which, like the title of many abstract paintings, is necessary to give us an idea of the meaning of the “picture” as a whole.

Through the confluence of the “meaning of the picture as a whole,” Miner effectively conveys how both In Our Time and Nine Stories work towards “the point of maximum energy.” Hemingway once told his wife Mary that “nobody really knows or understands and nobody has ever said the secret. The secret is that it is poetry written into prose and it is the hardest of all things to do.” Whether or not Hemingway shared this secret with Salinger is purely speculative; though, in Nine Stories, Salinger achieves poetry in prose after the example set within In Our Time. Furthermore, Pound’s meditation on how a longer poem could operate in the modes of imagism and vorticism seems especially relevant to In Our Time and Nine Stories:

I am often asked whether there can be a long imagiste or vorticist poem. The Japanese, who evolved the hokku, evolved also the Noh plays. It in the best “Noh” the whole play may consist of one image. I mean it is gathered around one image. The unity consists in one emage, enforced by movement and music. I see nothing against a long vorticist poem.

A decade later Pound would encourage Hemingway’s application of the doctrine of the image to In Our Time, and he surely would have encouraged Salinger’s championing these same qualities in Nine Stories. Thus, in relation to the poetic qualities of their prose, it is hard to separate Hemingway from Pound when addressing Salinger’s fiction, a topic I will address more thoroughly later.