"They're not full of a lot of emotional stuff": Salinger and Imagism (Part III)
Part III
At last, the fact that Salinger’s conversation with Japanese and Chinese poetry can be found throughout his post-WWII prose, and the absence of it from his pre-war prose, speaks for itself. Salinger’s application of Pound’s doctrine of the image in Nine Stories is a testament to the influence of both Hemingway and Pound upon his writing. In one of Salinger’s last works, Seymour, An Introduction, Salinger seems to, in fact, pay tribute to Pound through Buddy Glass’ explanation of 184 poems that Seymour left after he committed suicide:
It may be help, to start with, to say that Seymour probably loved the classical Japanese three-line, seventeen syllable haiku as he loved no other form of poetry, and that he himself wrote—bled—haiku (almost always in English but sometimes, I hope I’m duly reluctant to bring in, in Japanese, German, or Italian. It could be said, and most likely will be, that a late-period poem of Seymour’s looks substantially like an English translation of double haiku, if such a thing existed, and I don’t think I’d quibble over that, but I tend to sicken at the strong probability that some tire but indefatigably waggish English Department member in 1970—not impossibly myself, God help me—will get off a good one about a poem of Seymour’s being to the haiku what a double Martini is to the usual Martini.
Of course, I have no idea if Salinger is thinking of Pound as he writes this passage, but I can’t think of a better explication of “In a Station of the Metro” than that it is to “the haiku what a double Martini is to the usual Martini.” To this end, Pound states, in “A Retrospect,” that “only emotion endures” and that the content of some poems is “too much embedded in me for me to look back at the words.” “If you’re a poet, you do something beautiful,” Salinger writes in Franny and Zooey, “I mean you’re supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything.”
Notes:
I discuss the details of Hemingway and Salinger’s meetings in my essay “For Ernest, With Love and Squalor: The Influence of Ernest Hemingway Upon the Life and Fiction of J. D. Salinger,” which is will be published in the Spring 2011 edition of The Hemingway Review.
Each of the nine stories has an image of glass/water that reflects, as it were, “the point of maximum energy” in each story and ties into the overall cycle through the epigraph. In “Bananafish,” the glass/water image is the surface of the ocean. Seymour tells Sybil to look for bananafish through the surface of the water and that bananafish “lead a very tragic life,” and that, “they’re very ordinary-looking fish when they swim in. But once they get it, they behave like pigs. Why, I’ve known some bananafish to swim into a banana hole and eat as many as seventy-eight bananas.” In the following story, “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut,” Salinger conveys the moment of epiphany through the transfer of glass/vision in the characters Eloise and her daughter Ramona: “she picked up Ramona’s glasses and, holding them in both hands, pressed them against her cheek. Tears rolled down her face, wetting the lenses. ‘Poor Uncle Wiggily,’ she said over and over again. Finally, she put the glasses back on the night table, lenses down” (37). Note how Salinger ties the title of the story into the epiphanic instant, a motif he will employ several times in Nine Stories. The effect, as with Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” super-positions the primary action of the story with the thematic nuances, thus the significance of the image is multiplied through a vortex. This same effect can be seen in “Just Before the War with the Eskimos when Franklin Graff leans against the window pane of his apartment in New York City and offers a parable akin to Seymour’s: “He continued to look down at the street. ‘They’re all goin’ over to the goddam draft board.’ he said. ‘We’re gonna fight the Eskimos next. Know that?.’” The next story, “The Laughing Man,” has one of the simplest and complex images of glass/water in the collection. Salinger employs a meta-narrative technique within the story and in explaining the story within the story (both are titled “The Laughing Man”) the narrator states that, “The Laughing Man” “was a story that tended to sprawl all over the place, and yet it remained essentially portable. You could always take it home with you and reflect on it while sitting, say, in the outgoing water in the bathtub” (58). The image of the outgoing water anticipates the conclusion of “Teddy,” as does the abundance of baby references in the story invoke the womblike bathtub and the idea of being baptized or born again. Having already explicated “Down at the Dinghy” in the body of this essay, we’ll turn to another simple yet extremely complex glass image in “For Esme—with Love and Squalor.” The image comes in the concluding moments of the story when the character Sergeant X takes “Esme’s father’s wristwatch out of the box. When he did finally life it out, he saw that its crystal had been broken in transit.” The image is especially poignant because of the way it simultaneously embodies the transfer of temporal and eternal verities of time. In the next story, “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes,” Salinger portrays glass through the “eyes” in projecting the division between the external and internal. The image of eyes is also especially intriguing because it comes from a poem, a type of imagistic haiku variation, which, yet again, is quoted in the instant of time: “I start thinking about this goddam poem I sent her when we first started goin’ around together. ‘Rose my color is and white, Pretty mouth and green my eyes.’ Christ, it’s embarrassing—it used to remind me of her. She doesn’t have green eyes—she has eyes like goddam sea shells, for Chrissake.” When considering this hokku-like sentence, it is worth remembering Pound’s reflection that “in a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective” (Gaudier-Brzeska). So much of Nine Stories is a commentary on marriage (which incidentally is another point of confluence with In Our Time) and this story, especially in relation to “For Esme” and “Bananafish,” seems to be commenting on the superficial qualities of the outer and superficial qualities of a spouse above the inner and more substantive qualities. As Salinger writes in addressing the would be groom in “For Esme,” “nobody’s aiming to please, here. More, really, to edify, to instruct.” Finally, in the story “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” Salinger’s use of glass in the precise instant of transformation has a religious connotation that foreshadows “Teddy”:
I reached out to her instantly, hitting the tips of my fingers on the glass. She landed heavily on her bottom, like a skater. She immediately got to her feet without looking at me. Her face still flushed, she pushed her hair back with one hand, and resumed lacing up the truss on the dummy. It was just then that I had my Experience. Suddenly (and I say this, I believe, with all due self-consciousness), the sun came up and sped toward the bridge of my nose at the rate of ninety-three million miles a second. Blinded and very frightened—I had to put my hand on the glass to keep my balance.
The moment of epiphany in “Blue Period” has a Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus quality to it and, along with “Teddy,” necessitates a re-evaluation of the other glass/water images in Nine Stories in relation to “the sound of one hand clapping.” In fact, before the final two stories, there is little indication of a religious instant being central to the epiphany; however, once they are seen in “Blue Period” and “Teddy,” the images of glass/water seem to reel back through moments of transfer in the other stories.
Outside of the number of examples cited in this work, Salinger has an ongoing dialogue with poetry throughout his work. For instance, he frameworks The Catcher in the Rye upon Holden’s misquoting of Robert Burns’ poem “Comin’ Thro The Rye,” “You know that song ‘If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye’?,” Holden ask his sister Phoebe, who corrects him, “It’s ‘If a body meet a body coming through the rye’! she states, “It’s a poem. By Robert Burns.” Intrestingly, the poem has an imagistic quality to it that corresponds with both “catching” and “meeting” a body coming through the rye. Additionally, Murial Glass tells her mother that a book of poems (which James Finn Cotter argues is Rilke’s The Voices) are by “the only great poet of the century” in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Later in the story Seymour quotes T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, “mixing memory and desire.” Salinger also alludes to Eliot in his uncollected short story/novella “The Inverted Forest” which is based upon a poet whose collection of poems, The Inverted Forest, contains the lines “Not wasteland, but a great inverted forest / with all foliage underground.” Later in the story Salinger quotes from Cooleridge’s Kubla Khan, “a poet doesn’t invent his poetry—he finds it,” he writes, the place “where Alph the sacred river ran—was found out, not invented.” And Salinger borrows his title, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, from Sappho. There is an interesting imagistic quality to the lines which are seemingly presented with a nod to Nine Stories:
When I’d checked into the bathroom with Seymour’s diary under my arm, and had carefully secured the door behind me, I spotted a message almost immediately. It was not, however, in Seymour’s handwriting but, unmistakably, in my sister Boo Boo’s. With or without soap, her handwriting was always almost indecipherably minute, and she had easily managed to post the following message up on the mirror: Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man. Love, Irving Sappho, formerly under contract to Elysium Studios Ltd.
Salinger also alludes to Sappho, Rilke and Eliot in Franny and Zooey. Significantly, in Franny and Zooey, Buddy Glass informs us that Seymour wrote, “a haiku-style poem I found in the hotel room where Seymour shot himself. It was written in pencil on the desk blotter: ‘The little girl on the plane / Who turned her doll’s head around / To look at me.’” Moreover, as I mention in other places in this essay, there is an extensive discussion of Seymour’s poetry (in relation to Japanese and Chinese poetry) throughout Seymour, An Introduction. Yet, the most important thing to note is that Salinger does not allude to poetry casually within his stories; it is always, like Hemingway’s use of the iceberg theory, interwoven into the thematic undercurrents of the story.
Salinger’s quotes Saigyo’s poem, “What it is I know not / But with the gratitude / My tears fall,” in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters. The poem is a testament to his knowledge of eastern verse. Saigyo, a forbear of Basho, wrote with a colloquial style that surely would have attracted both Salinger and Pound.