hemingway blech?
denis jonnes (djengltl@mbox.nc.kyushu-u.ac.jp)
Thu, 18 Feb 1999 15:18:37 +0900
I'm with rick on "for esme"--it seems to me the fount (font?) from which
all else in Salinger springs. I used to be very down on
Hemingway--especially things like Farewell to Arms, but now feel he was
a genuine innovative writer. I also see Salinger in complex dialogue
with Hemingway--Salinger has a lot more Hemingway-style violence than
the standard Salinger read let's onto; you have, in both, preoccupation
with what EH at one point called "nada" (thanks to Mr. Yoshio Nakamura
for this insight) and the business with suicide (shared of course by
many other mid 2oth c. American writers and poets), preoccupation with
sex (and never quite connecting up), preoccupation with celebrity (how
to be it, or how to avoid it) and then dividing up of world between
cognescenti and those who are, in various ways, full of it. On level of
style, you have Salinger carrying the Hemingway terseness and ellipses
yet a step further, etc.
Just stray apple-eater thoughts here, but I agree it is extremely
fertile field, which must have been ploughed by someone somewhere
sometime.
D. Jonnes