HEMINGWAY THE POET →

Today is the birthday of Ernest Hemingway, and I spent the whole morning trying to find a passage in The Sun Also Rises that I remember vividly but which may not exist on the page. The passage I recall describes a scene that occurs on a hot August day in Spain. The novel’s protagonist, Jake Barnes—and maybe his buddy, Bill Gorton—are fishing from the banks of a river flanked by steep green hills. I recall a panoramic view of a valley filled, like a bowl, with brilliant sunlight, beneath a perfectly transparent sky. I remember bright silver fish reflecting that sunlight.

Armed with word searches and try as I might, I couldn’t locate that single image. What I think I’m now remembering is a mental picture of that fishing trip I gleaned when I read the book in a Scribner’s paperback edition at the age of 20 (or now remember that I gleaned). And yet, while Hemingway doesn’t render that exact image, the entirety of Chapter 12 conveys it to me in bits and pieces, sights and sounds and smells. 

In “A Brief Guide to Imagism,” Hemingway’s mentor Ezra Pound defines “image” as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” That’s what my (mis)remembered image amounts to, I now think. 

Pound goes on to describe the sense of liberation a reader may feel when encountering such an image. “It is the presentation of such a ‘complex’ instantaneously which gives the sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art,” Pound writes.

In that sense, it doesn’t matter if a reader like me can’t locate the remembered image on the page as long as the sum total of the writing is that its music “[V]ibrates in the memory,” as Shelley would have it.

Then again, there are many times when that music vibrates in Heminway’s actual words. Note the phrase “lovely arc” in the following paragraph, which stands very well on its own as a prose poem:

“I got my rod that was leaning against the tree, took the bait-can and landing-net, and walked out onto the dam. It was built to provide a head of water for driving logs. The gate was up, and I sat on one of the squared timbers and watched the smooth apron of water before the river tumbled into the falls. In the white water at the foot of the dam it was deep. As I baited up, a trout shot up out of the white water into the falls and was carried down. Before I could finish baiting, another trout jumped at the falls, making the same lovely arc and disappearing into the water that was thundering down. I put on a good-sized sinker and dropped into the white water close to the edge of the timbers of the dam.”