Dream Catcher: A Memoir

by Salinger, Margaret A.

  The other thing that amazed me, as a person who had grown up hearing from my father a relentlessly pessimistic view of the possibilities of happiness in marriage—any marriage—as well as the worse-than-dismal state of his relationship with my mother, is the brief appearance, in just two stories, “Wake Me When it Thunders”4 and “Death of a Dogface,” of a husband and wife who see eye to eye, imperfectly, humanly, but they like what they see. What I didn’t realize on first reading them is that, in each of these stories, the husband and his wife are both intelligent but uneducated. The dialect, flawless as usual, makes clear their social status without any sense of making fun of it. That, too, is very like my father; he never lacked respect for local farmers who had something to teach him even though their language might be full of ain’ts and the like. He was merciless, however, on those who tried to make their language sound “tonier” by using, or rather misusing, words that have a sophisticated sound to the unsophisticated ear. “Always use the simplest word possible to say what you’re trying to say” was his adage. Only use a less simple word if you really need to in order to describe accurately what you’re talking about.

  Flawed couples, human couples, in these two stories manage to work toward mutual understanding, love, and respect. Philly Burns, for example, is back from the war and explains to Juanita, his wife, who loves going to Hollywood war movies, why he can’t stand them. He tells her the story of his real-life experience of war, and how the movies are a lie. In Hollywood stories, he says:

  You see a lot of real handsome guys always getting shot pretty neat, right where it don’t spoil their looks none, and they always got plenty of time, before they croak, to give their love to some doll back home, with who in the beginning of the pitcher, they had a real serious misunderstanding about what dress she should ought to wear to the college dance. . . . Then you see the dead guy’s hometown, and around a million people, including the mayor and the dead guy’s folks and his doll, and maybe the President, all around the guy’s box, making speeches and wearing medals and looking spiffier in mourning duds than most folks do all dolled up for a party.

  Philly tells his wife a real story about a real hero, his sergeant, who happened to be a particularly ugly guy (hence the original title, “Death of a Dogface”), not Hollywood material at all, whose men respected him above all others. When he died, he had his jaw blasted off and he received four other terrible, ugly holes in various places, trying to save some new recruits during the bombing of Pearl Harbor. As the story ends, Philly tells us:

  He died all by himself, and he didn’t have no messages to give to no girl or nobody, and there wasn’t nobody throwing a big classy funeral for him here in the States, and no hot-shot bugler blowed taps for him.

  The only funeral Burke got was when Juanita cried for him when I read her Frankie’s letter and when I told her again what I knowed. Juanita, she ain’t no ordinary dame. Don’t never marry no ordinary dame, bud. Get one that’ll cry for a Burke.

  This kind of respect and meeting of the minds between husband and wife never again appears in my father’s stories. As he turns to the middle-class characters of his novels, it seems that education somehow works as an impediment to being landsmen; the elite world of prep schools and Ivy League colleges creates islands of isolated strangers who can’t connect, lonely men who can’t find a landsman, certainly not in a lover or spouse.

  Reading the stories my father wrote when he was a soldier had, for me, the bittersweet poignancy of a Requiem Mass. Something very human bloomed briefly and died,5 and although his work and life passed on to other realms such as those of the prescient, Herrlichkeit Teddy and Seymour, whom we meet walking open-eyed to their deaths, the change to his preoccupation with Übermenschen both in his fiction and in his life left behind no human lap to sit on, no precious walks and talks, soldier to soldier, no warm arms to hold me, no familiar Daddy smell—a mingling of applewood smoke from the fireplace in his study, old woolen sweaters, and his Balkan Sobranie pipe tobacco—to comfort me. When I read his novels, the soldier, the father I knew and loved and admired—no that’s not right—worshiped as a child was missing. It was such a pleasure to discover his old stories, those he said he chose to let “die a natural death” in these old magazines. I read them with affection and recognition: that’s the Daddy I like to remember.

  EARLY IN 1943, Salinger was posted to a cadet classification squadron at a base near Nashville, Tennessee. He wrote to Colonel Baker again to ask his help with Officer Candidate School, telling him that he’d been accepted but still hadn’t been called up. That fall, he was assigned a job in public relations at Patterson Field in Fairfield, Ohio. His orders finally came through, and in October of ’43, he was transferred to Fort Holabird, Maryland, to train as a special agent in counter-intelligence, where he would put to good use his own intelligence and the German and French he’d learned at Valley Forge, and please, God, for the Allies’ sake, no tools.

  A story my father told me many times is about what happened when he went home to say good-bye just before shipping out for England, where he and eight hundred other special agents would receive specific D-Day training and their assignments to fighting units. He didn’t want anyone to accompany him to the ship for an emotional good-bye. He just wanted a quiet leave-taking at home and forbade his mother from coming down to the ship to see him off. Later, as he was marching with his battalion on the way to the ship, he suddenly glimpsed her. She was following along, hiding behind lampposts so he wouldn’t see her.

  While in England, he sold two stories to the magazines about a GI’s last visit home and leave-taking before shipping out. Here, my father gets a chance to “fix” things and rewrite history the way he would have wanted it to happen. And, of course, in one of the great joys of fiction writing, he also gets to control his mother: no more hiding behind lampposts.

  The first story of leave-taking is called “Once a Week Won’t Kill You.”6 We are now in typical Salinger territory: husbands and wives who have no meeting of the minds whatsoever, and the search for a landsman within the man’s boyhood family. The story opens with the man packing to ship out for the war in the morning. Despite his pretty, blond wife’s babbling presence, he is essentially alone. The real connection and important leave-taking is between the man and his aunt, who is his closest relative since his parents died when he was a young boy. She is terrific, one wants to read more about her, but it’s a short story. They have a marvelous conversation, then he has to tell her that he has to go to war. He’s nervous about how she’ll take the news.

  “ ‘I knew you’d have to,’ said his aunt, without panic, without bitter-sentimental reference to ‘the last one.’ She was wonderful, he thought. She was the sanest woman in the world.” The conversation takes a slightly disturbing turn, and as he leaves to go, he makes his wife promise once again to take his aunt to the movies. “Once a week won’t kill you,” he tells her.

  The second story about leave-taking, “Last Day of the Last Furlough,” is much longer, and with a different cast of characters, but in one central way it is the same: the mother, like the aunt, takes the news on the chin. In this story we see the last appearance in his fiction of friendship and brotherhood, a landsmanshaftn of equals beyond the glass confines of one’s own family. I wish that this had survived and flourished in my father’s own life; our life as a family would have been so much richer. This was not to be. Instead, his search for landsmen led him increasingly to relations in two dimensions: with his fictional Glass family, or with living “pen pals” he met in letters, which lasted until meeting in person when the three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood presence of them would, with the inevitability of watching a classic tragedy unfold, invariably sow the seeds of the relationship’s undoing.

  In “Last Day of the Last Furlough,” John F. “Babe” Gladwaller Jr., same rank and serial number (ASN 32325200) as Jerome “Sonny” Salinger, is about to be sent overseas. Babe’s army buddy Vincent Caulfield is visiting. Vincent ha
s just received notice that his kid brother, Holden, the one “who got kicked out of all those schools,” is missing in action. Vincent tells Babe’s ten-year-old sister, Mattie, that he, too, has a sister just her age. Vincent kids around with Mattie in a really nice, funny scene—just the way my father kids around. Later, in Babe’s room, Vincent says:

  “It’s good to see you, Babe. . . . G.I.’s—especially G.I.’s who are friends—belong together these days. It’s no good being with civilians anymore. They don’t know what we know and we’re no longer used to what they know. It doesn’t work out so hot.”

  Babe nodded and thoughtfully took a drag from his cigarette. “I never really knew anything about friendship before I was in the Army. Did you, Vince?”

  “Not a thing.”

  At dinner, Babe lambasts his father for romanticizing war the way they do in the movies and goes into a typical long and emotional Salinger diatribe (for which Babe, again typical of my father, later feels embarrassed). Babe, in a sentiment similar to that expressed by Philly Burns, tells him that war will continue until we stop making it look heroic, “instead of the stupid, bloody mess it really is.”

  Searching for a landsman, Babe goes into Mattie’s room, where she is sleeping, to wake her up and talk to her. In a scene very like Holden waking his sister, Phoebe, who guesses he’s been kicked out of school again, Mattie guesses, correctly, that Babe has received his orders to ship out. Mattie, like the aunt in the previous story, is terrific about it. He kisses her good-night and leaves her room, finally at peace with himself about going to war.

  . . . this is where Mattie is sleeping. No enemy is banging on our door, waking her up, frightening her. But it could happen if I don’t go out and meet him with my gun. And I will, and I’ll kill him. I’d like to come back too. It would be swell to come back. It would be—

  His mother, too, guesses that he is going overseas. She tells him calmly that she is not worried. “You’ll do your job and you’ll come back. I have a feeling.” The story ends with him feeling happy, following her suggestion to wake Vincent and go down to the kitchen for some cold chicken.

  Babe appears again in two more stories, one set on a battlefield in France, the other set just after the war ends and it’s not so swell to be back suffering from “battle fatigue.”7

  Babe found some peace about going to war, as well as some peaceful good-byes. I don’t know how my father felt until he got on board the ship. His bunkmates, he told me, were having a farting contest and laughing like hyenas about it. He lay back on his bunk and sank into utter despair.

  STAFF SERGEANT SALINGER WAS IN England for the next few months occupied in much the same way as is his character Staff Sergeant X, in the story “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor.” The fictional X, like my father, attended a planning and training course for Counter-Intelligence Corps agents in the south of England in preparation for the D-Day invasion. X is sitting in a tea shop, having a lovely conversation with Esmé, a young girl of about thirteen, and her little brother, Charles. When queried, X tells Esmé that he is a writer of short stories by profession. Like my father, X is assigned to the Twelfth Infantry Regiment (combat) of the Fourth Division. “I landed on D-Day, you know,” he’d say to me darkly, soldier to soldier as it were, as if I understood the implications, the unspoken. Although he said it a number of times when I was a child, he never once elaborated beyond the stark statement. I found out, among other facts, in a terrific book by their regimental historian, Colonel Gerden F. Johnson, History of the Twelfth Infantry Regiment in World War II, that it was Utah Beach their regiment hit that day.

  My father’s story “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” goes abruptly silent when Sergeant X leaves England’s shores, the way his saying “I landed on D-Day” stood for a million things unsaid, bodies and body parts strewn across beach and field and town, miles of white crosses, the slaughter and misery of war. In the story, the scene shifts abruptly from pre–D-Day England to somewhere in Germany shortly after VE day (victory in Europe and the surrender of Germany). Staff Sergeant X is sitting on a bed, vomiting into a wastebasket:

  His gums bled at the slightest pressure of the tip of his tongue, and he seldom stopped experimenting; it was a little game he played, sometimes by the hour. He sat for a moment smoking and experimenting. Then, abruptly, familiarly, and, as usual, with no warning, he thought he felt his mind dislodge itself and teeter, like insecure luggage on an overhead rack.

  The war that left him that way is entirely offstage. It’s a tremendously powerful way to tell the reader that something terrible has happened without telling you what. It’s left to your imagination, which for most of us is a pretty spooky place to be left. Especially when you aren’t allowed to ask further questions.

  As I began to fill in the pages that had been crossed out of my own family’s personal history during the war, things my father never told me, and I never asked, I was, once again, rather horrified to find that I shared with many of my peers a general view of our American story that was missing vital pages. Much like the myth of perpetual progress and widening opportunities for all Americans in the twentieth century, I had been taught that we, as a nation, went to war to fight Hitler and the evil values and practices—genocide of the Jews being the most glaring example—for which he stood. I found out, I’m ashamed to say, that in actuality anti-Semitism in America appears to have been at its apogee from 1939 to 1945. It was a real slug in the stomach to find out how many Americans supported the war despite Hitler’s view on the Jews, with which many agreed. In a 1938 poll, for example, taken of Americans about ten days after Kristallnacht, it was found that the majority believed that Jews were “partially or entirely responsible for Hitler’s treatment of them,” and four separate polls revealed that 71 to 85 percent of Americans opposed increasing immigration quotas for refugees. Scores of anti-Semitic leaflets circulated on American military bases stateside. A typical bit of such excreta I came across was allegedly written by a U.S. marine, before he had something useful with which to occupy his time:

  The Parable of the Shekels

  I. And it came to pass that Adolph, Son of Abitch, persecuted the tribes of Judea and there was war.

  II. And when the war was four years, many tribes came to the help of the Jews, but the Jews took up arms not.

  III. They took up arms not lest in so doing they would take from their pockets their hand and it would come to pass that they would lose a shekel.

  IV. And the Gentiles came up in great multitudes from all the lands to fight for the Jews and the Jews lifted up their voices and sang “Onward Christian Soldiers.” We will make the uniforms.

  V. And the Jews lifted up their eyes and beheld a great opportunity and they said unto one another “the time has come when it is good to barter the junk for pieces of silver” and straightaway it was so.

  VI. And they grieved not when a city was destroyed for when a city is destroyed there is junk and where there is junk there are Jews and where there are Jews there are money [sic] [and sick].8

  Such overtly anti-Semitic incidents and leaflets were most prevalent at points of induction.9 Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox and Secretary of War Henry Stimson issued orders forbidding the circulation of such anti-Semitic publications at all naval and military posts. It is hard to outlaw or legislate attitudes, but the experience of service together changed the attitude of many a soldier. When the Army publication Yank magazine asked soldiers, in August of 1945 just before the Japanese surrender, what changes they most wanted to see made in postwar America, the majority of GIs surveyed agreed that “above everything else, the need for wiping out racial and religious discrimination” was their major hope.10 Whether this was due to the experience of Jew and Gentile fighting side by side or to the witnessing “up close and personal” of anti-Semitism put into practice, it is impossible to say. Perhaps it is as my father told me when I was a little girl: “You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how
long you live.”11

  It was particularly depressing to find how much the virtual elimination of the Jewish GI’s story continues to this day in current histories of World War II. Citizen Soldiers, a critically acclaimed book that was on the New York Times best-seller list for many months as I was writing my own book, purports to be the story of the American soldier from D-Day to VE day. The author, Steven Ambrose, is a noted writer of best-sellers—Undaunted Courage and D-Day as well as multi-volume biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon—and founder of the Eisenhower Center and president of the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans. Two years ago, before I asked questions about what things were like in my father’s day, I’m not sure I would have noticed the virtual X-ing out, the elimination by silence, of all but the Gentile GI’s stories. In an otherwise fascinating book, bringing to life the GI’s experience of battle, this stuck in my craw. I’m not speaking of the author’s motivations, but of the effect of “talking that way.” It’s not dissimilar to the tradition of referring to all human beings as “men”: someone’s story gets overlooked, devalued, or silenced. When you’re talking about a war of genocide, something more than being politically correct is at stake when you tell the American citizen soldier’s story in a way that excludes Jews. (He devotes a chapter to the African-American soldier.) Imagine you are a Jewish war veteran, or the surviving friend or relation of a soldier who didn’t happen to be a Christian, and reading the beginning of chapter 9 of Ambrose’s book: