Dream Catcher: A Memoir

by Salinger, Margaret A.

  On those days, melting snow revealed the bodies of both German and American soldiers upon the ground where they had been frozen into weird shapes after they had fallen in the winter battles. Hundreds of dead cattle littered the fields and destroyed vehicles lined the roads along with the carcasses of the horses that had been used to pull enemy supply vehicles. Most of the small towns had been either partially or completely destroyed and the wreckage lay untouched where it fell. Human excreta was deposited in the corners of rooms where the fighting had been at such close quarters that even leaving the buildings was an invitation to death. This part of Germany, just north of the point where the borders of Germany, France and Belgium meet, was the filthiest area the 12th had ever fought through.21

  In April, the Twelfth Infantry Regiment was assigned to “mopping up.” This meant, among other tasks, that all units picked up many prisoners of war in their areas and were constantly alert for resistance from small groups of bypassed enemy. (As a counter-intelligence agent, one of my father’s jobs was the interrogation and processing of POWs and suspects.)

  The last action to be fought by the Twelfth Infantry Regiment in World War II took place May 2, 1945, between Company A and SS troops on Tegernsee. On May 5, the Twelfth Regiment opened its command post in Hermann Göring’s castle at Neuhaus. The area was secured, and the Twelfth began carrying out its occupation duties. Nazi civil authorities often fled the towns as the Allied forces moved in, and local government was in chaos. Thousands of liberated displaced persons, Allied prisoners of war, and German political prisoners posed a threat to the security of the captured areas, and counter-intelligence officers such as Staff Sergeant Salinger were kept extremely busy.

  News of the German surrender reached them on May 8. On the fourteenth of May, the entire Fourth Infantry moved to an area west of Nürnberg in the general vicinity of Ansbach and continued its duties keeping order. Sometime during these next few weeks, my father was taken to a hospital just outside Nürnberg and admitted for battle fatigue. He wrote to Hemingway in July, making light of it, joking about the questions the psychiatrists asked him about his family life and background. What is clear in the letter is that he did take one thing seriously: he was adamant in his resolve to fight any attempt to give him a psychiatric rather than an honorable discharge. He was successful, and the army doctors sent him back to his duties a few weeks later.

  A man should receive a medal of honor, I think, for holding off cracking up until after the war with the Eskimos.22 Sergeant X, too, held off cracking up until the battle was won. At the end of the war, he, like Sergeant Salinger, is newly released from a hospital. He is “a young man who has not come through the war with his faculties intact.” Both sergeants extended their stay after the armistice by signing a six-month civilian contract to help with the de-Nazification of Germany, bringing in suspected Nazis for interrogation and sentencing. Sergeant X is in his room, “and for more than an hour he had been triple-reading paragraphs, and now he was doing it to the sentences.” He opens a book that belonged to a “low-level official in the Nazi Party, but high enough, by Army Regulations standards, to fall into an automatic-arrest category.”

  X himself had arrested her. Now, for the third time since he had returned from the hospital that day, he opened the woman’s book and read the brief inscription on the flyleaf. Written in ink, in German, in small, hopelessly sincere handwriting, were the words “Dear God, life is hell.” Nothing led up to or away from it. Alone on the page, and in the sickly stillness of the room, the words appeared to have the stature of an uncontestable, even classic indictment. . . . [X] wrote down under the inscription, in English, “Fathers and teachers, I ponder ‘What is hell?’ I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” He started to write Dostoevski’s name under the inscription, but saw—with fright that ran through his whole body—that what he had written was almost entirely illegible. He shut the book.

  The change in my father’s handwriting in the letters (which I read in the Library of Congress collection) he wrote to friends and family stateside after his release from the hospital at Nürnberg is truly spooky. His handwriting, almost as distinctive and familiar to me as his face, becomes something totally unrecognizable.

  Sergeant X’s friend, Corporal Z, who like John Keenan, was his “Jeep partner and constant companion” throughout the war, comes in the room. He notices that X’s face is jumping and twitching. Z tells him that he wrote to his girl back home, a psychology major, and told her that X had had a nervous breakdown.

  “You know what she said? She says nobody gets a nervous breakdown just from the war and all. She says you probably were unstable like, your whole goddam life.”

  X bridged his hands over his eyes—the light over the bed seemed to be blinding him—and said that Loretta’s insight into things was always a joy.

  Later, alone, he thinks that there “might be some quick, however slight, therapy in it” to write a letter to an old friend in New York, but his fingers shake so violently he can’t roll a sheet of paper into his typewriter. He knows he should get the vomity wastebasket out of the room, but instead puts his head down and closes his eyes sleeplessly. “A few throbbing minutes later” he opens his eyes and notices a letter he hasn’t opened. It is from Esmé, the young girl he had met in England. It’s a lovely, plain letter much like the one Mattie wrote to Babe, or the girl in Belgium wrote to “Family Bill.” The story ends:

  He just sat with it in his hand for another long period. Then, suddenly, almost ecstatically, he felt sleepy.

  You take a really sleepy man, Esmé, and he always stands a chance of again becoming a man with all his fac—with all his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact.

  * * *

  1. Zooey, p. 140.

  2. “Last Day of the Last Furlough,” Saturday Evening Post, July 15, 1944, p. 26.

  3. When it appeared in the April 13, 1944, issue of the Saturday Evening Post, the editors had taken it upon themselves to change the title from “Death of a Dogface” to “Soft-Boiled Sergeant.” You can imagine how pleased he was about that—and the Norman Rockwell–like drawings that accompanied the story. But a young writer has no control over these things, as my father would, later, when his reputation was established.

  4. “Wake Me When it Thunders” (renamed “Both Parties Concerned” by the Saturday Evening Post, February 26, 1944), came out a few months before “Death of a Dogface.”

  5. Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras und alle Herrlichkeit des Menschen wie des Grases Blumen. Das Gras ist verdorret und die Blume abgefallen—“Then all [the glory of the] flesh is like grass and all godlikeness [the illusion of being as God, or hubris if you like] of men, like the grass’s flower. The grass withers and the bloom falls” (I Peter 1:24, quoted in Brahms, Ein Deutsches Requiem).

  6. Story, November-December 1944.

  7. Today we’d call it post-traumatic stress disorder. They did not mean “tired.”

  8. Lois J. Meltzer, “Anti-Semitism in the United States Army During World War II” (master’s thesis, Baltimore Hebrew College, 1977), p. 101. Quoted in Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism, p. 141.

  9. Ibid., p. 42.

  10. Sociologist E. Digby Baltzell acknowledged that he and many of his fellow naval officers returned home from World War II “far less willing to tolerate the traditional, often dehumanizing, ethnic snobberies of our prewar years” (ibid., p. 151).

  11. As a counter-intelligence officer, my father was one of the first soldiers to walk into a certain, just liberated, concentration camp. He told me the name, but I no longer remember.

  12. Centuries of Christian teachings that the Jews killed our Savior and that Jews suffer because God is punishing them, as a race, for this sin have been rescinded only in the past twenty years or so by prominent Protestant theologians, who say we must stop “bearing false witness against our Jewish neighbors” (Krister Stendhal, Harvard Divinity School). Pope John XXIII in the Second Vatican Council specifically “exonerated” Jews
for Christ’s death, which means it is now against the teachings of the Catholic Church and false dogma to hold that the Jews are responsible for killing Jesus.

  13. My father never mentioned this visit with Hemingway to me, but I read about it in his letters on file at the Library of Congress.

  14. “A Boy in France,” Saturday Evening Post, March 31, 1945, p. 21.

  15. My aunt has said she didn’t notice him dabbling in anything “strange” medically or religiously before the war, nor does any such “abracadabra” appear in his pre-war writings, but I can’t be sure.

  16. Another soldier wrote a letter home voicing a similar despair as he wrote of a buddy’s death: “He wasn’t twenty years old. . . . Shrieking and moaning, he gave up his life on a stretcher. . . . Back in America the race tracks were booming, the night clubs were making record profits, Miami Beach was so crowded you couldn’t get a room anywhere. Few people seemed to care . . . we wondered if the people would ever know what it cost the soldiers in terror, bloodshed, and hideous, agonizing deaths to win the war” (Private Daniel Webster of the 101st, quoted in Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers, p. 417).

  17. Elizabeth Frank, Louise Bogan: A Portrait (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), p. 338.

  18. The Twelfth Infantry Regiment was awarded the Distinguished Unit Citation for its defense of Luxembourg.

  19. Collection of letters of Whit Burnett, Library of Congress.

  20. Ibid.

  21. Colonel Gerdon F. Johnson, History of the Twelfth Infantry Regiment in World War II, p. 309.

  22. “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” title of JDS story in Nine Stories.

  4

  Detached F-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s

  Wild Nights—Wild Nights!

  Were I with thee

  Wild Nights should be

  Our luxury!

  Futile—the Winds—

  To a Heart in port—

  Done with the Compass—

  Done with the Chart!

  Rowing in Eden—

  Ah, the Sea!

  Might I but moor—Tonight—

  In Thee!

  —Emily Dickinson1

  THE WAYS IN WHICH MY father sought to reattach himself and characters to their moorings, before I was born, the ways he found to save them and himself from hell—“the suffering of being unable to love”—is of central interest to me, as his daughter and as a person who also has experienced her own mind “suddenly lurch and teeter like insecure luggage on the overhead rack.” When and how my father and his characters reached out in a moment of personal crisis and re-established connection, or instead, did the reverse and bolted the door, became something I now looked at closely. How my father dealt with the real-life traumas of war, of anti-Semitism, of family; the vicissitudes of suffering, and his attempts at resolution throughout his life and work, began to reveal some familiar patterns.

  I found out that in real life, Sergeant Salinger did not receive a redemptive letter or a hand out of hell from a young girl. Instead, he, like Sergeant X, met a young woman who, like the woman in the story, was a “low-level official in the Nazi party, but high enough by Army Regulations standards to fall into an automatic-arrest category.” Sergeant Salinger, himself, had arrested her. She and Jerry were married by summer’s end.

  Given my father’s sense of duty and honor, as well as his deeply suspicious nature—he was indeed well cast in his role as interrogator—Sylvia, his first wife, must have been, as my mother said, an extraordinary woman. My aunt described Sylvia to me as a tall, thin woman with dark hair, pale skin, and blood-red lips and nails. She had a sharp, incisive way of speaking and was some sort of a doctor. My aunt said, “She was very German,” and gave me a dark look, chin tucked in, eyebrows raised as if she were peering over the top of bifocals and directly into my eyes for emphasis. My father told my mother that Sylvia, in contrast to Claire, was a real woman who knew her own mind and had accomplished something at a young age. He also vilified her as a terrible, dark woman of passion, an evil woman who bewitched him. My mother said he told her that Sylvia hated Jews as much as he hated Nazis, and she let him feel it. Their relationship, he said, was extremely intense, both physically and emotionally. As happened with many wartime marriages, their passion did not survive transplanting to America, where they moved in with his parents. Sylvia went back to Europe for good several months later. Aunt Doris said, “Mother didn’t like her.”

  I knew my father had a war bride whom he jokingly referred to as “Saliva,” instead of Sylvia, but otherwise he was pretty untalkative about his homecoming, scattering a few details such as the hell of his hay fever at the time, as he held a handkerchief to his maddeningly itchy nose and eyes during allergy season each summer. “It was like this only worse over there,” he’d tell me, blowing his nose and digging at his reddened eyes. More of the feelings, rather than the details, emerge in his story “The Stranger” (Collier’s, December 1, 1945) in which he tells us about Babe’s homecoming. Babe is suffering acutely from hay fever and battle fatigue. He is home physically, but can’t make the transition back to civilian life in his mind and emotions.

  You don’t need to be the Regis Professor of Poetry for the poetry of this story to hit you squarely between the eyes. He uses language, here, like Basho’s frog2—a few words, and an image unfurls in the mind and the five senses, like the little clamshells we had when we were kids and you’d drop them, plop, into a glass of water, and the shell would open and a colored paper flower, hidden inside, would unfold and rise blooming, filling the glass.

  Babe’s friend Vincent Caulfield has been killed in action. Babe, unlike Vincent, has made it home alive, and he decides to visit Vincent’s girl, bring her a poem Vincent wrote for her, and to tell her how he died. His sister Mattie, who is still ten years old, as she was in the story “Last Day of the Last Furlough,” set several years before when Babe left for war, accompanies him. He stands at Vincent’s girl’s door thinking that he shouldn’t have come at all.

  The maid answers the door and goes to get Vincent’s girl. While they wait for her in the living room, Babe looks through a pile of records beside the phonograph.

  His mind began to hear the old Bakewell Howard’s rough, fine horn playing. Then he began to hear the music of the unrecoverable years . . . when all the dead boys in the 12th Regiment had been living and cutting in on other dead boys on lost dance floors: the years when no one who could dance worth a damn had ever heard of Cherbourg or Saint-Lô or Hürtgen Forest or Luxembourg.

  Isn’t that just brilliant? She comes in the room and Babe introduces himself. They all go into her bedroom where the light is better. Vincent’s girl and Mattie sit on her bed, Babe in a chair facing them.

  Babe crossed his long legs as most tall men do, laying the ankle on the knee. “I’m out. I got out,” he said. He looked at the clock in his sock, one of the most unfamiliar things in the new, combat-bootless world, then up at Vincent’s girl. Was she real? “I got out last week,” he said.

  He starts to tell her about Vincent’s death, feeling the same urge that Philly Burns did in trying to explain to his wife, Juanita, that guys don’t really die all handsome and Hollywood, the way they do in the movies: it’s a lie, it wasn’t like that, and the lie isn’t fair to the men who suffered. Babe was there when Vincent was blown to pieces by mortar fire. When Vincent’s girl asks Babe what a mortar is, he’s torn between wanting to tell civilians the truth and keeping quiet about the whole damn thing. He gives up and hands her the poem Vincent wrote about her. He starts to apologize, but she tells him she’s glad he came anyway. Babe heads for the door quickly because he, too, is crying. He calms down in the elevator with Mattie, but outside on the street things are worse again:

  The three long blocks between Lexington and Fifth were dull and noonish, as only that stretch can be in late August. A fat, apartment-house doorman, cupping a cigarette in his hand, was walking a wire-haired along the curb between Park and Madison.

  Babe figured
that during the whole time of the Bulge, the guy had walked that dog on this street every day. He couldn’t believe it. He could believe it, but it was still impossible. He felt Mattie put her hand in his. . . .

  “Babe,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Are you glad to be home?”

  “Yes, baby.”

  “Ow! You’re hurting my hand.”

  He relaxes his grip. The story ends, once again, with a hand stretched toward him helping him out of his private hell. He watches his little sister Mattie. “With her feet together she made the little jump from the curb to the street surface, then back again. Why was it such a beautiful thing to see?”3

  Why indeed? Just as the rage expressed by my father—both in his fiction and in real life—at WASP “Society,” country clubs, Ivy League schools, debutantes, and the like, becomes less a personal, private Salinger idiosyncrasy when looked at in the context of his life as a Jew or half-Jew growing up in New York in the twenties and thirties, so, too, I think, his wartime experiences and stories of Staff Sergeant Babe Gladwaller and Staff Sergeant X provide a context for The Catcher in the Rye. I’m not saying that the reader needs to know the background of the story to appreciate the book, I’m saying something much smaller, that I needed to understand the context and the connections to begin to make sense of the frightening, life-or-death emotional intensity evoked in both my dad and his character Holden by things that seem like minor aesthetic issues. I needed to understand how logic and proportion could go so awry sometimes in my relationship with him.