Salinger

by Paul Alexander

  Upon reading the story, the reader learned that it was actually about writing a story. The story-within-the-story concerns Justin Horgenschlag and Shirley Lester, would-be lovers who are supposed to meet in order for the boy-meets-girl story-within-the-story to take place, but who don’t because the author in the story “couldn’t do it with this one.” Instead, in Salinger’s version of the boy-meets-girl story, Justin and Shirley never meet. Shirley goes off to become involved with a man “with whom she [is] in love” but who is not—and never will be—in love with her, while Justin starts dating a woman “who [is] beginning to be afraid she [isn’t] going to get a husband.” In short, the boy and the girl do not fall in love with each other, but with people who do not love them and never will.

  In his fourth published story, Salinger may have exhibited his considerable skill at handling irony and satire, but he also offered his first take on the idea of love, a subject on which he had little experience, except for his relationships with Oona and—perhaps—with the young girl in Vienna. Still, Salinger’s impression of love was clear enough: He rejected it, or, more to the point, he rejected the possibility that a true and reciprocal love could exist. In Salinger’s world, apparently, one did not end up with one’s true love but with someone who had his or her own agenda—and more than a few ulterior motives.

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  But early in 1941, Salinger had found the subject matter about which he was supposed to write. For some time he had been searching for that special character or milieu; as it is with most writers, much of this process of discovery had been unspoken, even accidental, as if he were going about it by instinct. Then, even though he was only in his early twenties, he came to understand that the vehicle through which he was destined to examine the world in such a way as to make his fiction distinctly his own was Holden Caulfield.

  The story was “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” and in it Holden is a kind of teenage Everyman. “While riding on Fifth Avenue buses,” Salinger wrote, “girls who knew Holden often thought they saw him walking past Sak’s or Altman’s or Lord & Taylor’s, but it was usually somebody else.” Holden is a study in ordinariness, as evidenced by the events documented in the story. He comes home from prep school; kisses his mother; meets his girlfriend, Sally Hayes, for a drink and a night on the town dancing; tells Sally he loves her in the taxi just before she tells him she loves him; and goes with her the next night to see the Lunts in O Mistress Mine on Broadway. This is just the sort of life East Side WASPs raised their children to lead, and from all indications Holden is going to do his part to carry on the lifestyle. It’s implied he will finish prep school, go to college, marry Sally Hayes, get a respectable job, buy an appropriate apartment, and have children who will be raised to be like their parents.

  Or at least that’s what Holden is supposed to do. However, Holden is in the middle of an emotional meltdown. Over drinks, he bares his soul to Sally in a long monologue during which he confesses he hates “everything.” “I hate living in New York,” he says. “I hate the Fifth Avenue buses and Madison Avenue buses and getting out at the center door.” That’s not all, either. He hates plays, movies, even fitting sessions at Brooks Brothers. So he tells Sally he wants the two of them to leave New York, go to Vermont or “around there,” and live in a cabin near a brook until the money he has—one hundred and twelve dollars—runs out. Then he’ll get a job up there so they can live in the country. Always the good WASP, Sally cannot begin to understand the motivation behind Holden’s “slight rebellion.” “You can’t just do something like that,” she tells him.

  The story ends with Holden making a drunken telephone call in the middle of the night to Sally to tell her that he will join her to trim her Christmas tree as planned. Even so, there is a disturbed, and disturbing, quality to the conversation. Holden’s line “Trim the tree for ya,” which he repeats over and over like a mantra, has a pleading, desperate quality to it, as if he is asking Sally to give him some sign she still wants him despite what he has told her before. She says what he hopes she will say—yes, she wants him to come trim her tree—but still, that answer doesn’t seem to be enough.

  By inventing Holden Caulfield, Salinger had entered an arena where he would be able to produce significant fiction. Holden was that genuine article—the literary creation that speaks from the soul of the author to the heart of the reader. Salinger had to realize Holden was special because he started another story about him right away. At this rate, perhaps he would end up with a series of stories about Holden. There was one other fact Salinger knew, and it was important. As Salinger would admit years later, Holden was an autobiographical character. Holden’s drunken telephone call to Sally, for example, was based on an episode Salinger himself had lived. In the future Salinger would repeatedly contend that fictitious events had to sound real to the reader. In Salinger’s case, he may have ensured that authenticity by basing his characters on real people, himself among them.

  Salinger wanted to do something with “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” right away. So, at his urging, Olding submitted the story to the New Yorker, and in November, much to Salinger’s surprise, the editors accepted it, probably looking to run it right away since the story is set during the Christmas season. When he got word of the acceptance, Salinger was overjoyed. He had been eager to break into the pages of the New Yorker; at the amazingly young age of twenty-two, he had been successful. Elated, Salinger wrote to William Maxwell, who would be his editor for this story at the magazine. He had another story about Holden, but he was going to hold off on sending it to him, Salinger said. Instead, Salinger told Maxwell, he would try a different story on him—another one about prep-school children, an obese boy and his two sisters.

  As the New Yorker prepared to publish “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and all the warnings Roosevelt had made through the years about radical nationalism growing uncontrollably in parts of Europe and Asia seemed more than justified. Within hours, Roosevelt asked Congress, and Congress agreed, to declare war on Japan. The start of war meant the editors of the New Yorker did not feel it was appropriate to publish—so soon after Pearl Harbor—a story about a neurotic teenage boy whose “slight rebellion” is prompted by the fact that he has become disenchanted with the life he leads as the son in a wealthy family in New York. Holden’s problems were trivial compared to world developments. So the magazine’s editors postponed the publication of Salinger’s story. Although he would not know it at the time, the editors would not publish “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” until after the conclusion of World War II. It would be years, then, before Salinger realized his dream of seeing his work appear in the magazine he respected most.

  However, Salinger had larger concerns than the question of whether the New Yorker was going to run his story. At twenty-two, he was prime material for military service. Earlier in 1941, he had tried to join the Army, but military doctors turned him down because he had a minor heart condition. With the United States about to enter a world war, it was only a matter of time before Salinger’s heart condition would be considered negligible, making him eligible for the newly sanctioned draft.

  Private Salinger

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  A week after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Salinger discovered he still couldn’t join the Army—because of his minor heart condition. He wrote a letter to Colonel Baker at Valley Forge to seek his advice. In his letter Salinger caught up Baker on what he had been doing for the past two years. He had had two years of ROTC and two years of college, he wrote, and was beginning to publish short stories in magazines such as Esquire, Story, Collier’s, and the New Yorker. His inability to join the Army, however, made him feel unnecessary. This said, Salinger asked for guidance from Baker, who, perhaps to Salinger’s surprise, gave it to him in the form of a letter suggesting that Salinger become an Army volunteer. Salinger was apparently coming to the conclusion that military service had to take precedence over everything. But, accordi
ng to an interview he would give much later, before enlisting, he left Manhattan to work for a brief stint as an entertainer on the Kungsholm, an ocean liner that sailed the Caribbean. Salinger held the job only briefly, but the experience left such a lasting impression on him that years afterward he would still remember fondly his one real venture into live show business.

  In the wake of the entrance of the United States into World War II, the government redefined classifications, which allowed Salinger to join the Army. On April 27, 1942, Salinger reported to Fort Dix, where he was given his serial number, 32325200, only to be assigned to the Officers, First Sergeants, and Instructors School of the Signal Corps in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. There, he went to classes in the morning and drilled recruits in the afternoon. During his first weeks in the Army, Salinger did not have the time or the mental concentration to write fiction, although in many ways life in the Army was not completely different from life at Valley Forge. In fact, at the start, Salinger loved the Army so much that he decided he wanted to go to Officer Candidate School. To make such a step, which many recruits could not do, he needed letters of reference from individuals who had known him or worked with him in the past. To write those letters, Salinger solicited Colonel Baker and Whit Burnett.

  Dated June 5, 1942, Baker’s letter was gushing. “I am of the opinion,” Baker wrote, “that [Salinger] possesses all of the traits and character which will qualify him as an outstanding officer in the Army. Private Salinger has a very attractive personality, is mentally keen, has above-average athletic ability, is a diligent worker and thoroughly loyal and dependable . . . I believe he would be a genuine credit to the country [as an officer].” Burnett’s letter, dated July 1, was more guarded. “I have known Jerry Salinger, who has taken work under me at Columbia University, for three years,” Burnett wrote, “and he is a person of imagination, intelligence, and capable of quick and decisive action. He is a responsible individual and it seems he would be a credit to an officer’s rank if he sets his mind in that direction.” If he sets his mind in that direction—it was the sort of phrase that cuts both ways, suggesting, as it does, that if he did not set his mind “in that direction” he might not be a credit to the officers’ rank.

  In the early summer of 1942, Salinger was turned down for Officer Candidate School. By July 12, the date he wrote to Burnett to thank him for accepting “The Long Debut of Lois Taggett” for Story, Salinger knew he had not been chosen. Instead he was going to be sent to Governor’s Island, where he would take exams to be transferred to the Army Aviation Cadets. That transfer came through, and by the end of the summer he was assigned to the post of Army Aviation Cadets instructor at the Army Air Force Basic Flying School in Bainbridge, Georgia.

  In September, as he carried on a correspondence with Oona, whose absence from his life only proved to him how much he loved her, he wrote to Burnett from Bainbridge. He may have been in the land of Faulkner and Caldwell, he said, but he would rather have been slightly north of where he was—about a thousand miles north! It was just too slow and too sticky for him down South. He was not so lucky, of course. Despite his unhappiness with the location, he remained in Georgia for a while. He was there when he received his author’s copy of the September-October edition of Story, which included, much to his delight, “The Long Debut of Lois Taggett.”

  “[H]e is one of many of ‘our boys’ who are doing an important job and we are rooting for all of them,” read Story’s contributors’ note about Salinger. “He is a native New Yorker, twenty-three years old, and his first story ‘The Young Folks’ appeared in the March-April, 1940, issue of Story.” Earlier in the note, the editors included an excerpt from a letter Salinger had written to them. He was a member of the Officers, First Sergeants, and Instructors School of the Signals Corps, he said, and, in part because the other soldiers in his tent were always listening to the radio, he hadn’t “written a line” since he was inducted into the Army.

  He may have stopped writing for the time being, but he had not stopped publishing, as evidenced by “The Long Debut of Lois Taggett.” Set in the privileged world of Manhattan’s high society, where coming-out balls at the Hotel Pierre, nights at the Stork Club, and seasonal trips to Rio were considered essential occurrences, the story traces the eventful yet oddly empty life of Lois Taggett. Specifically, Lois marries “a tall press agent named Bill Tedderton,” a man with a penchant for physically abusing her (he burns her hand with a cigarette on one occasion, then crushes her bare foot with his brassie on another). She divorces Bill in Reno (where else?) only to remarry someone named Carl Curfman, “a thick-ankled, short young man who always wears white socks because colored socks irritate his feet.” She then suffers an unspeakable tragedy when the child—a boy—she has with Carl “toss[es] peculiarly in his sleep [one night] and a fuzzy woolen blanket snuff[s] out his little life.” Of the stories Salinger had published so far, “The Long Debut of Lois Taggett” was the most bleak and pessimistic. It seemed to say that, above all else, life is defined by loveless unions and random acts of tragedy. The negative view of marriage was especially alarming coming from an author so young, especially from someone who was then in love himself. Did Salinger believe that his love for Oona, no matter how strong it might have been, was doomed to fail?

  On December 12, 1942, Salinger published “Personal Notes on an Infantryman” in Collier’s. Like “The Hang of It,” his short short story that had run in the magazine a year and a half earlier, “Personal Notes” used as source material life in the military and relied on an O. Henry–style ending. An unnamed first-person narrator recalls how a middle-aged father joins the Army to avenge his son, also a member of the Army, who had been severely wounded at Pearl Harbor (he lost an arm). It is not until the story’s conclusion that the reader learns the narrator is talking about his own father who wants to avenge the wounding of his son, the narrator’s brother.

  Despite the subject matter of the story, despite the fact that the story’s main throughline concerns a father driven by the rage he suffers over his gravely injured son, the story still has a feel of innocence to it. The narrator has a “thrill” when his father says he wants to see action, since the son admires his father’s desire for revenge. Both father and son feel the kind of blind emotional glee experienced by any patriot. The father’s proposed act of aggression is deemed worthy of praise and valor; no consideration is given to the possibility that the father himself might be killed or wounded or emotionally disturbed as a result of going to wan Instead, in “Personal Notes on an Infantryman,” the characters celebrate the glory of the military and battle. In its own way, the story was as much pure propaganda as the movies put out by Hollywood at the time and the disinformation then being released by the U.S. government. In time, however, Salinger would make a complete reversal on the topics of the military, war, and all related issues, once he had endured one of the worst experiences of his life—live combat.

  During that year, 1942, Salinger sold another story, “Paula,” to Stag magazine, but it was never published. Still, Salinger was encouraged by the story’s sale. Then, in late 1942, he was given more reassurance when Burnett wrote to Olding to tell her he wanted to see a novel from Salinger. “I am very much interested in Salinger’s turning his hand to a novel, if he is not too busy,” Burnett wrote. “I have watched his developments since he was in my class at Columbia and I wish you would sound him out about a book for the Story Press–Lippincott imprint.” Not too long after getting this note, Salinger wrote back to Burnett to tell him that, while he was trying to find a way to write stories again, Army life would not allow him to work on a piece of fiction for a number of days running, something he would have to do to write a novel. Maybe he would try the novel once he found himself in an environment more conducive to writing.

  But Salinger had other concerns. He had been stationed first in New Jersey and then in Georgia, so he had not been able to spend any time with Oona since entering the Army. He had written her long, passionate, st
rangely morose letters, and she had answered them all, but, as the year progressed, Oona must have lost interest in Salinger, for she decided to move from New York to Los Angeles, where her mother lived with her new husband. This marked the end of Salinger’s romance with Oona. It was, at least, the second time a serious romance had ended for Salinger. The first had been with the girl in Vienna. Oona and the Viennese girl were about the same age—their mid- to late teens—when Salinger met them although he had aged by seven years. Indeed, he was twenty-three to Oona’s sixteen. In the future, while he continued to mature, the girls on whom he would focus his affections and those whose lives he described in his stories would remain approximately the same age—the age of both Oona and the girl he knew in Vienna.

  In the early part of 1943, while still stationed in Georgia, Salinger wrote to Burnett saying that within the last couple of weeks he had sold a story called “The Varioni Brothers” to the Saturday Evening Post—the first time he had made a sale to that magazine, which at the time had one of the largest circulations in the country. If he kept making money as he was now doing, Salinger said, he planned on getting married. Interestingly, Salinger did not say he wanted to marry Oona O’Neill, but instead a girl he had dated before he entered the Army, who attended Finch Junior College. Perhaps Salinger was merely trying to save face with Burnett, who may have known that Salinger had once dated Oona, because by then, the early months of 1943, it was widely known that Oona was having an affair with Charles Chaplin, the legendary Hollywood actor and director, who was fifty-four years old when he first met Oona.