Salinger

by David Shields

  MARK HOWLAND: In so many of Salinger’s stories and novellas, the parents are effectively absent. We hear that there’s so much love in these [Glass] stories, but we never meet Les, and we never see Les and Bessie, the patriarch and matriarch, interacting in any way.

  SHANE SALERNO: Shortly after his bar mitzvah, Jerry and Doris were informed that Miriam was not born Jewish. The Salingers celebrated both Christmas and Chanukah.

  JEAN MILLER: I think he had a lot of trouble with his father. He never told me his father was in the meat business. He always told me his father was in the cheese business, and his father very much wanted him to join him in the cheese business, which he had no intention of doing, and I think that caused a lot of friction.

  He wasn’t getting his father’s approval. That brings me back to Jerry saying in a letter, “Sometimes you have to rely on your own approval. Sometimes you’ll never get approval from people. It’ll either come very late or never at all.” I’m certain he was talking about his father. He told me the bare outline of how his father wanted him to go into this business. How he was not going to do that. How his father thought it was ridiculous that he was going to write. How his mother thought it was fine. That Jerry could do anything he set his mind to, according to his mother. His mother approved of everything he did. He never asked me to meet them. He never talked about defying his father as a youth. He never talked about those years.

  DAVID SHIELDS: Throughout his life and writing career, Salinger and his alter egos (Holden, Buddy, et al.) rail against the hypocrisies of the bourgeoisie. A likely genesis was the criminal behavior of the J. S. Hoffman Company.

  SHANE SALERNO: Sol Salinger was vice president of J. S. Hoffman when the company was indicted for violations of U.S. antitrust laws and price-fixing. In March 1940 the company was charged with conspiracy to monopolize the supply of “foreign-type cheese” made in the United States. Later that year the Federal Trade Commission issued an order to the company to “cease and desist from fixing or maintaining” prices that were offered to Wisconsin producers of Swiss and limburger cheese.

  In 1941 a federal judge accused Hoffman of “knowingly and continuously” being “engaged in conspiracy to fix prices to be paid at cheese factories . . . during a period of approximately eight years [i.e., all of J. D. Salinger’s Park Avenue childhood]. As a result of this conspiracy, the defendants suppressed the competition among themselves.” In 1942 a federal grand jury charged Hoffman with “conspiracy to fix prices of American and brick cheeses.”

  Sol Salinger’s and Hoffman’s legal troubles continued. In September 1944 Hoffman pleaded no contest and paid a fine of $2,000 for conspiracy to fix the price paid by dealers of “foreign-type cheeses” manufactured in Wisconsin. And later that year Hoffman agreed to stop using insignia that implied their Swiss cheese was imported from Switzerland.

  To the oversensitive son of a judgmental father who presented himself as an upholder of all things conventional and respectable, such misconduct must have landed with the force of revelation. Indeed, Salinger once referred to his father as a “crook,” according to one of our interviewees.

  JOHN C. UNRUE: There was an estrangement between Jerry and his father. He commented far less about his mother. He once joked, “My mother walked me to school until I was twenty-six years old. Typical of mothers.”

  JOYCE MAYNARD: Jerry told me almost nothing about his family. There were no photographs of him as a boy, of his family, of his sister. There was nothing.

  LEILA HADLEY LUCE: I asked him if Franny and Zooey was autobiographical, if he had brothers and sisters, and if Bessie was modeled on his mother. He was totally evasive.

  DAVID SHIELDS: Salinger’s daughter, Margaret, points out that especially when growing up, Salinger was very conflicted about being half-Jewish, not because of his beliefs but because he was in a difficult social position. Many people in the 1940s held an open bias against Jews; the Ivy League, for instance, restricted the number of Jews they would accept. Being embraced by high society required not just money, education, and connections but also gentile status. As Salinger grew older, he frequently wanted what he claimed to despise: money, interest from Hollywood, the stamp of approval from the Ivy League. The wires got crossed from the very beginning.

  CHILDHOOD FRIEND: He wanted to do unconventional things. For hours, no one in the family knew where he was or what he was doing. He just showed up for meals. He was a nice boy, but he was the kind of kid who, if you wanted to have a card game, wouldn’t join in.

  —

  ERNEST HAVEMANN: [Salinger] was anything but a prodigy; he struggled along painfully in the New York City elementary schools. He was known as Sonny . . . in those days.

  MARK HOWLAND: Salinger was a terrible student. His grades were atrocious.

  JOHN SKOW: Unlike Zooey and the rest, [Salinger] was anything but a Quiz Kid. His grades at public schools[, which he attended through eighth grade on] Manhattan’s Upper West Side,] were mostly B’s, but arithmetic baffled him. The tall, skinny boy had a better time of it at Camp Wigwam in Harrison, Maine, where, at eleven, he played a fair game of tennis and made friends readily.

  DAVID SHIELDS: The camp was attended by upper-middle-class Jewish children.

  EBERHARD ALSEN: Young Jerry Salinger was a good mixer and participated fully in the camp’s activities; he even helped put on a play.

  ERNEST HAVEMANN: He was interested in dramatics as a boy: the 1930 annual of Camp Wigwam . . . listed him as everybody’s “Favorite Actor.”

  PAUL ALEXANDER: In 1932, Sol Salinger set up an interview for his son at McBurney Preparatory, an exclusive private school on West 63rd Street on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Records suggest that at that interview Sonny was anything but impressive. Awkward and ambivalent, he created the impression of being what he was—a distracted, unfocused, smart-alecky kid who had no idea of what he wanted to do with his life. During the enrollment interview at the prep school, Sonny flippantly stated that he was interested in two subjects: “drama and tropical fish,” demonstrating a hint of his defensive attitude.

  Salinger at McBurney Prep School.

  SHANE SALERNO: Salinger attended McBurney for his freshman and sophomore years.

  ERNEST HAVEMANN: His record as a freshman shows an IQ of 111, a shade above average, and grades of 80 in English, 77 in biology, 66 in Algebra, and 66 in Latin.

  PHOEBE HOBAN: Salinger was a poor student. McBurney’s files also show that Salinger shared some interests with Holden. He managed the fencing team, acted in school plays (often portraying women), and worked on the school newspaper, the McBurneian.

  DAVID SHIELDS: A review in the school paper of a play called Mary’s Ankle noted, “Some think Jerome Salinger gave the best performance.”

  SHANE SALERNO: Accused of being “hard-hit” by adolescence and not knowing the meaning of the word “industry,” Salinger flunked out of McBurney in spring 1934. He performed no better at a private school, Manhasset, on Long Island.

  HARVEY JASON: Salinger’s father decided that his son needed structure, and he was whisked away to a military school.

  Salinger, second row, second from left, Valley Forge Military Academy.

  SHANE SALERNO: Sol initiated contact with Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania, but he didn’t accompany his son to the interview. Many people speculate that Sol didn’t attend the interview to prevent his son’s being rejected due to anti-Semitism.

  DAVID SHIELDS: Salinger’s mother was extremely overprotective. When Salinger’s own daughter was being sent off to boarding school at twelve, Salinger mentioned how eager he had been to get away from his mother’s blanketing warmth when he went to boarding school. His mother took him to the Valley Forge entrance interview. He was accepted, enrolled a few days later, and spent his junior and senior years there.

  WILLIAM MAXWELL: At the age of fifteen, Salinger was sent to military school, which he not very surprisingly detested.

  LEILA HADLEY LUCE: He did say th
at he’d gone to a military school and, strangely enough, he said he liked it.

  SHANE SALERNO: One can easily imagine Salinger sincerely believing both sentiments: proving his artistic bona fides to Maxwell by condemning military school and demonstrating that he was a hail-fellow-well-met by telling a date that he loved it.

  DAVID SHIELDS: His sister, Doris, still called him “Sonny,” but everyone else he asked to call him “Jerry.” “J.D.” was too formal, and “David” was too Jewish.

  THE NEW YORK TIMES: (May 19, 1935) Miss Doris Jane Salinger, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Sol Salinger of 1133 Park Avenue, was married to William Seeman Samuels, son of Mrs. Maurice S. Samuels and the late Mr. Samuels, yesterday at the home of her parents. The ceremony was performed by Dr. John Lovejoy Elliott in the presence of relatives.

  MARK HOWLAND: Valley Forge was a good place for Salinger because it got him out of New York and away from his father. A military school is a very structured environment. And at that time in his life, that seemed to be something that he needed and wanted.

  DAVID SHIELDS: He was a man who hated ever being told what to do by anyone ever, and Valley Forge Military Academy was very strict, and yet he thrived here. He loved military school and, later, the military. He would do anything he had to do to become a writer, and he knew serving in the military would help him burn down to the ground the Park Avenue apartment in which he grew up. He wanted experience. He had no idea what it would cost him.

  SHANE SALERNO: Salinger took all the required courses and participated in many extracurricular activities, such as ROTC and Glee Club, but his major love on campus was Mask and Spur, the drama club. He acted in every play in his two years there, most of the time playing the role of women, which by then was nothing new to him. He had played women in many, many plays.

  One of his classmates owns a Crossed Sabres yearbook in which, instead of signing his name, Salinger signed the names of the characters he had played that year. He wasn’t Jerome Salinger; he wasn’t Sonny Salinger; he was a series of characters in a variety of plays, and that’s how he wanted to be known to his classmates.

  Salinger signed this Valley Forge yearbook with the names of the characters he portrayed in various plays.

  PAUL ALEXANDER: As a devoted member of the Mask and Spur Dramatic Club, Jerry appeared in R. C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End, playing the part of Young Raleigh.

  SHANE SALERNO: His first year, he was a member of the staff of Crossed Sabres, the school yearbook; the second year, when he edited Crossed Sabres, it had photographs of Salinger in theatrical costume and in military uniform, including one of him on the opening pages. On one page, he tries to predict what all of his classmates will be doing in several years; he predicts that he’ll be a great playwright and that one of his classmates will be playing strip poker with Mahatma Gandhi. Typical Salinger, mixing up sex, games, and celebrity.

  PAUL ALEXANDER: Things began to go well for Jerry at Valley Forge, where besides being a member of Mask and Spur, the Glee Club, and the Noncommissioned Officers Club, he joined the Aviation Club and the French Club.

  HARVEY JASON: Valley Forge Military Academy is important for two reasons: number one, that’s where Salinger really got his act together; and number two, that’s where Salinger began to write.

  EBERHARD ALSEN: Classmates remember that after lights out he would always be writing by the light of a flashlight under his bed covers.

  Salinger at Valley Forge Military Academy.

  SHANE SALERNO: From Valley Forge he gained a lot of discipline, and he learned French and German, which would help him tremendously during his service in the Army and the CIC. He also came away from Valley Forge with a passion for both acting and writing.

  BEN YAGODA: In high school Salinger announced that his ambition was to succeed Robert Benchley as the theater critic for the New Yorker. Once he decided he wanted to be a writer, it wasn’t much of a leap for him to covet publication in [his favorite magazine]. In the early ’40s it had a cult following; it was read by literary insiders and sophisticates. You acquired a WASP badge of honor by being a New Yorker reader.

  DAVID SHIELDS: His goal in life at fifteen was to write for the New Yorker. The searing ambition for the boy in full flight from Park Avenue was to be published in the house organ of Park Avenue.

  SHANE SALERNO: Salinger became close friends with his Valley Forge roommates—William Dix, whom Salinger called “the best and the kindest,” and Richard Gonder, who remembered Salinger as being “condescending but loving.”

  DAVID SHIELDS: Salinger’s humor already had an edge. The cadets received red merits on their caps; when Jerry’s mother visited, he told her the badges were a punishment for swearing.

  RICHARD GONDER: Jerry’s conversation was frequently laced with sarcasm about others and the silly routines we had to obey and follow at school. The school in those days was on a strictly military basis: up at six, endless formations, marching from one activity to another, meals and classes at set hours, taps at ten. Jerry did everything he could do not to earn a cadet promotion, which he considered childish and absurd. His favorite expression for someone he didn’t care for was “John, you really are a prince of a guy.” What he meant by this, of course, was “John, you really are an SOB.” Jerry and I hated the military aspects of the school. Everything was done in a row, and at fifteen you don’t want to do things in a row.

  Jerry was the delight of the English teachers, but he got only passing marks in his other subjects. He had a great sense of humor and was more sophisticated than the rest of us. He would read [us] the letters he sent home to his mother, whom he was very close to, and we were all astonished. He was very slight in build because he hadn’t shot up yet, and he was worldly as far as his mind was concerned. He was a rather nice-looking guy. I liked him immensely. I enjoyed his wit and humor. He was so sure of himself as far as his writing went. He knew he was good.

  JAMES LUNDQUIST: One of his classmates at Valley Forge, Alton McCloskey . . . did remember going along with Salinger to hit the local beer taps after lights out at the academy.

  SHANE SALERNO: Other modest examples of Salinger’s prep school rebellion included stealing off campus now and then for a swim on private property or breakfast in town.

  JAMES LUNDQUIST: As literary editor of Crossed Sabres, the school yearbook, he wrote a poetic tribute to the school that is still sung at Last Parade.

  J. D. SALINGER (Valley Forge Class Song, 1936):

  The last parade, our hearts sink low:

  Before us we survey—

  Cadets to be, where we are now

  And soon will come their day.

  Though distant now, yet not so far,

  Their years are but a few.

  Aye, soon they’ll know why misty are

  Our eyes at last review.

  The lights are dimmed, the bugle sounds

  The notes we’ll ne’er forget.

  And now a group of smiling lads:

  We part with much regret.

  Goodbyes are said, we march ahead

  Success we go to find.

  Our forms are gone from Valley Forge

  Our hearts are left behind.

  SUBHASH CHANDRA: Salinger spent two years at Valley Forge and graduated in 1936, securing his only diploma. His final grades there . . . were: English: 88; French: 88; German: 76; History: 79; and Drama: 88.

  Salinger’s graduation from Valley Forge; he is second from left.

  DAVID SHIELDS: Colonel Milton G. Baker—Valley Forge’s superintendent, an aggressive fund-raiser and promoter—would become the model for the headmaster of Pencey in The Catcher in the Rye.

  EBERHARD ALSEN: There are many parallels between Salinger’s experiences at Valley Forge and Holden Caulfied’s experiences at Pencey Prep: Being managers of the fencing team and losing the team’s equipment on the subway. In The Catcher in the Rye, James Castle, harassed by bullies, jumps to his death.

  SHANE SALERNO: At Valley Forge, the student who fell o
ff the roof above Salinger’s dorm was named William Walters.

  EBERHARD ALSEN: Also, both Salinger and Holden are six feet two and a half and both are loners.

  —

  SHANE SALERNO: Salinger enrolled as a freshman at New York University, Washington Square College, for the 1936–37 academic year.

  PAUL ALEXANDER: Complicating Salinger’s return to New York was his dismay at having to live at home again. Herbert Kauffman, a friend from military school, stayed in the Salinger home for a time and remembered heated arguments between Jerry and his father. However, Sol was not the belligerent one; Kauffman said that it was Jerry who was sarcastic and unfair to his father. Sol wasn’t insensitive to Jerry; he just didn’t want him to become a writer. In the midst of the Great Depression, Solomon felt that the profession of neither writer nor actor would do his son any good. Nonetheless, Jerry and his friend Herb made a stab at being actors, going from theater to theater hoping for a big break.

  MARK HOWLAND: The professions that Jerry was interested in were acting and writing, neither of which were legitimate fields, according to his father.

  SHANE SALERNO: Salinger didn’t “apply himself” and dropped out in the spring. His father couldn’t have been too happy, especially when Salinger then took a job that summer aboard a Caribbean cruise ship while America was muddling through the Depression.

  PAUL ALEXANDER: When nothing panned out, Jerry either agreed to or was pressured to accompany his father to Europe to learn the family business.

  SHANE SALERNO: Salinger spent eight months in Europe in ’37 and ’38, mainly in Vienna, learning his father’s meat-and-cheese business and writing advertising copy. Sol also thought his son’s rudimentary high school knowledge of German and French might make him useful as a translator for the company.

  DAVID SHIELDS: In a contributor’s note to “The Heart of a Broken Story,” published in Esquire in September 1941, Salinger mentions that when he was in Vienna he won “high honors in beer hoisting.”

  J. D. SALINGER (contributor’s note for “Once a Week Won’t Kill You,” Story, November–December 1944):