Spent a year in Europe when I was eighteen and nineteen, most of the time in Vienna. . . . I was supposed to apprentice myself to the Polish ham business. . . . They finally dragged me off to Bydgoszcz for a couple of months, where I slaughtered pigs, wagoned through the snow with the big slaughter-master, who was determined to entertain me by firing his shotgun at sparrows, light bulbs, fellow employees.
PAUL ALEXANDER: The apprenticeship was so disturbing to Salinger that as late as 1951 he still complained about it to friends like William Maxwell, who was his first editor at the New Yorker.
WILLIAM MAXWELL: He lived in Vienna, with an Austrian family, and learned some German and a good deal about people, if not about the exporting business. Eventually he got to Poland and for a brief while went out with a man at four o’clock in the morning and bought and sold pigs. He wrote and sent what he wrote to magazines in America—and learned, as well as this ever can be learned, how not to mind when the manuscripts came back to him.
EBERHARD ALSEN: One of the most autobiographical stories in all of Salinger’s fiction is “A Girl I Knew” (1948). The story lightly fictionalizes Salinger’s experiences in Europe before and right after the war, in 1937 and 1945. Like Salinger, the narrator of the story, John, has flunked out of college and his father has decided to apprentice him to his business. He sends him first to Vienna and then to Paris to study German and French. Like young Jerry Salinger, John is very tall—six foot two and a half—chain-smokes, and dabbles at writing stage plays. Also like Jerry Salinger, John falls in love with a Jewish girl in Vienna. Moreover, like Salinger, John returns to Europe during the war as a sergeant in the Counter Intelligence Corps and decides that he would like to go to Vienna after the war. We know about Salinger’s crush on a Viennese girl from a letter to Ernest Hemingway that he wrote in 1945. In that letter he says he hopes to get a chance to return to Vienna because he wants to “put some ice skates on some Viennese girl’s feet again.”
RICHARD STAYTON: That moment when he tied that young lady’s ice skates was one of the most beautiful experiences of his life. Then he experienced horrific warfare, and at the end of the war he discovered that the young lady whose ice skates he put on had been taken to a concentration camp and killed.
J. D. SALINGER (“A Girl I Knew,” Good Housekeeping, February 1948):
Leah was the daughter in the Viennese-Jewish family who lived in the apartment below mine—that is, below the family I was boarding with. She was sixteen, and beautiful in an immediate yet perfectly slow way. She had very dark hair that fell away from the most exquisite pair of ears I have ever seen. She had immense eyes that always seemed in danger of capsizing in their own innocence. Her hands were very pale brown, with slender, actionless fingers. When she sat down, she did the only sensible thing with her beautiful hands there was to be done: she placed them on her lap and left them there. In brief, she was probably the first appreciable thing of beauty I had seen that struck me as being wholly legitimate.
EBERHARD ALSEN: Like the narrator of “A Girl I Knew,” Salinger went back to college after he returned from Europe.
DAVID SHIELDS: In September 1938, Salinger enrolled at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, only fifteen miles from Valley Forge. This became a lifelong pattern: instant nostalgia, the attempt to replicate childhood experience. Salinger also said that he liked Ursinus and its obscurity; he claimed to appreciate that it wasn’t in the Ivy League, the repository of overt snobbery and anti-Semitism. Which is a fascinating reason to like a school: because it’s not like another kind of school. It suggests that you’re more interested in this other kind of school.
FRANCES THIEROLF: When this handsome, suave, and sophisticated New Yorker in the black Chesterfield coat (complete with velvet collar) hit the campus in 1938, we had never seen anything quite like it. . . . Most of the girls were mad about him at once—including me—and the boys held him slightly in awe with a trace of envy thrown in. He declared openly that he would one day produce the Great American Novel. Jerry and I became special friends, mostly, I am sure, because I was the only one who believed he would do it.
DAVID SHIELDS: When Frances Thierolf got married, her name became “Frances Glassmoyer,” the inspiration for the name of one of Salinger’s most memorable fictional characters, Franny Glass.
SHANE SALERNO: Another Ursinus classmate said that Salinger looked on the college and students with “disdain,” that he “seemed dissatisfied” and “never smiled, gave a friendly greeting, or responded to overtures of acceptance.”
ANABEL HEYEN: He felt he had come down from New York and didn’t really fit in. When I saw him around campus, he was very standoffish. It was hard to have a conversation with him. He was almost a recluse.
IAN HAMILTON: Salinger found an outlet for his true interest by writing a column, “The Skipped Diploma: Musings of a Social Soph,” for the Ursinus College newspaper. He reviewed plays, movies, and books and took opportunities to function as a wit at large, often mocking Hollywood stars and lampooning theater productions and radio shows. Salinger’s column of October 10, 1938, includes an especially telling statement concerning his frustrations and deep conflict with his father: “Once there was a young man who was trying to grow a mustache. This same young man did not want to work for his Daddykins—or any other unreasonable man. So the young man went back to College.”
J. D. SALINGER (contributor’s note for “Heart of a Broken Story,” Esquire, September 1941):
On returning to America he went to a small college in Pennsylvania where, he says, he wrote a smug little column for the weekly paper.
DAVID SHIELDS: For his column “The Skipped Diploma,” he used the byline JDS. The column was a vehicle to talk about whatever came to mind: movies, books, train rides, glib satires. His writing already displays talent, rancor, and wit, and he introduces a character named Phoebe.
J. D. SALINGER, (“The Skipped Diploma,” October 10, 1938):
Letter: Dear Mother—You and your husband have failed to raise me properly. I can neither Begin the Beguin nor identify Joe Oglemurphey’s torrid trumpet. In short, college life for me is not too peachy—Dolefully yours, Phoebe Phrosh.
Men bore me; / Women abhor me; / Children floor me; / Society stinks. . . . Book Dept.: For Hollywood’s sake, it would be well for the authoress of Gone with the Wind to rewrite same, giving Miss Scarlett O’Hara either one slightly crossed eye, one bucked tooth, or one size-nine shoe.
J. D. SALINGER (“The Skipped Diploma,” October 17, 1938):
Act One: Franklin:—I hate war. Eleanor hates war. James, Franklin, Elliot, and John hate war. War is hell! . . . Lovelorn Dept.: Question—I go with a boy who is so very confusing. Last Wednesday night I refused to kiss him good-night, and he became very angry. For nearly ten minutes he screamed at the top of his voice. Then suddenly he hit me full in the mouth with his fist. Yet, he says he loves me. What am I to think?? Answer—Remember, dearie. No one is perfect. Love is strange and beautiful. Ardor is to be admired.
J. D. SALINGER (“The Skipped Diploma,” December 12, 1938):
Mr. X: College feller? Us: (cautiously) Yes. Mr. X: Thought so. Heh! heh! Larry—that’s my oldest boy—he goes to college, too. Plays football. You play? Us: N-no. Mr. X: Well, I guess ya need a little weight. Heh! heh! Us: Heh! heh! . . . Mr. X: (after a bit, but with the same determination) Ya really wanna gain some weight, though. Us: (between gritted young, strong teeth) Can you suggest a plan? I refuse to eat breakfast foods. Mr. X: (happily) Well, why don’t ya drop my oldest boy, Larry, a line? He’ll be able to tell ya. Us: (momentarily struck with brilliance) You have been so kind that you don’t deserve to be kept in the dark. The truth is, unfortunately, that for generations our family has suffered from beriberi. Mr. X: (retreating slightly) Oh.
DAVID SHIELDS: Salinger’s voice is already in, if not full cry, beginning cry: his adroit mixture of high and low diction, his eye for satiric detail, his ear for revealing speech. What was still missing, of cou
rse, was what became the signature of his work: a heart in free fall.
—
PAUL ALEXANDER: Early one evening, not too deep into the fall semester, Jerry sat on the bed in the third-floor dormitory room to which he had been assigned without a roommate and spoke, in animated, energetic language, to the group of half a dozen fellow students who had gathered in his room. Tonight Jerry was telling the boys, as he had done on previous occasions, stories about his experiences in Europe. In the claustrophobic dorm room, with its impersonal, industrial feel, Jerry crafted his stories about his voyage to Europe, his adventures in Paris, and the disturbing events he witnessed on his predawn pig-slaughtering expeditions in Poland.
RICHARD DEITZLER: He wasn’t what I’d call social, but he was an interesting person. He was a perfectly normal, attractive young man—an ordinary student. The thing that surprised us, of course, was the way he could tell stories.
DAVID SHIELDS: Salinger told tales and joked about other people, amusing classmates, but when they headed out drinking, he typically stayed in his dorm.
CHARLES STEINMETZ: I was in the same English class with him. We had to write different things—a piece of a description, a scene from a play, a narration. He wrote very well, so well the professor would read his compositions to the class. You could tell even then that he had a talent for writing. But Jerry didn’t enjoy the course, because it wasn’t what he wanted. He told me once, “I’m not satisfied. This is not what I want. . . . Charlie, I have to be a writer. I have to. Going here is not going to help me.” He wanted a course that would teach him to write better and he felt he wasn’t getting it out of this course. He was looking for more of an instructional approach to writing—an analytical approach. This professor just wanted us to write for effect. He didn’t want to break down the process of writing.
SHANE SALERNO: When Salinger heard about a course in Columbia University’s Extension Division that offered just such an approach, he quickly left Ursinus.
RICHARD DEITZLER: He didn’t say goodbye to anyone. He just left [before the start of the second semester of his freshman year]. One day he was there, going to classes, writing for the school newspaper, telling stories to his dorm mates. The next day he was gone.
SHANE SALERNO: Ursinus registrar Barbara Boris later wrote, “Salinger had an average record; he did not ‘flunk out.’ I have no information on why he left the college.”
—
DAVID SHIELDS: In January 1939 Salinger enrolled in two Columbia extension courses: short-story writing and poetry writing. The poetry class was taught by Charles Hanson Towne, whose 1919 poem “Of One Self-Slain” eerily foreshadows many of the key aspects (despair, alienation, suicidal ideation, religion, unfinished work) of Salinger’s life and work to come:
When he went blundering back to God,
His songs half written, his work half done,
What hills of peace or pain he won?
I hope God smiled and took his hand,
And said “Poor truant, passionate fool!
Life’s book is hard to understand:
Why couldst thou not remain at school?”
Salinger’s poem “Early Fall in Central Park,” written for the course, begins, “Slobber and swarm, you condemned brown leaves.” The elegiac note, struck early.
JOHN C. UNRUE: Salinger enrolled in Whit Burnett’s short story class at Columbia University [in spring 1939]. It was a very important move for Salinger. Burnett was a professor at Columbia, but he was also editor of Story magazine.
Whit Burnett, Salinger’s writing teacher at Columbia University.
JAY NEUGEBOREN: Story was started in Vienna in 1931, by Martha Foley, who was then a foreign correspondent, and her husband, Whit Burnett. During their first ten years, they published the very first work of a remarkable coterie of writers: John Cheever, William Saroyan, Erskine Caldwell, Carson McCullers, Jean Stafford.
Burnett and Foley read every submitted story. As Martha always said, “I publish the best stories I can find,” which was tremendously enticing and encouraging for young writers sending their work. Their office also became a writers’ hangout. It was just a little Manhattan storefront, but people like Malcolm Lowry and Nelson Algren would chat with the Burnetts and whoever else crossed the threshold. What seems to me extraordinary is that Martha Foley and Whit could pick out of thousands of stories by these writers and see something that nobody else had seen. These writers were submitting to a variety of magazines, and mostly they were rejected. Story gave many of them their first published start. How do you account for Martha and Whit’s high rate of success? I think you account for it by the fact they truly loved short stories. They had a very simple aim: to publish the best short stories they could find. And that’s what they did.
In that course at Columbia, there would have been a wide range of students: eighteen-year-olds, twenty-one-year-olds, but also thirty-, forty-, fifty-year-old people—businesspeople who wanted to learn how to write. The first semester he was in Whit Burnett’s class, Salinger sat in the back of the room and did nothing.
WHIT BURNETT: There was one dark-eyed, thoughtful young man who sat through one semester of a class in writing without taking notes, seemingly not listening, looking out the window.
J. D. SALINGER (“A Salute to Whit Burnett”):
Mr. Burnett simply and very knowledgeably conducted a short-story course, never mugwumped over one. Whatever personal reasons he may have had for being there, at all, he plainly had no intentions of using fiction, short or long, as a leg up for himself in the academic or quarterly-magazine hierarchies. He usually showed up for class late, praises on him, and contrived to slip out early—I often have my doubts whether any good and conscientious short-story-course conductor can humanly do more. Except that Mr. Burnett did. I have several notions how or why he did, but it seems essential only to say that he had a passion for good short fiction, strong short fiction, that very easily and properly dominated the room. It was clear to us that he loved getting his hands on anybody’s excellent story . . . no particular pets, no fashionable prejudices. He was there, unmistakably, and however reechy it is almost sure to sound, in the service of the Short Story.
JOHN C. UNRUE: Initially, Salinger did not seem special as a writing student, showing little interest or enthusiasm while Burnett spoke.
WHIT BURNETT: He was a silent fellow. Almost never a question. Never a comment. I thought he was nothing.
DAVID SHIELDS: Burnett’s marriage to Martha Foley would end in 1941 and she would leave the magazine. A student in Burnett’s class, Hallie Abbett, whom he would marry and who would work with him on the magazine and various anthologies, described Salinger as a “grave, charming young man with an almost Egyptian quality of reserve.”
JAY NEUGEBOREN: Salinger even apologized to Burnett for being lazy and shut off emotionally during the first semester of the class; he was blocked, he said, because of psychological problems.
JOHN C. UNRUE: Salinger returned the next fall to take the course a second time.
JAY NEUGEBOREN: The second semester, pretty much the same thing.
PAUL ALEXANDER: On September 6, 1940, Salinger told Whit Burnett that he had decided to use the initials “J. D.” instead of “Jerome,” because he was afraid readers would confuse him with the writer Jerome Faith Baldwin. In mid-September Salinger submitted a story called “The Survivors” to Story and Burnett turned it down.
SHANE SALERNO: Burnett read William Faulkner’s “That Evening Sun Go Down” to the class.
J. D. SALINGER (“A Salute to Whit Burnett”):
In class, one evening, Mr. Burnett felt himself in the mood to read Faulkner’s “That Evening Sun Go Down” out loud, and he went right ahead and did it. . . . Almost anybody picked at random from a crowded subway car would have given a more dramatic or “better” performance. But that was just the point. Mr. Burnett very deliberately forbore to perform. He abstained from reading beautifully. It was as if he had turned himself into a reading lamp
, and his voice into paper and print. By and large, he left you on your own to know how the characters were saying what they were saying. You got your Faulkner story straight, without any middlemen between.
JAY NEUGEBOREN: Toward the end of the second semester, Burnett noticed that his silent student was interested. He was engaged. He was animated.
WHIT BURNETT: He suddenly came to life. He began to write. Several stories seemed to come from his typewriter at once, and most of these were published.
PAUL ALEXANDER: Salinger turned in three stories, and Burnett was impressed; they were polished, sophisticated. They were the kind of stories that he didn’t often get from students at that level. Now remember, Salinger was only twenty years old, but even at that point Burnett realized that if Salinger was willing to make the kind of commitment that he would have to make to the craft of writing, his future was limitless. Based on Burnett’s encouragement, Salinger went home and wrote a story called “The Young Folks,” which he submitted to Burnett, and much to Salinger’s surprise, Burnett accepted it for his magazine and paid him twenty-five dollars. It was the first money J. D. Salinger ever made as a writer.
Whit Burnett and his wife, Martha Foley, who together edited Story magazine.
SHANE SALERNO: When, on January 15, 1940, “The Young Folks” was accepted, Salinger wrote gratefully to Burnett, “I’m two cold sweaty hands. . . . I can draw a rejection slip with both hands tied behind me. Writing has been important to me since I was seventeen. I could show you a lot of nice faces I have stepped on to illustrate the point.”
PAUL ALEXANDER: “The Young Folks” has two hallmarks for which Salinger would become famous: an absolute dead-on accurate use of dialogue and a fascination, some might even say obsession, with the thinking and actions of young people.
J. D. SALINGER (“The Young Folks,” Story, March–April 1940):
“What do you do most of the time when you’re home week ends, anyway?” Edna asked.
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