J. D. SALINGER (contributor’s note to Story, November–December 1944):
I’m twenty-five, was born in New York, am now in Germany with the Army. I used to go pretty steady with the big city, but I find that my memory is slipping since I’ve been in the Army. Have forgotten bars and streets and buses and faces; am more inclined, in retrospect, to get my New York out of the American Indian Room of the Museum of Natural History, where I used to drop my marbles all over the floor. . . . Am still writing whenever I can find the time and an unoccupied foxhole.
JOHN C. UNRUE: Salinger is reported to have continued writing, not with indifference to the casualties, but with a very great focus on his art—gotten under a table to write during times of attacks because he was intent on finishing something, or perhaps starting something.
DAVID SHIELDS: Salinger took his typewriter on his jeep and would sit in a foxhole and just pound away. Werner Kleeman would watch Salinger write his stories and voraciously read the magazines his mother mailed to him. The two men, both in their mid-twenties, would walk up the hill to the mess hall together. The duo went out on the same boat for training maneuvers and were frequently in “tough spots” surrounded by German artillery fire, Kleeman later told a journalist.
WERNER KLEEMAN: In those days, he was very normal, except that he would never let anybody read his letters home and always forged the signature of a censoring officer.
J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Elizabeth Murray, August 1944:
I can’t remember very acutely what happened in the early weeks. I can remember lying in ditches, face in the dirt, trying to get the maximum protection out of me hat. Stuff like that. But I can’t remember the intensity of the early frights and panics. And that’s nice.
J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Frances Glassmoyer, August 9, 1944:
I met and have had a couple of long talks with Ernest Hemingway. He’s extremely nice and completely unpatriotic. Sitting in my jeep as I write this. Chickens and pigs are walking around in an unbelievably uninteresting manner.
I dig my fox-holes down to a cowardly depth. Am scared stiff constantly and can’t remember ever having been a civilian.
J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Whit Burnett:
You never saw six-feet-two of muscle and typewriter ribbon get out of a jeep and into a ditch as fast as this baby can. And I don’t get out until they start bulldozing an airfield over me.
SHANE SALERNO: Diving out of a jeep under sniper fire, Salinger broke his nose and never got it fixed.
—
DAVID SHIELDS: Salinger needed war, the experience of war, to become a better writer, and he was becoming a more substantial and more serious writer, almost literally story by story. It was all one big bloody mess in his mind and psyche—the war and the writing and the surviving and the survivor’s guilt and the artist’s guilt and the ecstasy of artistic creation. He was a twenty-five-year-old ghost, looking for rebirth, placing stamps on envelopes sent stateside. Writing about the war was the only way for Salinger to survive the war. He was seeking oblivion, but he was also seeking fame.
Everything changes after D-Day; what Salinger pretended to know before he now knows viscerally and conveys with increasing emotional power. He’s learning to aim the gun at himself.
In late 1944, his OCS rejection still stings. In “Once a Week Won’t Kill You,” a soldier’s wife says to him, “I wish you’d phone that man with the thing on his face. The Colonel. In Intelligence and all. I mean you speak French and German and all. He certainly could get you at least a commission. I mean you know how miserable you’ll be just being a private or something. I mean you hate to talk to people and everything.”
“A Boy in France,” which was published in March 1945, is no longer merely entertainment; this is writing. After a “long, rotten afternoon” of combat, Babe Gladwaller finds a blood-soaked foxhole and tries to go to sleep but is close to shell shock: “I’ll open the window, I’ll let in a nice, quiet girl—not Frances, not anyone I’ve ever known—and I’ll bolt the door. I’ll ask her to walk a little bit in the room by herself, and I’ll look at her American ankles, and I’ll bolt the door. I’ll ask her to read some Emily Dickinson to me—that one about being chartless—and I’ll ask her to read some William Blake to me—that one about the little lamb that made thee—and I’ll bolt the door. She’ll have an American voice, and she won’t ask me if I have any chewing gum or bonbons, and I’ll bolt the door.” When U.S. soldiers in Vietnam saw death in its starkest form, they would often say, “There it is.” For Salinger, there it is.
Regarding “Elaine,” which was published just after “A Boy in France,” Salinger wrote to Burnett that it was about “the beginning of the end of beauty; and that’s where the war starts, I guess.” The prewar, Stork Club, wise-guy Salinger is now MIA. In “This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise,” Salinger’s and Holden’s bodies are missing, breaking down, going silent: “Drenched to the bone, the bone of loneliness, the bone of silence, we plod back to the truck. Where are you Holden? Never mind the missing stuff. Stop playing around. Show up. Show up somewhere. Hear me? It’s simply because I remember everything. I can’t forget anything that’s good, that’s why.”
Which is the precise pivot to the postwar art lesson Salinger will spend his life trying to teach himself and the world. In “The Stranger,” published in December 1945, “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? . . . 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. She was talking a blue streak.” Only the child can touch the despair burned into the postwar veteran’s flesh and mind without hurting him. “His mind began to hear the old Blakewell Howard’s rough, fine horn playing. Then he began to hear the music of the unrecoverable years; the little unhistorical, pretty good 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.” Salinger’s 12th Regiment was being decimated by the war: because of such pain, he will thereafter seek unity in all things.
Conversation with Salinger #2
The road to Salinger’s house and his mailbox, photographed by Ted Russell for Life magazine in 1961.
MICHAEL McDERMOTT: Very few photographs have been taken of Salinger. In 1960 Newsweek was the first magazine to really look deeply into him. They hired a local photographer, who tried to get a photograph of him. The photographer parked his car near Salinger’s house and was ready to ambush him; lo and behold, Salinger and his daughter—I think she was about four years old at the time—were walking down the road. The photographer walked up to Salinger, introduced himself instead of just grabbing the shot, and melted in his presence. The photographer said Salinger was so polite that he felt ashamed telling him he was in Cornish to take a picture of him for Newsweek. Salinger thanked the photographer for not trying to sneak a picture of him and then said, “My method of work is such that any interruption throws me off. I can’t have my picture taken or have an interview until I’ve completed what I set out to do.” That’s a remarkable statement, and the photographer left without getting the picture.
MARC WEINGARTEN: There was a bounty on Salinger’s head. Everyone wanted a photograph of this guy, and no one could get it. Time tried. Newsweek tried repeatedly. Nothing. Finally, a photographer at Life magazine named Ted Russell was given the assignment and a deadline of three days to get a photo of Salinger or pack it up and come home.
TED RUSSELL: I was a Life photographer and had been assigned by Life to shoot at the U.N. the week in the fall of 1961 that Dag Hammarskjöld, the Un
ited Nations secretary general, was killed in a plane crash in the Congo. I got a phone call from an editor at Life asking me to leave and go up to New Hampshire and shoot J. D. Salinger. I didn’t know much about him at that time. I hadn’t read Catcher in the Rye. It became well known when I was in Korea [during the Korean War]. I wasn’t that familiar with him or his books, or of the fact that he was supposedly a famous recluse.
[The editor at Life] said that he hadn’t been photographed for a decade, and he was very reclusive. She said if you get a picture of him I’ll eat my hat, so that was something of a challenge. I went up there and did my best to get a picture of this reclusive man. The editors put a three-day limit on the job. I was being paid by the day, a hundred a day. And they said go up there and hang out; if it’s more than three days, forget about it.
The editor gave me some written notes. The Life people were very thorough in their research; they gave me very specific directions on how to find him: go over the covered wooden bridge and drive a mile and a half, take the left-hand fork to the dirt road, et cetera, et cetera. They described the house as being hidden away in this wooded area.
I followed those very well-researched directions in the car I rented. I saw the Salinger mailbox they described, with his name on it. I drove past the house and parked a few hundred yards down the road. I tried to be as unobtrusive and discreet as possible. You couldn’t exactly walk down that dirt road with six cameras hanging around your neck. I put my camera in a shopping bag. I looked like a regular guy.
I found a spot with underbrush that provided me a hiding place. Fall hadn’t set in yet, and there was plenty of underbrush that gave me good cover. The challenge was not to be seen, so I took advantage of the terrain, hiding in the bushes much in the way that one would if one were hunting an animal. Patience is very important.
I stayed in a hotel in Windsor, across the river from Cornish, New Hampshire. I would drive to Cornish in the morning, find my little hiding place in the bushes, and stay there all day, shivering, and come back the next day until I ran out of daylight. I didn’t get up there too early in the morning, but I’d stake out pretty much all day. It was very cold and rainy, and I had a horrible cold bordering on the flu. I waited in that spot for two and a half days. It was miserable. On the third day, he came out very briefly to let his dog out and that was just enough time for me to get off a half-dozen frames. One of my favorite pictures was a photo of his dog with his nose stuck beneath the fence. I thought it was funny that Life captioned that photograph as “Salinger’s dog takes an un-Salinger-like peek under the fence.”
I was using a Pentax 300-millimeter lens handheld. It was one of the first single-lens reflex [cameras] to be widely available. I don’t know what the distance was, but I was pretty close. You can tell by the size of the image that with a 100-millimeter lens you can’t be too far away. It was maybe 150 feet away. I was afraid that I was close enough that he might be able to hear the clicking of the shutter.
I’ve always felt somewhat bad about intruding on Salinger’s privacy. I did it because it was a challenge; it was an assignment that I’d been given. It was my job to do the assignment to the best of my ability, solve the problems, and do it. But I always had pangs of conscience.
A guy goes to that much trouble to stay out of the limelight—I always thought, gee, I should have left the poor guy alone. I had misgivings. I became offended by the paparazzi people chasing Jackie Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy’s children and all the paparazzi people today who descend on Britney Spears. Hanging out and stalking celebrities is a sleazy way to make a living. I really never felt that good about having intruded on his privacy in the way that I did. My one comfort was that if Salinger knew how cold and miserable I was, suffering the two and a half days to get those damn pictures, he probably wouldn’t have minded as much. He could take comfort in knowing I suffered out there for that photo.
Salinger outside the fence of his house, where he lived from 1953 to 1967. Life magazine photo, September 1961.
MICHAEL McDERMOTT: It is truly a paparazzi photo, but Ted Russell has an intuitive ability to compose apparently anything that’s in front of him and make it beautiful. The balance of the photograph is nice. The dark bar is very symbolic of a Salinger mood. Salinger’s wearing his characteristic jumpsuit—his uniform for writing and for gardening. When you see it close up, you can actually see the dark circles on Salinger’s eyes—this haunted look.
4
INVERTED FOREST
GERMANY-BELGIUM BORDER, NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 1944
The Battle of Hürtgen Forest is an epic disaster for Salinger and the 4th Division; casualties are staggering for the U.S. Army. Salinger’s literary tone turns shell-shocked, a muted elegy for the innumerable GIs, including himself, lost in the slaughter.
ALEX KERSHAW: Salinger’s 4th Division entered the Hürtgen Forest on November 6, 1944. It was incredibly eerie, almost medieval. Primal fears came out in the Hürtgen Forest.
STEPHEN E. AMBROSE: Just south of Aachen lay the Hürtgen Forest. Roughly fifty square miles, it sat along the German-Belgian border, within a triangle outlined by Aachen, Monschau, and Düren. The Roer River ran along the eastern edge of the Hürtgen. Beyond it was the Rhine. The U.S. First Army wanted to [get close] to the Rhine, which General James Hodges decided required driving the Germans out of the forest.
Generals Omar Bradley and Hodges remained resolute to take the Hürtgen. They put in the 4th Infantry Division. It had led the way onto Utah Beach on June 6 and [gone] through a score of battles since. Not many D-Day veterans were still with the division; most were dead or badly wounded. In the Hürtgen, the division poured out its lifeblood again.
If the Americans ever got down into the river valley, the Germans could have been bypassed to the south, with the dams as the objective. The forest without the dams was worthless; the dams without the forest were priceless. But the generals got it backward and went for the forest. Thus did the Battle of Hürtgen Forest get started on the basis of a plan that was grossly, even criminally stupid.
The Hürtgen Forest, also known as the “killing field.”
EDWARD G. MILLER: The decision to fight originated in the heady days of Allied optimism in the late summer of 1944. The unexpected success of the Normandy breakout led the GIs of the First Army’s VII Corps (and the rest of the Allies for that matter) to believe they were fighting a defeated enemy. The Americans were eager to smash through the German border defenses and cross the Rhine. Barring the way to the Rhine, however, was the Roer River. Between the VII Corps and the Roer was a densely populated, but narrow, terrain corridor and a large forested area south of Aachen.
WERNER KLEEMAN: My opinion was, it was a waste of time to fight in the Hürtgen forest. If you have to get to the area behind it, go around; don’t go through it. The Germans knew every road and they had artillery shells that exploded so that the tree branches would come down and kill soldiers. That, to me, was a suicide mission.
LIEUTENANT GEORGE WILSON: The country was obstacle enough in itself, yet the Germans had two additional advantages. They always knew exactly where we were, having just left there themselves, and thus easily called down shelling on us. They also had prepared in advance a series of defensive positions. Their bunkers were made of thick logs with a few feet of dirt on top. The bunkers were almost immune to artillery which had to arc in overhead. Tree bursts bothered them very little, and there was no chance of our tanks getting anywhere near them for direct fire. The infantry had to take them the hard way, going in after them one at a time, sometimes through barbed wire.
ALEX KERSHAW: The Germans used tree bursts, timing the fuses on 88-millimeter artillery shells so the shell would explode in the treetops. The explosion would rain thousands upon thousands of shards of wood and hot metal shrapnel on the men below.
MAJOR GENERAL RAYMOND G. BARTON: Added to the natural obstacles of tall, closely knit woods, steep hillsides and lack of roads were deliberate mine fields, wire entanglements an
d booby traps planted by the enemy during the weeks of inactivity in this sector. Continuous rain, snow and freezing weather severely hampered our operations, and during the next month the regiment suffered as many casualties from trench foot and exposure as it did from battle.
ALEX KERSHAW: They called it the meat factory, because it ground up so many Americans. Guys were dying, one per yard.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL WILLIAM GAYLE: The companies moved through the same bit of woods, were pinned down in front of the enemy wire, cut to pieces by the unremitting and inescapable tree bursts, [and] in the afternoon [they] went back to the holes they had left in the morning . . . to spend another cold night in icy water.
American troops advancing in the Hürtgen Forest.
COLONEL GERDEN F. JOHNSON: Higher commanders had regarded the objectives given the 12th Infantry as nothing but local attacks to straighten the line and thought they would be easy. The heavy opposition the 12th had encountered seemed so out of proportion to the limited objectives that there was a feeling in Division and Corps staffs that the reports of losses were being exaggerated.
J. D. SALINGER (The Catcher in the Rye, 1951):
He [D.B., Holden Caulfield’s older brother and a soldier during World War II] once told Allie and I that if he’d had to shoot anybody, he wouldn’t’ve known which direction to shoot in. He said the Army was practically as full of bastards as the Nazis were.
JOHN McMANUS: There was a constant parade of new faces [to replace casualties], especially in the rifle companies. It’s hard to get to know the new guys; they don’t necessarily have identities the guys you trained with back in England did, and a lot of them are gone quick, dead or wounded. You probably resent them a little bit, too, even though it’s not their fault, because they’re replacing your buddies. You also don’t want to witness them getting chewed up and destroyed like everybody else; an emotional distance has to be maintained in order to retain sanity.
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