Salinger

by David Shields

  Salinger himself never spoke on the matter. He came closest to an explanation in a letter to his friend Paul Fitzgerald, published here for the first time.

  J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Paul Fitzgerald, November 23, 1946:

  Sylvia and I separated less than a month after we returned to the States. She’s now in Switzerland, practicing medicine. If I gave you all the reasons for the separation, I would have to go straight back to the beginning. As most of the details would probably depress you, I’d rather not do that. I’ll say briefly that, almost from the beginning, we were desperately unsuited to, and unhappy with, each other. If I gave you one or several reasons, they would undoubtedly sound one-sided. Let’s let it go. When we see each other again, and if you’re interested in hearing the facts, I’ll do my best to give them to you honestly. I just wanted to let you know—straight from the horse—what’s happened. I can understand how sorry you must be.

  EBERHARD ALSEN: After her return to Germany, Sylvia briefly moved back to Weissenburg, where her mother still lived. In August 1946 she and her mother moved to their old house in Nuremberg. From there Sylvia moved to Geneva, Switzerland, where she was trained as an ophthalmologist.

  More than three years later, on January 26, 1949, Sylvia’s marriage to J. D. Salinger was officially annulled by the family court of Queens County, New York. Sylvia did not find out about the annulment until August 1950, when she was living in Switzerland, and she had considerable difficulty in getting the Swiss authorities to accept the annulment. She had to write many letters to various officials both in Germany and in France until the French authorities finally accepted the annulment. Sylvia had to sign her name as Dr. Sylvia Salinger-Welter until November 24, 1954.

  “Bad intentions” and “misrepresentations”: in other words, Salinger was claiming that Sylvia had deliberately deceived him, quite possibly regarding her involvement in the Gestapo. Salinger’s family would not have made a distinction between the Nazi Party and the Gestapo, which was, after all, a unit of the Nazi government.

  LEILA HADLEY LUCE: Jerry was a very private person. He told me he’d been married, and I said, “What was her name?” He said, “Sylvie.” I never knew if it was Sylvia or Sylvie, and I didn’t want to ask again. He said he found out some disturbing things about what she did in the war, specifically with the Gestapo. Jerry also told Sid Perelman this. Jerry said she had lied to him and that when he learned what she had really done in the war he could not possibly remain with her.

  DAVID SHIELDS: Salinger has done his best to shroud the facts and cover his tracks about her and their relationship; his letter to Fitzgerald—“most of the details would probably depress you”—is his only statement. Nor did Sylvia ever say anything about what happened between herself and Salinger. She maintained her silence for over fifty years and took the answers to her grave.

  EBERHARD ALSEN: Sylvia obviously represented something mythic or at least metaphoric concerning Salinger’s Nuremberg breakdown and the war and his half-Jewish family.

  ALEX KERSHAW: Salinger got to a place intellectually and emotionally—importantly, emotionally—whereby he could identify and sympathize with the so-called victim and the perpetrator so intimately that he would do the opposite of what any so-called decent American would do, which was to go and marry maybe a Nazi, certainly a German, woman.

  LEILA HADLEY LUCE: Jerry and Sylvia had total telepathic communication and they met in dreams, which sounded odd to me, but Jerry truly believed that and told me that.

  EBERHARD ALSEN: According to Salinger, there were telepathic and trance-state conversations between him and Sylvia. I’d like to know what they discussed.

  After they separated, Salinger confessed to friends that he hadn’t written during the entire eight months he was married, but that since Sylvia had returned to Europe, he had finished a new story.

  From another letter that Salinger wrote to Elizabeth Murray, we learn that “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” was originally entitled “The Male Goodbye” and that it was written in June 1946 in Daytona Beach, immediately after his marriage ended.

  J. D. SALINGER (“A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” The New Yorker, January 31, 1948):

  “Well. In the first place, he said it was a perfect crime the Army released him [Seymour] from the hospital—my word of honor. He very definitely told your father there’s a chance—a very great chance, he said—that Seymour may completely lose control of himself. My word of honor.”

  8

  MEASURING UP

  NEW YORK CITY; HOLLYWOOD; TARRYTOWN, NEW YORK; STAMFORD, CONNECTICUT, 1946–1950

  Back in the social and artistic hubbub of the city he knows so well, Salinger, a twenty-seven-year-old half-Jew divorced from his German wife, a damaged veteran with undiagnosed PTSD, attempts to resurrect his prewar dream—publication in the New Yorker, success as a writer—and to reconcile his divided soul, the part of him that remains trapped forever in World War II and the part of him that seeks pragmatically to advance his literary career. What he doesn’t realize yet is that he doesn’t get to choose what’s happening in his head. A compounding irony: only by returning emotionally and imaginatively to the battlefield is he able to advance his art.

  MICHAEL SILVERBLATT: Salinger comes back from the war aware that this devastated and shell-shocked tone is his tone.

  Thomas Lea’s painting of the “two-thousand-yard stare.”

  PAUL ALEXANDER: It must have seemed to Salinger as if his life were never going to change. Here he was—one more time—living at home. However, because he had gone to war, because he had seen what he had seen, he was different. At night, instead of staying at home and reading or writing as he had done in the past, he started to go out, often ending up in Greenwich Village. Known for its funky bars and jazz clubs, the Village was the kind of place where aspiring writers, singers, and actors would spend the evening hours and meet other young people like themselves.

  A. E. HOTCHNER: It was the year after the war ended, and a lot of us were knocking around New York. We got out of uniform, but it was difficult to get any editorial jobs. The only person I knew who had a job was Don Congdon, who was the fiction editor of Collier’s. I met him because I had submitted a short story he liked, but he couldn’t convince the editor to accept it.

  Congdon had an apartment on Charleston Street in Greenwich Village and invited me to his Wednesday-night poker games that included a rotating group of would-be editors and writers. The editors didn’t have jobs and the writers hadn’t been published but believed they were going to be and nobody understood them yet. We played nickel-and-dime poker. One of the players was a tall, lanky, dark gentleman named Jerry Salinger.

  Jerry was a lousy poker player. He refused to bluff and he felt anybody who bluffed was a weenie, as he would say. I said, “But if you don’t bluff, you’re not going to be a successful poker player.” I don’t recall Jerry ever winning a round of poker; he was too cautious and suspicious. God knows, Jerry never drew to an inside straight. Afterward Jerry and I would go across to Chumley’s, a famous bar in the Village, and nurse a beer and nurse our losings.

  The door to Chumley’s bar, where Salinger socialized with A. E. Hotchner and other writers.

  Chumley’s was a refuge for writers—a small, comforting place where you were never hurried by anybody, waiters or the owner or anybody, to finish your beer. You could sit there for half a day, half an evening, into the wee hours, with a notebook, writing, doing anything you wanted. You’d write and you’d think, “I’m in the tradition of Dylan Thomas and all the other people who have been in Chumley’s.” It was the equivalent of the Paris café of the 1920s, where you could order a coffee or a glass of wine and sit forever, where Hemingway used to write in his notebooks. That was Chumley’s. The bar had this great decor of book jackets. So many writers with book jackets up there began their writing careers in Chumley’s.

  Jerry mostly liked to listen to his own talk. We’d sit at one of the small tables, and i
f somebody came in whom he knew and liked, he would join us, but there weren’t many people Jerry knew or liked. He was an iconoclast, a loner. I don’t know why he decided to spend as much time with me as he did. Maybe it was because I sometimes questioned his literary arrogance; he would put down almost any writer you could talk about. He would carry on about how bad all current writing was—and past writing, too, for that matter. He was beautifully read and had digested what he read. It was amusing to listen to him berate other writers, because it was always wittily done. It was always at a pretty high plane, his criticism of writing, but it was all really posturing: he was insecure about what he was doing.

  Dreiser through Hemingway: they were all inferior. The only really worthwhile writer, the only one he accepted, was Melville. Who, conveniently, was long dead. We would get into heated discussions about Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, which I felt were some of the finest writing in the English language. Jerry didn’t. He thought they were nothing but diary entries.

  DAVID SHIELDS: During the war, Salinger admired Hemingway’s work. After the war, after all he had seen, after his own breakdown, he couldn’t.

  A. E. HOTCHNER: Jerry shared a trait that was, I think, the most predominant of all Hemingway’s idiosyncrasies. I’d say to Ernest, “What happened to Bill? He’s not here.” Hemingway would answer, “He didn’t measure up.” Now there is no barometer of what that is. Over the years, Hemingway excommunicated friend after friend after friend: they didn’t measure up. I don’t know how it happened that I escaped that. I didn’t toady to him. I don’t know why, but for some reason I measured up.

  Jerry had his own set of values, his own demands. Whatever it was he imposed on the people he knew, if they didn’t measure up to it, they were dismissed. They weren’t worthy; they couldn’t be trusted. He’d never tell you the requirements, either. They’re mysterious, subjective. You can be dismissed at any time. Of course, when you get pathological about it, nobody can measure up. That’s maybe what happened to Jerry Salinger. Nobody could measure up to whatever it is he demanded of himself and of you.

  Jerry didn’t talk much about the war. He talked only about literature. In the period of time when we used to come into Chumley’s, Jerry had been writing a couple of stories that were taken by the “slicks”—that is, the general-circulation magazines—but they bore no resemblance at all to what he wrote later on. And at that time I felt he was writing them in order to make the few bucks he needed. It wasn’t until later I discovered that he came from a very wealthy family. He lived with them on Park Avenue and money was not a concern of his.

  Thinking back on the guys who sat around the poker table, I’d say what distinguished Jerry from the pack was that in his mind there was no doubt he was going to be published, no doubt that he had enormous talent, and no doubt that everybody else at the poker table was inferior to him.

  Jerry had written a story called “Holden Caulfield on the Bus,” which the New Yorker had rejected, but he talked endlessly about how he would rework it and eventually they would realize that it was a new kind of writing and publish it. He had read my stories “Candle in the Poolroom Window” and “An Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,” both of which he found amusing—he’d given me his “Bowling Balls” title to use—but he was nevertheless appalled that I would waste my time writing about something that was not connected with my life. “There’s no emotion in these stories,” he said. “No fire between the words.”

  DAVID SHIELDS: In mid-November 1946 the New Yorker notified Salinger of its plan to finally publish “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” in the coming weeks. After holding the story for five years—so long that Salinger had concluded it was never going to run—the editors had suddenly changed their minds and decided to use it after all. If his boyhood dream had been deferred, it was about to be fulfilled.

  BEN YAGODA: In December 1946 the magazine finally published this story about this kid named Holden Caulfield. That seemed to signal a change in Salinger’s fortunes.

  “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” is an early version of a scene in The Catcher in the Rye. The story follows Holden, who, home from Pencey, goes out with Sally to the movies and then goes skating with her; later that night, he calls drunkenly up to her apartment.

  PAUL ALEXANDER: For five agonizing years he had had to wait until his story appeared in the magazine that he respected the most. But once it did, his thinking changed. And after that he wanted to publish only in the New Yorker.

  —

  PHOEBE HOBAN: Salinger loved to go to jazz clubs. He went to hear Billie Holiday.

  DAVID YAFFE: When Salinger returned from the war, he would have had the opportunity to witness one of the most extraordinary explosions of jazz in the twentieth century, and it was all happening in New York. You could walk down a single block on Fifty-second Street between Sixth Avenue and Broadway, and Art Tatum would be playing in one club, Charlie Parker in another, and Billie Holiday would be singing right down the street. Salinger regarded the music as pure and uncorrupted and lacking in the phoniness that he saw in so many things. He also liked Blossom Dearie, who was more of a cabaret singer than a jazz singer.

  Salinger was a record collector, which is a fascinating species of fetishist. You think of these people who obsessively alphabetize their record collection and have their own private Dewey decimal system. It’s a way of ordering experience and having control over it and not dealing with living, breathing human beings.

  A. E. HOTCHNER: The best times I had with Jerry were when he would call up and say, “I’m going to the Blue Angel tonight. Want to come along?” We would go to the Blue Angel, which was a nightspot where young talent would try out, hoping to be discovered. I don’t think they even got paid. The place itself was pretty grubby. It needed paint; it served booze and a little food. It was not an inviting place, but the talent was inviting, and the man who was the impresario of the Blue Angel had a good ear: he brought extraordinary young performers to the stage.

  Jerry had a wonderful time because he identified with these types who were trying to make their mark in music, just as he was trying to make his mark with his writing. He was charitable, and when once in a while a great talent would show up—a lot of these performers went on to become big stars—Jerry would get word to them and have them come to the table. He loved having them there. It was the most communicative I ever found him. He was a different kind of person when he was enjoying the talent of a singer. These were the best times with Jerry because he was the most natural. He was expressing himself fully to that fellow aspiring artist. At other times he was guarded or angry about writing or about what happened in the news that day.

  In all of the times Jerry and I went to nightspots, he never showed any interest in the young women around us. He was consumed with his ambition as a writer. I never heard him say, “Let’s have a couple of beers.” Jerry was all business. I never saw him pick up anybody at any of these places, so I was rather surprised later on to read about the various alliances he had with much younger women. When I knew him—he must have been twenty-seven, twenty-eight—he didn’t have a girlfriend, or at least not one he brought around.

  SHANE SALERNO: Salinger met a lot of girls in the drugstore of the Barbizon Hotel for Women on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He would bring them down to Greenwich Village to various clubs and restaurants he frequented. Several of his friends thought he was interested in these girls, at least in part, for the dialogue he could incorporate into his stories. One girl returned to the Barbizon convinced she had just been out on a date with the goalie for the Montreal Canadiens.

  He worked out with barbells to build up his skinny body—probably a carryover from the exercise regimen he’d been forced to maintain in the army. He studied Zen Buddhism—quite a departure from the Judaism and Irish Catholicism of his parents. His Zen Buddhism would become a central part of his life. While he studied Zen and hung out in Greenwich Village, he dated a succession of young women. Some of his dates remembered that
he was eager to give them reading lists on Zen Buddhism.

  PHOEBE HOBAN: Salinger was quite a tall guy. He had an athletic build, even though he was a bookworm, and was pretty suave with the women.

  DAVID YAFFE: Salinger was fascinated by the idea of Bessie Smith—he idolized and deified her—but if he had been face-to-face with Bessie Smith, I don’t think he would have been able to last five minutes with her. She would have represented a very threatening adult female sexuality, precisely the opposite of his obsession: young girls.

  —

  DAVID SHIELDS: The publication of “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” in the New Yorker elevated Salinger’s literary status, but the magazine continued to reject many, even most of his stories, so he was forced to continue publishing in the slicks.

  A. E. HOTCHNER: His reaction to New Yorker rejections was, “They want me to write an O. Henry type of story, but I have to find my own voice, and this is it, and they’ll catch up to me.” That was Salinger’s point of view. “They aren’t used to this new voice. They aren’t used to my form of short story. But they will come around. I’m not going to compromise on this.” And he didn’t. He compromised on his stories for the slicks but not on his stories for the New Yorker. He was determined that the editors of the New Yorker were going to publish more of him.

  DAVID SHIELDS: In earlier letters to Whit Burnett, Salinger had complained that the New Yorker is interested only in “little Hemingways and little [Katherine] Mansfields,” but the “editors really knock me out.” He also called Clifton Fadiman, the New Yorker’s book reviewer, “smug and patronizing and literarily dishonest.” The New Yorker had been urging him to write more “simply and naturally,” but none of the magazine’s editors “really know what a short story is.”