22 Out-of-print J. D. Salinger Stories

by J. D. Salinger

  "That was how I began to write poetry myself.

  "I began writing eight or ten words of my own on a sheet of paper, in very large letters that I could read without any trouble. I did that for over a month, filling a couple of small, dime- store writing tablets. Then suddenly I quit. For no particular reason. Chiefly, I was saddened by my own ignorance, I think. Then, too, I was a little afraid I was going blind. There’s never just one reason for anything. But anyway I quit. It happened to be October. So I went to college."

  His voice now clearly implied that he was either coming to an end or had already reached it. He smiled at Corinne.

  "You look as though you’re still in school, Corinne. Look at your hands."

  Corinne’s hands were folded on the table, classroom style.

  "The point is—" he said suddenly—and broke off.

  Corinne didn’t prompt him. He began again at his own convenience.

  "The point is," he said, looking at Corinne’s folded hands, "that for seven and a half years I’ve had nothing in my life except poetry. And the years before that I had nothing but,"—he hesitated—"well, discord. And malnutrition. And—well, the Rover Boys." He stopped dead again and Corinne thought he was going to tell her point-blank how his equipment for survived differed from that of other men. But when he spoke again there still was mostly organized information in his voice. He still was not really using his own poetry for the occasion.

  "I’ve never taken a drink in my life," he said very quietly, as though to take the edge of confession off his statement. "And not because my mother was an alcoholic. I’ve never smoked either. It’s just that somebody told me when I was a small boy that drinking and smoking would dull my sense of taste. I still think that, in a way, I can’t get past half my childhood dogmas." At this point Ford sat back rather stiffly in his seat. The little movement was quite unobtrusive. But Corinne caught it. It was the first time he had shown ever the very slightest need for self-control of any kind. But he continued—easily enough it seemed. "Every time I but a ticket on a train I wonder that I have to pay full price. I feel momentarily cheated—gypped—when I see an ordinary, adult’s ticket in my hand. Until I was fifteen my mother used to tell conductors I was under twelve."

  Casually, Ford looked at his wristwatch, saying, "I really have to get back, Corinne. It’s been nice seeing you."

  Corinne cleared her throat. "Will you—can you come up to my apartment Friday night?" she asked rapidly, "I’m having a few very good friends," she said.

  If he hadn’t already seen, Ford saw now that Corinne was in love with him and he gave her a brief look that is fairly difficult to describe yet extremely easy to overanalyze. It had in it nothing quite so melodramatic as a naked warning, but surely a strong suggestion of, "Why don’t you try to be very careful? That is, about me and all." The admonition of a man who either is in love with someone or something he doesn’t happen to be regarding at the moment or who suspects himself of having, at some time in his life, either lost or forfeited some natural interior dimension of mysterious importance.

  Corinne pushed the book away and fumbled in her handbag. "I’ll give you my address," she said. "Please try to come. I mean, if you can."

  "I certainly will," he said.

  The week Corinne looked forward to seeing Ford again was an unfamiliar, rather awful week in which she—nervously, willfully—reclassified her whole person, calling her beautiful, high-bridged nose too big and her symmetrical, tall body big-boned and hideous. She read Ford’s poetry constantly. In her lunch hours she wandered intensely through Brentano’s basement, searching literary magazines for poems by, or articles about, her love. Evenings, she went so far as to get out her dictionary to translate Gide’s now well-known essay on Ford, "Chanson...enfin" (which first appeared, rather incongrously, in a Harper’s Bazaar-ish French magazine called Madam Chic.)

  At ten o’clock on the evening Ford was expected, Corinne’s telephone rang. She had somebody turn down the volume of her phonograph while she was listened to Ford apologize for not having arrived. He explained he was working.

  "I understand," Corinne said. Then, immediately, "How long do you think you’ll be working?"

  "I don’t know, Corinne. I’m just in the middle of something."

  "Oh," she said.

  Ford said, "How long do you think your party will keep going?"

  "It isn’t a party," she denied.

  "Well, your friends. How long will they be there?"

  She made her friends stay until four in the morning, but Ford didn’t show up.

  He did telephone her again, though, at noon the next day. He tried her apartment first, where the maid gave him her office number.

  "Corinne, I’m terribly sorry about last night. I worked all night."

  "That’s all right."

  "Can you have dinner with me tonight, Corinne?"

  "Yes."

  At this point I could very nicely use two old Hollywood characters. The calendar that gets its days blown off by an unseen electric fan. And the glorious studio tree that bursts, in about two seconds, out of the bitterest winter into the lushest early spring.

  During the next four months Corinne saw Ford at least three times a week. Always uptown. Always surrounded by the marquees of third-run movie houses, and nearly always over bowls of Chinese food. But she didn’t mind. Neither did she especially mind that her evenings with him seldom—if at all—lasted until later than eleven, at which hour Ford, who imposed deadlines on himself, felt that he had to go back to work.

  Sometimes they went to a movie, but usually they stayed in the Chinese restaurant until it closed.

  She did almost all the talking. If he talked at any length at all he talked about poetry or poets. On a couple of rare evenings he talked whole essays away. One on Rilke, one on Eliot. But nearly all of the time he listened to Corinne, who had her life to talk away.

  He took her home every evening—via subway and crosstown bus—but he came up to her apartment only once. He looked at Corinne’s Rodin (which had once belonged to Clara Rilke), and he looked at her books. She played two records for him on the phonograph. Then he went home.

  Although Corinne was accustomed to moderate drinking—most of her friends were either middling-heavy or downright heavy drinkers—she never ordered even one cocktail in Ford’s company. Or near it, for that matter. She was afraid he might have a sudden, untimely impulse to take her in his arms—perhaps in the shadow of some familiar uptown landmark: a haberdashery or an optometrist’s shop, for example—and find her breath repulsive to some degree.

  When he finally did kiss she had, inevitably, just arrived from a cocktail party at the office.

  The kiss happened in the Chinese restaurant. About ten weeks after they had first met there. Corinne was reading proof on some of her own copy for the magazine—waiting for Ford. He came up to her, kissed her, took off his overcoat, and sat down. It was the average, disenchanted kiss of the average disenchanted husband just checked into the living room straight from the office. Corinne, however, was much too happy with it to wonder just when he passed through a period of enchantment. Later, when she gave the incident a little thought, she arrived at the satisfactory conclusion that the evolution of their kisses was going to take place backwards.

  The same evening he kissed her, she asked him whether he couldn’t find time to meet some of her friends.

  "I have such nice friends," she told him enthusiastically. "They all know your poetry. Some even live on it."

  "Corinne, I don’t mix too well—"

  Corinne leaned forward joyfully, remembering something.

  "That’s what Miss Aigletinger once yelled about you into my father’s thing. Do you remember Miss Aigletinger?"

  Ford nodded unnostagically. "What would I have to do if I met them?" he asked.

  "My friends?" said Corinne. But she saw that he was serious. So she wasn’t. "Oh, just juggle a couple of Indian clubs, tell ‘em who your favorite movie stars
are."

  But her jokes around Ford never had any follow-through. She reached for his hand across the table. "Darling, you wouldn’t have to do anything. These people just want to see you."

  A thought struck her—fell across her. "You don’t realize, do you, what your poetry means to people?"

  "Yes, I guess I do." But he had hesitated. Anyway, it wasn’t Corinne’s idea of a good answer.

  She began rather intensely. "Darling, you can’t pick up a literary magazine in Brentano’s without seeing your name. And that man you introduced me to? The trustee or something? He said he knows three people who are writing books about The Cowardly Morning. One man in England." She ran her fingers through the knuckle-grooves of Ford’s hand. "Thousands of people are waiting for Wednesday," she said tenderly. (Ford’s second book of poems was due to come out, she meant by that.)

  He nodded. Something else was on his mind, however. "There won’t be any dancing at your party, will there? I can’t dance."

  A week or so later a tableful of Corinne’s best friends met Ford at Corinne’s apartment. Robert Wager arrived first. Then came Louise and Elliot Seermeyer. Corinne’s sensible Tuckahoe friends. Then came Alice Hepburn, who taught something at Wellesly—or had. Seymour and Frances Hertz. Corinne’s intellectual friends, arrived next, in the same elevatorload with Ginnie and Wesley, Corinne’s badminton friends. At least five of these people had read both of Ford’s books. (The brand-new one, Man on a Carousel, had just come out.) And at least three of the five were honestly and permanently excited by Ford’s genius.

  Ford arrived nearly an hour late, and his shyness lasted almost to the dessert course. Then all of a sudden his guest-of-honor behavior turned gently perfect.

  For a full hour he spoke to—and with—Robert Waner and Elliot Seermeyer on Hopkins’ poetry.

  He gave Sy Hertz not only the right attitude for Sy’s book (then in preparation) on the Wordworths, but the title and the first three chapters, too.

  He took on without batting an eyelash all of Alice Hepburn’s strident, suffragette-ish interruptions.

  He very kindly and uselessly explained to Wesley Fowler why Walt Whitman isn’t "dirty."

  Nothing he said or did during the evening even faintly smacked of performance. He simply was a great man whose greatness had been cornered at a dinner party, and who fought his way out not with theatrical aphorisms or with boorish taciturnity, but—generously, laboriously— with himself. It was a great evening. If not everyone actually knew it, everyone at least felt it.

  The next day, at the magazine office, Corinne had an interoffice telephone call from Robert Waner.

  As generally happens to people who overload themselves with any one virtue, Waner’s voice over the phone was so full of control that some of it could not help but leak out.

  "It was a very nice party," he began.

  "Bobby, you were wonderful!" Corinne responded ecstatically. "Everybody was wonderful. Listen. Speak to the operator. Find out if I can kiss you."

  "Nothing doing." Waner cleared his throat. "Here on a mission for my government."

  "No kidding!" Corinne felt almost sick with affection for Bobby. He was really wonderful. "What government?" she demanded happily.

  "He doesn’t love you, Corinne."

  "What?" Corinne said. She had heard Waner perfectly.

  "He doesn’t love you," Waner courageously repeated. "He isn’t even considering loving you."

  "Shut up." Corinne said.

  "All right."

  There was a long pause. But Waner’s voice came in again. It sounded quite far off.

  "Corinne, I remember, a long time ago, kissing you in a cab. When you first got back from Europe. It was sort of an unfair, Scotch-and-soda kiss—maybe you remember. I bumped your hat." Waner cleared his throat again. But he put the whole thing through. "There was something about the way you raised your arms to straighten your hat, and the way your face looked in the mirror over the driver’s photograph. I don’t know. The way you looked and all. You’re the greatest hat-straightener that ever lived."

  Corinne broke in coldly. "What’s the point?" Nevertheless, Waner had touched her, probably deeply.

  "None, I guess." Then: "Yes, there is a point. Of course there’s a point. I’m trying to tell you that Ford’s long past noticing that you’re the greatest hat-straightener that ever lived. I mean a man just can’t reach the kind of poetry Ford’s reaching and still keep intact the normal male ability to spot a fine hat-straightener—"

  "You sound rehearsed," Corinne interrupted cruelly.

  "Maybe I am."

  "What makes you think—" She broke off; started over. "I thought poets were supposed to know more about those things than anyone else"—defiantly.

  "They do if they feel like writing verse. They don’t if they stick to poetry," Waner said. "Listen, Corinne. In both of Ford’s books there’s hardly a line of verse. It’s nearly all poetry. Do you have any idea what that means?"

  "You tell me," Corinne said coldly.

  "All right. It means that he writes under pressure of dead-weight beauty. The only kind of men who write that way—"

  "You are rehearsed," Corinne cut in.

  "I wasn’t going to phone you without having something to say. If I were—"

  "Listen," Corinne said. "You’re implying that he’s some kind of psychotic. I won’t have it, Bobby. In the first place it isn’t true. He’s—he’s serene. He’s kind, he’s gentle, he’s—"

  "Don’t be a fool, Corinne. He’s the most gigantic psychotic you’ll ever know. He has to be. Don’t be a fool. He’s standing up to his eyes in psychosis."

  "What makes you think he doesn’t like me?" Corinne demanded ambiguously. "He likes me very much."

  "Sure he does. But he doesn’t love you."

  "You said that. Please shut up."

  But Waner distinctly ordered, "Corinne, don’t marry him."

  "Now, listen." She was very angry. "If he doesn’t love me—as you’ve so gallantly pointed out—my chances of marrying him aren’t very hot, are they?"

  Waner tried to avoid sounding smug, but his text was against him. "He’ll marry you," he said.

  "Really. Why?"

  "Because he just will, that’s all. He likes you and he’s cold, and he won’t be able to think of any reason why he shouldn’t—or he’ll refuse to think of a reason why he shouldn’t. At any rate—"

  "He’s not cold," Corinne interrupted angrily.

  "Of course he’s cold. I don’t care how tender you find him. Or how kind. He’s cold. He’s cold as ice."

  "That doesn’t make any sense."

  "Corinne. Please. Stay out of it. Don’t try to find out if it makes sense."

  Corinne and Ford were married on April 20, 1937 (about four months after they had met as adults), in the chapel at Columbia. Corinne’s matron-of-honor was Ginnie Fowler, and Dr. Funk, of the English Department, stood up for Ford. About sixty of Corinne’s friends came to the wedding. Only two people besides Funk came expressly to watch Ford get married: his publisher, Rayburn Clapp, and a very tall, very pale man, an instructor of Elizabethan Literature of Columbia, who remarked at least three times that the flowers bothered his "nasal passages."

  Dr. Funk cancelled Ford’s lectures for ten days, insisting that Ford and Corinne take a short honeymoon.

  They drove to Canada, in Corinne’s car. They returned to New York, to Corinne’s apartment, on the first Sunday in May.

  I know nothing at all about their honeymoon.

  That’s a statement, not an apology, I’d like to point out. If I had really needed the facts, I probably would have been able to get them.

  The Monday morning following their return to New York, Corinne got a letter in the first mail, which she considered rather touching. It read as follows:

  32 MacReady Road

  Harkins, Vermont

  April 30, 1937

  Dear Mrs. Ford,

  I saw last week in the Sunday edition of the Ne
w York Times that you and Mr. Ford were married, and I am taking the liberty of writing to you, hoping that Columbia will know your home address and forward this letter accordingly.

  I have read Mr. Ford’s new book of poems, Man on a Carousel, and feel that I must somehow ask him for advice. But rather than risk disturbing him at his work I am writing first to you.

  I am twenty and a junior at Creedmore College here in Harkins. My parents are dead, and since early childhood I have lived with my aunt in what is probably the oldest, largest, and ugliest house in America.

  To be brief as possible, I have written some poems that I would very much like Mr. Ford to see, and I am enclosing them. I beg you to show them to him, as I feel I need his advice so badly. I know I haven’t the right to ask Mr. Ford to sit down and write me a letter of detailed criticism, but if he could possibly just read of even look through my poems, that would be enough. You see, our spring vacation begins next Friday, and my aunt and I are coming to New York City next Saturday, May eighth, on the way to attend my cousin’s wedding in Newport. I could very easily speak to you on the telephone about the poems.

  I shall be everlastingly grateful to you both for any kind of guidance, and may I, at this time, wish you both all happiness for you married life?

  Yours Sincerely,

  Mary Gates Croft

  If it were said now that Corinne pushed the verses over to Ford because she had been touched by the young-sounding appeal of the letter and because she wanted her qualified, brand- new husband to meet the appeal, the greatest part of the truth would be told. But the truth in its entirety seldom comes in one big neat piece. She had another reason. Ford was eating his corn flakes without cream or sugar. Absolutely dry and unsweetened. Corinne wanted a legitimate excuse to make him look up so that she could suggest, preferably in a casual voice, that he try eating his corn flakes with cream and sugar.

  "Darling," she said.

  The groom looked up politely from his dry corn flakes and his lecture notes.

  "If you have any time today, would you read this?"