Salinger (10 page)

Theirs was an affair the nation read about not just because of the dramatic age difference between them, but because a former girlfriend of Chaplin’s, Joan Barry, announced around this
time that Chaplin was the father of the child she was carrying. That scandal overshadowed the romance of Oona and Chaplin, who had originally met in late 1942 at the house of an agent who believed
Oona was right for a part Chaplin had been looking to cast. (Now that she was in Hollywood, instead of attending Vassar College where she had been accepted, Oona was pursuing a career in acting.)
“Contrary to my preconceived impression,” Chaplin would one day write about the first time he saw Oona, “I became aware of a luminous beauty, with a sequestered charm and a
gentleness that was most appealing. While we waited for our hostess, we sat and talked.” Their conversation lead to a passionate affair, which ended on June 16, 1943, when the couple married
in a civil ceremony in Carpenteria near Santa Barbara in California. They would have married earlier, but they had to wait until Oona turned eighteen, since her father, horrified that she would
marry a man of Chaplin’s age, refused to consent to the marriage. In fact, after Oona married, her father, who was the same age as Chaplin, disowned his daughter and, for the next ten years
until his death, never spoke to her again.

Needless to say, the press coverage of the Chaplin-O’Neill wedding was extensive. Newspapers around the world published photographs of the event. With no advance
warning, Salinger read about the wedding in the paper just like everyone else. In a letter to Whit Burnett, Salinger seems clearly upset about the loss of Oona. By then, June 1943, he had been
transferred to a base in Nashville, Tennessee. There, his job included issuing the morning report, an activity at which Salinger, who had been promoted to staff sergeant, made mistakes fairly
regularly. He also socialized with the locals. On one three-day pass, he went to Dyersburg, Tennessee, where he played golf, drank heavily, and danced with girls, presumably in bars. He also tried
to forget about Oona by looking forward to the
Saturday Evening Post
publishing “The Varioni Brothers.” He anticipated this story’s release because he hoped a Hollywood
studio might buy it, possibly as a Henry Fonda vehicle. He wanted the money he would earn by such a sale more than ever, but he hoped as well to make a splash in the community that had just
accepted Oona. Salinger had gone out of his way to remove “The Varioni Brothers” from any connection with the war by setting it in the 1920s, a decade closely associated with F. Scott
Fitzgerald, the author who had become one of Salinger’s favorites and an influence on his own writing.

The
Saturday Evening Post
published “The Varioni Brothers” on July 17. The story focuses on two brothers who form a highly successful singing act that ends when one brother
is mistakenly killed by a mob hit man who has a contract to murder the other brother for bad gambling debts. “The Varioni Brothers” is a passionate, moving, cautionary
tale set in “the high, wide, and rotten twenties.” Despite its deep emotion, memorable characters, and unquestionable literary quality, however, “The Varioni
Brothers” did not find a buyer in Hollywood. Salinger’s grave disappointment was compounded by the fact that—as the summer gave way to fall, according to letters he was writing at
the time—he seemed more, not less, disturbed by Oona’s marriage to Chaplin.

During these months, Salinger was transferred again, this time to the Eighty-fifth Depot Supply Squadron at Patterson Field in Fairfield, Ohio. From there, he finally wrote to Burnett to
complain about the O’Neill-Chaplin wedding. The photographs of the newlyweds in the newspapers offended him deeply, he said. Then he painted a grotesque if humorous verbal picture of the two
of them—Oona and Chaplin—in what can only be described as a bizarre mating ritual involving Chaplin perched on a dresser and Oona running around the bedroom wearing an evening gown.

As for Salinger’s wedding plans, they were off. The girl he had mentioned to Burnett—the junior-college coed—was no longer interested in him, probably because, as even he had
to admit, he never bothered to write or call her. At the moment, all he had going for him was a pending promotion, if it
was
a promotion, to the base’s public-relations department.
This was happening because his superior officers had seen “The Varioni Brothers” in the
Saturday Evening Post
Earlier, Salinger had again applied for admission into the Officer
Candidate School (in June and July, Burnett and Baker had been approached by government officials to supply another round of recommendations
for Salinger), but his second
application had been rejected as well. “[H]e wrote publicity releases for Air Service Command in Dayton, Ohio [Fairfield was near Dayton],” William Maxwell later reported, “and
used his three-day passes to go to a hotel and write stories.” Finally, at the end of 1943, Salinger was transferred into the Counter Intelligence Corps, which required him to be relocated
once more—now to Fort Holabird in Maryland where he would undergo training.

2

Salinger was encouraged by the events transpiring in his life in the early days of 1944. First, he had received the news that Stuart Rose, an
editor at the
Saturday Evening Post,
had bought three of his stories. He would have been happy with the sale of one—but
three
! It was an astonishing number for a magazine to
buy all at once, especially a magazine as powerful as the
Saturday Evening Post.
Heartened by this sale, Salinger felt comfortable enough with the routine of Army life that he began work
on a novel after all. What’s more, he decided the novel would be narrated by Holden Caulfield—a move that showed Salinger knew just how important the invention of Holden could be to his
career.

On January 14, 1944, Salinger wrote to Burnett to say that even though he expected to be transferred overseas soon, probably to England, he felt a new sense of urgency about his
writing—this, of course, excited him. A week later, still feeling enthusiastic, Salinger wrote to Woolcott Gibbs, a
New Yorker
fiction editor, to let him know that Dorothy Olding
would soon be submitting a new story, “Elaine,”
and that he had one request: that not a single word of the story be changed—not one. Reject it rather than
edit it, Salinger ordered Gibbs in his letter—with no room to negotiate. This said, Salinger entered into a breathless discussion about how he had improved as a writer and how the
New
Yorker
should push its regular contributors, writers such as John Cheever and Irwin Shaw and John O’Hara, to produce more meaningful stories. Finally Salinger revealed that he was
depressed because he had given the Army two years of his life—a much longer period of time than he had anticipated—and he saw no end in sight. Two weeks later, on February 4, William
Maxwell wrote to Olding to reject “Elaine.” “This J. D. Salinger just doesn’t seem quite right for us,” the letter said, with no stated reason for the decision.

Next, on February 26, the
Saturday Evening Post
ran “Both Parties Concerned,” the first of the three stories Stuart Rose had bought. Originally, Salinger entitled the story
“Wake Me When It Thunders,” but the
Post
had changed the title without even consulting him—a move that infuriated Salinger, especially in light of the stand he had just
taken at the
New Yorker
regarding “Elaine.” If he was not suspicious of the actions and motivations of editors before, this had changed his mind. In fact, Salinger was about to
decide that he knew more about editing his stories than his editors did. He was also coming to see how an editor would presume ownership of a story, which was alarming to Salinger since an editor
usually had nothing to do with the creation of the story in the first place. Unfortunately Salinger was only beginning to experience these troubles with editors—troubles
that would become so bad in the future, he would eventually come to question the very financial and ethical foundations on which the publishing business is based.

“Both Parties Concerned,” a love story about a couple who are in conflict over how to live their lives now that they are the parents of a newborn, was what it was—a piece of
commercial fiction meant to entertain a mainstream audience. Salinger had succeeded, though, at least in terms of making money. For “Both Parties Concerned,” he received two thousand
dollars, as he would for each of the other two stories the
Post
had bought. Six thousand dollars was a handsome sum in 1944 and more than passing encouragement for Salinger to continue
writing—if he still needed encouragement.

But Salinger could not dwell on his success at the
Saturday Evening Post.
Within a few weeks of the story’s publication, he was transferred to England.

By March, Salinger had settled into his new life at the headquarters of the Fourth Infantry Division in Tiverton, Devon, England. There, the Army continued to train him in
counterintelligence operations with the intention—although Salinger did not yet know it—of including him in the Allied forces’ invasion of occupied Europe. In Tiverton, Salinger
enjoyed going to the local Methodist church to listen to the choir. When he found the time, he also worked on his fiction. Mostly, though, he went about his Army duties; for Salinger, after two
years, those duties were becoming tiresome and predictable.

On April 15, “Soft-Boiled Sergeant,” which Salinger had originally entitled “Death of Dogface,” appeared in the
Saturday Evening Post.
Again without Salinger’s permission, the magazine had changed the story’s title, further confirming Salinger’s growing distrust of editors and publishers and underscoring the
arrogance he was coming to believe they often displayed toward a writer and his work. The story consists of one extended flashback to the occasion when Philly, the story’s main character, met
Sergeant Burke, the “soft-boiled sergeant” who had been Philly’s mentor in the Army. The most interesting moment of the story occurs when Philly and Burke go to a Charlie Chaplin
movie. Halfway through the picture, Burke leaves the theater. Following the movie, Philly finds Burke outside. “What’s the matter, Mr. Burke?” Philly says. “Don’t you
like Charlie Chaplin none?” Philly’s side is “hurting from laughing at Charlie.” To this, Burke replies, “He’s all right. Only I don’t like no
funny-looking little guys always getting chased by big guys. Never getting no girl, like. For keeps, like.” There is a lot of heavy-handed irony, juvenile cynicism, and even self-indulgence
in the passage. Charlie Chaplin may have been “funny-looking,” he may have been “always getting chased by big guys,” but, in real life at least, he
did
get the
girl—Salinger’s girl, Oona—and he had got her for good. “For keeps, like.”

In mid-April, Burnett wrote Salinger a letter congratulating him on the publication of “Soft-Boiled Sergeant,” which Burnett considered to be a “very fine
piece of work.” Along these lines, Burnett had an idea he wanted Salinger to consider. Burnett was wondering if Salinger
had given any thought to publishing a
short-story collection; if he had, Burnett would be interested in acquiring it for Story Press’s Lippincott imprint. “I thought the book might be called
The Young Folks,
”
Burnett wrote. “And all of the people in the book would be young, tough, soft, social, angry, etc. Perhaps the first third of the book would be stories of young people on the eve of the war,
the middle third in and around the Army, and then one or two stories at the end of the war.”

On May 2, Salinger gave Burnett his thoughts on the story collection. First, he was moved that Burnett felt so favorable toward his work that he would want to publish a collection of his
stories. Even so, Salinger was scared of releasing a story collection because, according to his own standards, so many of his stories were failures. Still, he listed eight that could be used as the
core of a book: “The Young Folks”; “The Long Debut of Lois Taggett”; “Elaine”; “Last Day of the Last Furlough”; “Death of Dogface”
(“Soft-Boiled Sergeant” in the
Post
); “Wake Me When It Thunders” (“Both Parties Concerned” in the
Post
); “Once a Week Won’t Kill
You”; and “Bitsy.” In addition to these, Salinger said, he had six Holden Caulfield stories, but he wanted to save them for the novel he was writing. Giving up on the third
person, he now wanted to narrate that novel in the first person. By doing so, the prose would have a more immediate, personal feel.