Salinger (12 page)

In all, during its eleven months of combat in Europe, the Fourth Division suffered some two thousand casualties a month with the vast majority of those casualties resulting from conflicts such
as the battle in the Hurtgen Forest. The unusually high number of dead and wounded the division sustained was bad enough, but, according to future military scholars, the Hurtgen Forest contest
should probably never have been fought in the first place—an irony that, when those involved found out, would be mind-numbing to them. In short, the battle took place because potentially
dangerous troop movement was not stopped due to, as one scholar later contended, “an extraordinary series of command failures all the way up to Omar Bradley,” the main American ground
commander for troops throughout northwestern Europe. From local to high command, a string of bad decisions put the Fourth and other divisions into jeopardy so that hordes of men were killed for no
reason at all. “The horrors of Hurtgen can never be forgotten by the men who were there,” wrote the division’s official reporter for the division records. What he did not record
was this: The battle did not have to occur at all. It
did
happen for no other reason than bureaucratic foul-ups.

Soon after the Allied forces finally won the battle of the Hurtgen Forest on December 16, 1944, the struggle for Luxembourg began. The Germans were on the attack. They hit the Americans’
First Army front hard, and the conflict, which resulted in substantial
casualties on both sides, came to be called the Battle of the Bulge. Salinger’s regiment was
involved in defending Echternach, one of the battle’s key points of conflict. After several days, Echternach fell to the Germans, making it appear as if the Allied forces could lose the
entire battle. Then, the Allies sent up from the back ranks inexperienced troops such as cooks and mechanics to fight on the front line, and somehow these novice soldiers pushed the Germans back
until the Allied forces won the Battle of the Bulge on Christmas Day.

For Salinger, the year 1944 ended on this disturbing note. For four long months, he had been directly involved in some of the worst fighting of the war. In the Fourth Division alone, he had
witnessed at least fifty to sixty casualties a day (with ten or more dead); some days, the casualties reached two hundred. Seeing so many of his fellow soldiers either killed or wounded had been
the sort of life-altering experience that would permanently change his view of war. To make matters worse, he probably knew, as did a number of soldiers, especially those who had access to
intelligence information, that some of the actions the military had taken, particularly toward the end of the war, were not even necessary.

Back in the States, the newspapers were full of field reports detailing the severity of the fighting at the front. Naturally, the friends and family members of American
soldiers were worried about the fate of the Allied troops. “If possible,” one of Salinger’s friends from California wrote to Burnett in late December, “would you let me know
any
information available about Jerry Salinger since the German breakthrough? I think he was near Echternach or even closer to the front, perhaps in some lovely detachment;
reports are garbled so far. . . . He is a valued friend and would scorn me for this letter. I know you would keep it confidential and would be very grateful should you write me anything you may
have heard.” No doubt Salinger’s friend had written to Burnett because of Salinger’s connection to
Story.
In fact, in its November-December issue, the magazine published
Salinger’s “Once a Week Won’t Kill You,” a plainly written, quasi-sentimental story that recounts the final actions of a young man as he prepares to depart for war. Readying
himself to leave, he admonishes his young bride to take his favorite aunt to the movies once a week. The story shows a family coping with the enormity of war through attention to small details.

Late in 1944, Salinger sent a V-mail to Elizabeth Murray. In the letter he told her that for some time he had been feeling sullen and depressed. He had written eight stories since he had been
shipped overseas, he said, three of them after D-Day. Then, with a certain true pleasure, he told her he had seen a good deal of Hemingway. Next, he recalled the VE-Day events in Paris, which
clearly left a joyful impression on him. Yet memories of these events had not been enough to brighten his spirits. The fighting had taken its toll. He was ready to go home.

5

In the first months of 1945, Salinger’s unit advanced deeper into Germany. After the strenuous fighting that took place in the
final months of 1944, the Germans were unable to put up much resistance. On this deployment, Salinger continued to work in his capacity as a counterintelligence officer. In March and
April, as he continued to go about his duties in the Army, Salinger published two more short stories. One of them represented a fundamental shift in the way he looked at war and the military. That
story, “A Boy in France,” appeared in the
Saturday Evening Post
on March 31, 1945. Previously, Salinger had been carefree, even fanciful, in the way he treated war; his
characters were often anxious to go into combat to kill the Germans or the Japanese. Now, Salinger painted a much different picture. In “A Boy in France,” the central piece of action
concerns a boy, Babe Gladwaller, who is so weary of fighting one night that, when he finds a foxhole, he removes the effects of a dead German soldier (principally a “heavy, bloody, unlamented
kraut blanket”), gets into the foxhole, and begins to hallucinate about going home to be with “a nice, quiet girl . . . not anyone I’ve ever known.” Finally, he rereads a
letter from his younger sister Mattie, which ends with her telling him, “Please come home soon.” Finished with the letter, Babe lies back in the foxhole, the weight of his entire war
experience crashing down on him. “Please come home soon,” he starts to repeat to himself out loud.
Please come home soon.

Gone is the cute, ironic tone of “The Hang of It” and “Personal Notes on an Infantryman.” That mood has been replaced by a dark tone of anguish and despair. When Babe
speaks at the end of the story—“Please come home soon”—it is not so much a wish as a plea, a despondent cry. The cruel fighting Salinger had seen so much
of had obviously changed the very way he thought and wrote about war and the military. His romantic view of the two had been destroyed by the abject reality of what he had
seen—death, pain, destruction.

Soon after “A Boy in France” appeared,
Story
finally published “Elaine,” which Burnett had bought after the
New Yorker
rejected it. This story did not
deal with war, but with a subject that was equally compelling to Salinger—the actions of a young girl nearing puberty. It would be this fascination with very young female characters that
Salinger would explore in story after story in years to come.

On May 5, unable to maintain the military action they had kept up for years, the Germans finally surrendered to the Allied forces. At the time, Salinger’s unit was
stationed at Nauhaus. From later pieces of evidence it appears that Salinger, like so many others who had fought in the war, was exhausted, disenchanted, and confused by what he had been through.
As each day passed during May and June, he did not improve. Exhaustion turned into despondency, disenchantment into despair. Salinger had more and more trouble coping with living life on a
day-to-day basis, now that the war was over. Finally, in early July he checked himself into an Army general hospital in Nuremberg where he was evaluated by doctors as being in good physical
condition but suffering from what amounted to a nervous breakdown. It may have been a mild breakdown—it would not require extended psychiatric care or admission to a mental
institution—but it was a
breakdown nevertheless. Exposure to live combat over a prolonged period of time had left Salinger depressed, angry, and unable to cope with
the routine nature of ordinary life.

While he was in the hospital in Nuremberg, Salinger wrote a letter to Hemingway and mailed it to Hemingway’s home in Cuba. Addressing the letter to “Papa,” the nickname
Hemingway was called by close friends and family, Salinger said he checked into a hospital because he had become deeply despondent. During his time in the hospital, he said, the staff had asked him
questions about his sex life, his childhood, and his feelings about the Army. His sex life was ordinary, his childhood was uneventful, and, yes, he liked the Army—those were the answers
Salinger said he gave to their questions. Next, Salinger asked Hemingway about his new novel, quickly adding that Hemingway should not sell the book to Hollywood. Using a playful but serious tone,
Salinger told Hemingway that, as chairman of various Hemingway fan clubs, he did not want to see Gary Cooper involved in any Hemingway motion-picture project.

As for his own life, Salinger had asked the Army to send him to Vienna, the city where he had once spent the better part of a year, but he had not yet heard what his orders were going to be.
Salinger wanted to go to Vienna, he told Hemingway, to put ice skates on the feet of a Viennese girl again—a reference, though Hemingway could not have known it, to the Viennese girl Salinger
had met years earlier and whom he recalled for many years afterward. In addition to asking to be sent to Austria, Salinger had written a couple of his “incestuous” stories, some poems,
and a play, which contained a character
named Holden Caulfield, who, Salinger said, he might portray himself if he ever finished the script. Finally, Salinger wanted to
write a novel but, because it was going to be emotional, he did not want to be discharged from the Army for psychiatric reasons, something he was concerned about. He
was
a jerk, he
admitted to Hemingway, but he didn’t want to be called one by people who didn’t know him when his novel was published—and then he speculated on a year—in 1950.

Salinger ended his letter by saying that the next time Hemingway was in New York, Salinger hoped he could see him. Then, in a long postscript, Salinger mentioned a recently published Fitzgerald
scrapbook Edmund Wilson had edited called
The Crack-Up.
Salinger disapproved of critics attacking Fitzgerald for his inability to develop as a writer. When an author produces a masterpiece
like
The Great Gatsby,
Salinger theorized, he can’t “develop” beyond that.

A few weeks later, Salinger was released from the hospital. For much of the summer, he continued to recuperate. In September he met a young woman named Sylvia. In the future,
details about Sylvia would remain mysterious, the result of Salinger’s unrelenting drive to prevent information about his life from becoming public knowledge. He spoke about his marriage to
friends, but just a few.

A mere handful of facts are known about Sylvia. She was French. She was a doctor, probably a psychologist. Salinger had been involved with her for only a brief period of time, maybe only a few
weeks, when the two were married. In November, Salinger was given a
non-psychiatric discharge from the Army; following this, the newlyweds lived in a small town in Germany
for a while. They seemed to be, for a time at least, a happily married couple. To support himself, Salinger lined up a six-month contract for civilian work with the Department of Defense. Despite
the distractions of his work and married life, however, he still found time to write and publish.

In October, he published “This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise” in
Esquire.
In this story Vincent Caulfield, back home from the war, is upset because his brother Holden, as he
was in “Last Day of the Last Furlough,” is missing in action. “Missing, missing, missing. Lies!” Vincent says. “I’m being lied to. [Holden]’s never been
missing before. He’s one of the least missing boys in the world. He’s here in this truck; he’s home in New York; he’s at Pencey Preparatory School (‘You send us the
boy. Well mold the man. All modern fireproof buildings . . .’); yes, he’s at Pencey, he never left school; and he’s at Cape Cod, sitting on the porch, biting his fingernails; and
he’s playing doubles with me, yelling at me to stay back at the baseline when he’s at the net.” Again, the sentimentality Salinger once felt about war is absent, replaced by the
anguished lament of a young man who has lost his brother in action.