Salinger (13 page)

Next, on December 1,
Collier’s
published another story that grew out of Salinger’s new take on war and the military. With “The Stranger,” Salinger returned to
the collection of characters he used in “Last Day of the Last Furlough”—Babe Gladwaller, his sister Mattie, and Vincent, Holden, and Kenneth Caulfield. The plot of “The
Stranger” centers around a visit made by Babe and Mattie to Vincent’s former girlfriend Helen to tell her the details of Vincent’s death,
which she had
been informed about by the Army, but only in general terms. In the Hurtgen Forest, Babe tells Helen, Vincent and four fellow GIs were warming themselves around a fire they had built when a mortar
shell hit, instantly killing Vincent and three of the four other men. Breaking down, Helen is distraught. Soon the visit ends, with Helen and Babe both in tears as they remember Vincent. Then Babe
and Mattie leave the apartment and go outside into the warm New York afternoon. As they walk along the sidewalk, trying to decide what to do next—maybe they’ll see a Broadway
play—they hold hands with each other, lovingly.

It is only then, at the end of the story, that the odd nature of the episode becomes clear. Babe has gone to the apartment of his friend’s former girlfriend to tell her about his
friend’s death and he has taken with him, of all people, his younger sister. “The more serious trouble,” Warren French would one day write about the Babe Gladwaller
stories—“Last Day of the Last Furlough,” “A Boy in France,” and “The Stranger”—“is that the attachment of a soldier to his young sister, which
had seemed touching in ‘Last Day of the Last Furlough,’ becomes a morbid preoccupation when it persists past the occasion that legitimately prompted it. We can sympathize with a soldier
about to be shipped overseas who attempts pathetically to cling to his childish innocence by seeking the affection of a child. But when he continues to dream in a battlefield foxhole, from which he
has just removed the bloody remains of a dead enemy, about this same little sister and when he later takes her along to visit a dead buddy’s ex-girlfriend, we begin to feel that his
sentiments approach those that Vladimir
Nabokov [would] exploit . . . and satirize . . . in
Lolita.
” This was what was disturbing about the way Salinger was
writing about young female characters: he seemed more than willing to ascribe to them emotions that were not conducive with their age—emotions that were more appropriate, in fact, for
adults.

The last story Salinger published in 1945 was “I’m Crazy,” which ran in
Collier’s
on December 22. For the story, Salinger used as narrator
Holden Caulfield himself, the same Holden Caulfield he had invented for “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” the story that the
New Yorker
had bought but still not published. It
never becomes clear in the canon of Salinger’s work if the Holden of these two stories is the same Holden who is missing in action in the Babe Gladwaller stories. In fact, there is some
evidence the Holdens are so different Salinger may have rethought the character when he took him out of the Gladwaller stories to make him into a character who could stand on his own. Even so, in
“I’m Crazy,” Holden recounts how he was kicked out of boarding school, and, in doing so, he gives some brief insights into his personality. “Only a crazy guy would have
stood there”—on a hilltop in the cold with a thin jacket on, what he’s doing at the start of the story. “That’s me. Crazy. No kidding, I have a screw loose.”
From there, he goes home unannounced to his parents’ apartment in New York; when he arrives, he wakes his younger sister Phoebe from a dead sleep. The brief ensuing conversation recalls the
one Babe has with his younger sister Mattie when he wakes her in “Last Day of the Last Furlough.” The
parallel between Mattie and Phoebe is too obvious to miss.
In fact, they are one and the same—prepubescent girls on whom Salinger’s mature narrators fix their unaltered, and perhaps even excessive, attentions.

Salinger returned to New York in May 1946 at just about the time he finished his Defense Department job. Of course, Salinger brought with him Sylvia—the young woman with
whom he had sought solace and had married in the throes of a post-combat nervous collapse. Whatever had brought them together in Europe, however, was apparently not enough to keep them together in
America. Shortly after Salinger and his new wife traveled to New York, Sylvia realized she could not live with him in the United States and abruptly returned to Europe. Later, when he tried to
explain the various forces that brought them together, Salinger would say they had gotten married partially because the two of them had a telepathic connection. Indeed, they were so in tune with
each other, Salinger later told a friend, that occasionally they knew at the same time when a particular event was about to take place.

In the end the connection between the two of them must have been weaker than what they had imagined, since no sooner had Sylvia gotten back to France than she filed for and was granted a divorce
from the man to whom she had been married for barely eight months. After this, Salinger found himself once again living with his parents.

It must have seemed to him as if his life was never going to change. Here he was—one more time—living at home, unsure about
what to do next. However, because
he had gone to war, because he had seen what he had seen, he
was
different. There was no question that he had been affected by his years in the Army and his experiences in war. 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 while away the evening hours and meet other young people like themselves.

Perhaps because he was trying to make a new life for himself, Salinger did things he had never done before. He started to work out with barbells to beef up his lanky body, probably a carryover
from the exercise program he had been forced to maintain in the Army. He started to study Zen Buddhism, a stark departure from the Jewish and Catholic religions he had been exposed to during his
youth. Zen Buddhism would become a central part of his life and remain so for years to come. While he studied Zen, while he hung out in Greenwich Village, Salinger also dated a succession of young
women, no doubt in an effort to forget about the brief marriage to Sylvia that had ended in disaster.

Salinger cultivated his nightlife. He often went out to clubs, especially the Blue Angel and the Reuben Bleu. He regularly had dinner at a variety of restaurants; one of his favorites was
Renato’s, an Italian place where he routinely had clams and frogs’ legs. On Wednesday nights, he was part of a small-stakes poker group that met in the Charlton Street apartment of Don
Congdon, a
Collier’s
editor. Mostly,
though, Salinger enjoyed Village society. One friend he had during this period was A. E. Hotchner, a struggling writer
who would go on to have a successful career as a journalist and novelist. A fellow member of the Congdon poker group, Hotchner frequently accompanied Salinger to a bar for a beer or two following
the game.

“Jerry had written a short story, ‘Holden Caulfield on the Bus,’ which the
New Yorker
had rejected,” Hotchner later wrote, “but he talked endlessly about
how he would rework it and how eventually they would realize that it was a new kind of writing and publish it. He had read ‘Candle in the Poolroom Window,’ and another short story of
mine, ‘An Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,’ both of which he found amusing, but he was nevertheless appalled that I would waste my time writing about something that was not connected with
my life. ‘There is no hidden emotion in these stories,’ he said. ‘No fire between the words.’” What impressed Hotchner, as he would write, was Salinger’s
“complete confidence in his destiny as a writer—a writer he was and a writer he would always be, and, what’s more, an important writer.”

From what Hotchner reports, then, it seems fair to infer this: Much, if not all, of Salinger’s writing—at least after his return from the war—was, to a significant degree,
autobiographical.

1

On the morning of November 19, 1946, Salinger sat at his desk in his bedroom in his parents’ apartment and typed a note to William Maxwell
at the
New Yorker.
As he composed the note, he was beside himself with joy. After holding “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” for five years—so long Salinger had concluded it
was never going to run—the editors had suddenly changed their minds and decided to use it after all.

Salinger couldn’t believe it! His excitement suffuses the note he typed to Maxwell. He would promptly make all the minor editorial changes Maxwell wanted, Salinger said—there were
not many of them—the instant he finished what he was doing. At present, he was in the middle of typing, in duplicate with carbon paper, a seventy-five-page story called “The Inverted
Forest” he had been working on for the last three months. It was one of the longest
stories Salinger had ever attempted, so he wanted to put it behind him—he
could do that in the next day or so—before he moved on to “Slight Rebellion Off Madison.” Oddly enough, in his note to Maxwell, Salinger told him he was going to have his agent
send along a new story to the magazine, but it was not “The Inverted Forest.” It was something called “A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All.”

As soon as he finished typing “The Inverted Forest,” Salinger made the changes to “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” which the
New Yorker
published on December 21.
The story may have been slight—it ran only four pages in the magazine—but there it was in the one publication Salinger respected more than any other. Salinger’s work had appeared
in some of the best periodicals in the country:
Collier’s, Story,
the
Saturday Evening Post, Esquire.
But it wasn’t until he saw a story of his in the pages of the
New Yorker
that he believed he had finally made it as a writer. What’s more, publishing “Slight Rebellion . . .” was particularly satisfying to Salinger since he felt a
special connection to the story’s autobiographical material. After all, Salinger had once made just such a late-night telephone call from a bar to a girl like Sally when
he
was
Holden’s age.

The appearance of “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” helped attract interest in another one of Salinger’s current enterprises, for Burnett and Salinger had decided that during 1946
they would finally do what they had been talking about for some time and publish a collection of Salinger’s stories. Burnett would release the book through Story Press’s Lippincott
imprint. After much discussion, it was
determined that the book’s content would be made up from the following stories: “The Daughter of the Late, Great
Man”; “Elaine” (which had appeared in
Story
), “The Last and the Best of the Peter Pans”; “Both Parties Concerned” (
Saturday Evening
Post
); “The Long Debut of Lois Taggett” (
Story
); “Bitsy”; “The Young Folks” (
Story
); “I’m Crazy”
(
Collier’s
); “Boy Standing in Tennessee”; “Once a Week Won’t Kill You” (
Story
); “Last Day of the Last Furlough” (
Saturday
Evening Post
); “Soft-Boiled Sergeant” (
Saturday Evening Post
); “The Children’s Echelon”; “Two Lonely Men”; “A Boy in France”
(
Saturday Evening Post
); “A Young Man in a Stuffed Shirt”; “The Magic Foxhole”; “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” (
New Yorker
); “What Got
Into Curtis in the Woodshed”; and “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls.” (No mention was made that the last story had the same title as one written by A. E. Hotchner. Hotchner would
later imply that he had come up with the title first.)

According to internal notes at Story Press, “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls” was supposed to appear in
Harper’s Bazaar.
Also, according to these same notes, an
advance of one thousand dollars had been negotiated for the book, which was to be called
The Young Folks.
In addition, a list had been compiled of established authors Story Press would
contact about providing endorsements for the book; that list included Jesse Stuart, Whit Burnett, Stuart Rose, William Maxwell, William Saroyan, and, maybe, Ernest Hemingway. Whoever was making
these internal notes—and one assumes it was Burnett—offered this observation: Salinger had a “second book, novel, one third done.” The plan was simple, then. Story Press
would publish
The Young Folks,
establishing Salinger’s name as a book author; after that, it would bring out his novel.