Salinger (15 page)

One day “entirely by accident,” John discovers that Leah is engaged to be married to a young man from Vienna. After John learns this, he goes to Paris, then America. Returning to
Vienna during the war in “an Intelligence job with a regiment of an infantry division,” John finds out from local citizens “what terrible things had been done to the Jews in
Vienna.” Near the end of the story, after the war in Europe is over, John discovers that Leah and her family, because they were Jews, “were burned to death in an incinerator.”

There is enough similarity between the events of this story and what is known about Salinger’s experience to guess that the story is autobiographical. One might conclude that the character
of Leah
was based on the young Viennese girl Salinger mentioned afterward—the girl he took skating about whom he wrote to Hemingway. Beyond the autobiography, “A
Girl I Knew” is important because it represents the first time Salinger dealt with his Jewish heritage and the holocaust.

In 1948, besides “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” Salinger published two more stories in the
New Yorker.
The selling of three stories to the
New
Yorker,
which paid better than any other magazine at the time, allowed him to earn a good salary as he continued to live his quiet suburban life in Stamford. Years later, reports would
circulate that during this year the editors at the magazine gave him a contract that would ultimately be worth many thousands of dollars a year for him to write for them.

But compensation, while important, was not the only issue for Salinger; he probably would have published there for less than what he was paid. To Salinger, writing for the
New Yorker
meant having control over the way his work was published; that, he felt, translated into greater notoriety within the literary community. Anyway, because the magazine did not even have a table of
contents, much less a contributors’ notes section, Salinger believed the magazine’s focus was where it should be: on the quality of the work, not the celebrity of the author.

“Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” appeared in the
New Yorker
on March 20. The story takes place one afternoon and centers on two former college roommates, neither of whom
graduated. Mary Jane is
now a New York career girl; Eloise, a Connecticut housewife with a maid, a daughter named Ramona, and a husband she does not like. They meet up at
Eloise’s house to spend the afternoon chain-smoking cigarettes and drinking highballs. During the afternoon, Eloise reveals that she is unhappy. She also explains why. She was once in love
with a young man named Walt Glass—Seymour’s younger brother—who was tragically killed in the war. Handsome and intelligent, Walt made her laugh as no one else could. Now, in the
wake of his death, she is stuck in a miserable marriage to a man she doesn’t even care for—and probably never will—while her one true love is gone.

“Uncle Wiggily” is a bleak story, mostly because of the way Salinger portrays Eloise, who has about her an air of controlled hysteria, as if at any moment she could snap from the
humdrum pointlessness of the life she hates. Cruel to her maid, disinterested in her husband, she even has a strained—and strange—relationship with her daughter. Here was a glimpse into
the world of the privileged, the segment of society Salinger’s father had so longed for his family to be a part of. But what Salinger found when he examined their world in a fiercely
realistic way was an assemblage of unhappy people living unfulfilled lives. In the end Eloise may have had class and money, she may have lived a life of total leisure, but she was ultimately a
woman plagued by utter despondency, unable to buy any modicum of happiness with her money.

Salinger’s next story to be published by the
New Yorker
was “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” which appeared on June 5. Its action centers around an odd cast of
characters: two fifteen-year-old
prep-school mates, Selena and Ginnie; Selena’s “goofy” twenty-four-year-old brother, a college dropout who didn’t
serve in the Army but worked in Ohio in an airplane factory; and Eric, a thirtyish, obviously gay man, who worked with Selena’s brother in Ohio. In the story, which takes place in
Selena’s family’s Upper East Side apartment, Eric comes to pick up Selena’s brother to take him to see Cocteau’s film version of
Beauty and the Beast,
but Ginnie
implies that later
she’s
seeing Selena’s brother, who had been flirting with her. However, the characters’ motivations remain unresolved. Why is Selena’s brother
flirting with Ginnie? Why is Eric taking Selena’s brother to a movie? Why is Selena’s brother going with him? What exactly is the nature of their friendship? These questions are never
answered.

Salinger had encountered no problems as he published his stories in the
New Yorker.
Unfortunately, around this time he did have problems with other magazines. He sold
Cosmopolitan
“Scratchy Needle on a Phonograph Record,” a fictional sketch inspired by the life of jazz legend Bessie Smith, but when the magazine ran the story in September the
editors had changed the title to “Blue Melody” without asking Salinger’s permission. Then there was confusion with “An Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,” which Salinger
sold to
Woman’s Home.
When the story did not appear in the magazine, for reasons that are unclear, he sold it to
Collier’s;
when the story did not appear there, he
withdrew it from submission and decided not to publish it at all.

As a result of his being treated this way by the “slick” magazines, Salinger decided he wanted to publish only in the
New Yorker.
If that meant not publishing a story at all
should the
New Yorker
turn it
down, he would just not publish that story. At the
New Yorker,
every alteration made to a story, including changing the
title, was done with the writer’s approval. Because of this, the
New Yorker
had the reputation of being the one magazine in the country that appreciated the writer and the vision he
had for his work. What Salinger did not yet know, what he would soon find out, was that editors at book publishing houses were no better than those at the slick magazines. The book editors and
publishers he would work with were arrogant, condescending, self-important people who contributed little to the creative process but kept the lion’s share of the profits—or at least
that’s what Salinger would come to believe.

One night in January 1949, Salinger went to visit Elizabeth Murray and her daughter Gloria, who were then living on Staten Island. “He was dressed very well,” says
Gloria Murray. “He wore a stunning black overcoat. He was very handsome. He sat with us for a while and talked. He told us about his war experiences—the V-Day in France. He
wouldn’t tell us about the gory details, just the V-Day and how the French had made a fuss over them when they went to Paris. He also mentioned meeting Hemingway. He said that he had a good
time with him one night but that one night was enough. They had gone to all of these bars drinking. Hemingway was a heavy drinker and Salinger wasn’t. Hemingway would not have been
Salinger’s kind of man.” Finally, on that evening in January 1949, Salinger gave Elizabeth Murray a copy of the
Good Housekeeping
in which “A Girl I Knew”
appeared. “He must have known the girl in the story although he didn’t say if he did,” Gloria Murray recalls. “He just said that it was a story he
had written very quickly. He and my mother talked about the story for a while and then he left. It was the last time I saw Salinger in person.”

3

Before he completely gave up on magazines besides the
New Yorker,
Salinger had to see into print a story or two he had already sold
elsewhere. For example,
Harper’s
had bought “Down at the Dinghy” but wanted him to shorten one key scene before the story was published. Salinger wrote to Gus Lobrano on
January 14, 1949, that he had reluctantly decided, after seriously considering his options, to make the change. Salinger was corresponding with Lobrano because the
New Yorker
was about to
publish “The Laughing Man,” which finally appeared on March 19. In this story, Salinger wrote about a group of prepubescent boys who belong to an after-school-and-Saturday activity
group, known as the Comanches, that is headed by an adult activity director, the Chief, who tells the boys an ongoing soap-opera adventure entitled “The Laughing Man” and who, it is
implied in the story in understated terms, gets his girlfriend pregnant. In the Salinger canon, critics would not regard “The Laughing Man” as a seminal story, even though at the time
it was published—the very late 1940s—the subject matter—a couples unwanted, out-of-wedlock pregnancy—was scandalous. Over the years, however, as social and cultural mores
changed, the story’s subject
matter was no longer salacious, making “The Laughing Man” seem like a slight piece of Americana in tune with the times in
which it was published.

In April, as Salinger continued to live and work in his barn apartment in Stamford,
Harper’s
published “Down at the Dinghy,” which at one point Salinger had called
“The Killer in the Dinghy” before he—and not some editor—changed the title. Earlier in the year, Salinger had written the magazine a letter addressing, among other things,
the topic of contributors’ notes. If he ran a magazine, Salinger said, he would never use contributors’ notes because he didn’t care about the mundane issues covered in them:
where a writer was born, how many children he has, et cetera. A writer who likes contributors’ notes is “very likely to have his picture taken wearing an open-collared shirt . . .
looking three-quarter-profile and tragic.” This said, Salinger proceeded to tell the magazine that he had been writing for ten years and that while he was not a “born writer” he
was a “born professional.” He didn’t choose the field of writing as a way to make a living, he continued; he just started writing one day when he was eighteen “and never
stopped.” Then again, maybe he did “select” writing; he was simply not sure anymore. For what it was worth, he added, he served during the war in the Fourth Division. “I
almost always write about very young people,” he said, ending his letter. Ignoring Salinger’s sentiments,
Harper’s
crafted a standard contributors’ note from the
letter. “His present story,” the note read, “is characteristic in that it is about very young people.”

In this story the young person about whom Salinger was writing is Lionel (his mother is Boo Boo Glass Tannenbaum, Seymour’s younger sister), who becomes so
disturbed over something that has happened to him, he hides near his home in a dinghy. The reader discovers the reason Lionel has done this: He overheard the family maid tell someone his father is
“a big-sloppy-kike.” The reaction of a child to just such an anti-Semitic comment may be realistic, but ultimately that exchange is not enough on which to base an entire story.
“Down at the Dinghy” seems to rely too heavily on a single comment to represent a subject as vast and complicated as racism.

By the early fall of 1949, Salinger had moved from Stamford to Westport, Connecticut, where he rented a modest but comfortable house. In late September he received a letter
rejecting a story (which story it was, is not clear) which made him furious. On October 3, Lobrano acknowledged Salinger’s anger when he told him in a letter he would have invited him to the
semi-finals of the U.S. Open at Forest Hills, but Lobrano thought he was out of the country in Nova Scotia, although he assumed Salinger was too mad to go with him anyway Salinger wrote back to
Lobrano on the twelfth to say he was not angry at him in particular because he knew Lobrano did not enjoy rejecting his stories. Still, Salinger had to admit he
was
disturbed by the
rejection. Perhaps that was one more reason why he had decided he was going to complete the novel about the prep-school boy he had been working on for so long.