Salinger (5 page)

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Coming from a relatively obscure military academy where he had turned in a no-better-than-mediocre academic performance, Jerry did not have
available to him an unlimited range of colleges to which he could apply. In fact, as the spring semester passed, Salinger’s plans became more uncertain. Those plans were finalized in June
1936 when Jerry applied to and was accepted by New York University’s Washington Square College. In the fall he took a standard freshman schedule, but he maintained the level of academic
performance he had established for himself prior to Valley Forge. To say that his attendance at NYU was not productive would be an understatement; it verged on being a waste of time. Unfulfilled
and unmotivated, he concluded there was little reason for him to continue at the college, so, by the late summer or early fall of 1937, he decided to take his father up on his suggestion, at least
for the immediate future. He
would learn the import-export trade. In order to study that business firsthand, Sol wanted Jerry to go to Europe, specifically to Austria and
Poland.

He traveled to Europe in the fall of 1937. While he seems to have gone to both Paris and London, he spent most of his time at the beginning of his trip in Vienna, where he improved his French
and German, two languages he had studied in prep school. He may have been able to work on his language skills, but as for learning his father’s business, he delved into it little, if at all.
William Maxwell later wrote about Salinger’s grand tour: “He . . . learned some German and a good deal about people, if not the exporting business.” Soon, though, Jerry had no
choice but to do what he had come to Europe to do. “I was supposed to apprentice myself to the Polish ham business,” Salinger wrote Ernest Hemingway (whom he would one day meet) about
his European experience. “They finally dragged me off to Bydgoszcz for a couple of months, where I slaughtered pigs, wagoned through the snow with the pig slaughtermaster.” This was an
event so disturbing to Salinger that years later he still complained about it to friends like Maxwell. “Eventually he got to Poland,” Maxwell wrote, “and for a brief while went
out with a man at four o’clock in the morning and bought and sold pigs. Though he hated it, there is no experience, agreeable or otherwise, that isn’t valuable to a writer of
fiction.” Just how that experience was valuable to Salinger is not clear; how it was valuable to him as a person is. Because he detested the episode as much as he did, he knew once and for
all he could not ever—
ever
—go into his father’s line of work.

Regardless of how Salinger employed his European experience as source material, he did use the months he spent in Vienna and Poland to write story after story. In fact,
Salinger was turning out fiction at a steady pace, and he continued to write even after he started to send off his stories to magazines for possible publication. He “learned, as well as this
can ever be learned,” Maxwell wrote, “how not to mind when the manuscripts come back.”

At the end of his months in Europe, Jerry returned to New York, where he moved back into his room in his parents’ apartment on Park Avenue. From his conversations with friends, a few
letters, and some elements of his stories, it seems that this episode in Vienna had been a happy time for him. His memories included a girl he had met there. As he would say years later in a letter
to Hemingway, one memory he would always hold with him was the afternoon he and this young girl went ice skating; he would never forget kneeling down to help her on with her skates—such a
simple but poignant image. At eighteen, he was about the same age she was. What is telling about his life, however, is that as Salinger grew older, even when he was well into his middle age, the
ideal object of his affection would always be about the same age as the young girl in Vienna. In many ways, this simple fact would turn out to be one of the defining qualities of Salinger’s
life and work.

When Jerry returned to America, he brought with him more than just memories of a young girl in Vienna. He also had an immediate
awareness of the events
in Europe that would soon prove to be historic. The political situation in key countries in Europe had been unstable. In Spain, following the abdication of King Alfonso XIII in 1931, the country
was in political turmoil, which only became worse in 1936 when General Francisco Franco mounted a Fascist coup. The resulting Spanish Civil War raged until Franco’s forces destroyed those of
the government in 1939. Benito Mussolini and his Fascist regime had been in control of Italy since the latter part of 1922 when, in the wake of the Fascists’ March on Rome, Mussolini was
named premier. However, the country that was in the most intense period of transition was Germany, primarily because of the political ascent of Adolf Hitler. After becoming chancellor in January
1930, Hitler solidified his support until he was able to establish in September 1935 the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws, which essentially started an undeclared war on the Jews. It was obvious Hitler
planned on waging war on more than the Jews after he annexed Austria in March 1938 with little or no resistance from the Austrian people. That aggressive policy would continue in 1939 when in
August Germany and the Soviet Union signed a pact agreeing to a partition of Poland. Once Germany began that annexation in September, the ensuing resistance by the Polish people sparked the
beginning of what became World War II.

Salinger had been in Europe, in the pivotal countries of Austria and Poland no less, at the very time these dramatic developments were taking place. They had an effect on him then—the
grandson of a
rabbi, he must have felt particularly disturbed by Hitler’s assault on the Jews—but that was nothing compared to what would happen to him as a
result of the United States entering World War II later in 1941.

In the spring of 1938, as he considered what to do next with his life, Jerry decided to try college once again. This presented a new problem. With his modest high-school
background and his less-than-stellar performance at New York University, a school he either could not or would not return to, he had to find a college that would accept him. Obviously, any school
with an outstanding reputation, and virtually all of them with only adequate or minor reputations, would reject his application. So, in early 1938, as he began searching for yet another academic
institution to attend, he found Ursinus College, a relatively unknown rural school sponsored by the Evangelical and Reformed Church.

Just why Salinger became interested in Ursinus is not clear; perhaps it came down to nothing more than location—Collegeville, Pennsylvania, a small town two hours by car from Philadelphia,
in the same vicinity of the Valley Forge Military Academy, a school about which Jerry had pleasant memories. Anyway, how could a student like Jerry resist going to the only college in the country
with a sycamore tree growing in one of the end zones of its football field? That detail alone was too good to pass up. Ultimately it all worked out. Jerry applied, Ursinus accepted him, and he
started there in the fall of 1939.

Early one evening, not too deep into the fall semester, Jerry sat on the bed in the third-floor dormitory room to which he had been assigned without a roommate and spoke, in
animated, energetic language, to the group of half a dozen fellow students who had gathered in his room. Tonight Jerry was telling the boys, as he had done on previous occasions, stories about his
experiences in Europe. In the claustrophobic dorm room, with its impersonal, industrial feel, Jerry crafted his stories about his voyage over to Europe, his adventures in Paris, and the disturbing
events he witnessed on his predawn pig-slaughtering expeditions in Poland. With undeniable storytelling skills, he made his travels sound romantic, which in turn made
him
seem worldly and
exotic. Most of the boys had never dreamed of going to Europe. Not only had Jerry dreamed about it, he had done it. This—and the way he told his stories—set him apart from the other
boys in the room.

“He wasn’t what I’d call social, but he was an interesting person,” says Richard Deitzler, one of the boys who listened to Jerry’s stories about Europe. “He
was a perfectly normal, attractive young man—an ordinary student. The thing that surprised us, of course, was the way he could tell stories.” Other students had a different view of
Salinger. “He had few friends,” says Anabel Heyen, a Ursinus coed. “He felt he had come down from New York and didn’t really fit in. When I saw him around campus, he was
very standoffish. It was hard to have a conversation with him. He was almost a recluse,” Salinger’s uneasiness about going to Ursinus may have contributed to his being, as he had
been in the past, lackadaisical about his academic performance. At Ursinus, he wasn’t failing his classes; he was merely drifting through them from one day to the
next.

As he struggled with academics, Salinger joined the writing staff of the
Ursinus Weekly,
the college newspaper. Initially he served as the drama critic, and in that capacity he reviewed
three plays, including J. B. Priestley’s
Time and the Conways
and Turner Bullock’s
Lady of Letters.
In his notices he achieved a balanced, professional tone, producing
pieces that were unusually skilled for a college freshman. His second job was more whimsical, for the editors allowed him to write a regular column called “The Skipped Diploma.” Using
the subtitle “Musing of a Social Soph,” Salinger, who signed his column “JDS” (apparently not in any serious attempt to protect his identity since he signed his name to his
drama reviews), mused on timely subjects that were interesting to him—a movie he had just seen, a book he had recently read, or a train ride that might have left a lasting impression on him.
Salinger may have been young, but “The Skipped Diploma” showed talent and perception. The columns were often witty and funny, employing a kind of Ivy League tongue-in-cheek humor
uncommon among Ursinus students. From start to finish, the columns were well-written; Salinger’s sentences were thought out and crafted, the result of studious rewriting. Moreover,
occasionally an excerpt was startling in its content, such as a passage he included in the column dated October 17, 1938:

“The Skipped Diploma” appeared in the
Ursinus Weekly
only during October, November, and December because, as the semester progressed, Salinger became less and less engaged
by his academic classes. After staying at Ursinus College for only nine weeks, a little over half the fall semester, he decided to drop out and return home to New York. “Salinger had an
average record; he did not ‘flunk out,’” Barbara Boris, the school’s registrar, later wrote, “I have no information on why he left the college.”