Salinger (6 page)

Friends, however,
would
speculate as to why he left. “I was in the same English class with him,” says Charles Steinmetz. “We had to write different things—a
piece of a description, a scene from a play, a narration. He wrote very well, so well the professor would read his compositions to the class. You could tell even then that he had a talent for
writing. But Jerry didn’t enjoy the English class because it wasn’t what he wanted. He told me once, ‘I’m not satisfied. This is not what I want.’ He just wasn’t
happy with his school situation. ‘I’ve got to be a writer,’ he said to me another time. ‘Charlie, I have to be a writer. I have to. Going here is not going to help
me.’ He wanted a course that would teach him to write better and he felt he wasn’t getting it out of
this course. He was looking for more of an instructional
approach to writing—an analytical approach. This professor just wanted to write for effect. He didn’t want to break down the process of writing.”

There were, in fact, academic courses that featured such an approach to the teaching of writing. One of the best known of those classes was at Columbia University. If Salinger moved back into
the city, perhaps he could audit that class.

Apparently, when Salinger decided to leave Ursinus—for whatever reason—he wasted no time. “He didn’t say good-bye to anyone,” Richard Deitzler remembers. “He
just left. One day he was there, going to classes, writing for the school newspaper, telling stories to his dormmates. The next day he was gone.”

2

Starting in the fall of 1938 and continuing into the winter of 1939, Salinger, who once again moved in with his parents after he left Ursinus,
had a series of rendezvous with a woman named Elizabeth Murray at a place in Greenwich Village called the Jumble Shop. Each time, over a long dinner, Jerry read one or more of his short stories to
Elizabeth as she listened intently. The two had met during the summer of 1938 when Jerry and William Faison, a friend of his from Valley Forge with whom he had appeared in
Journey’s
End,
traveled down to see Williams sister Elizabeth, who lived in a large, rambling house in the small town of Brielle on the south shore of New Jersey near Point Pleasant. Twelve years older
than William, Elizabeth had a daughter, Gloria, whom Jerry had enjoyed meeting
that summer. Elizabeth had taken an instant liking to Jerry, and the two of them had agreed to
meet up in the fall in New York City. As it happened, those meetings turned into informal editorial sessions during which Salinger read Elizabeth his work.

“Mother liked him,” says Gloria Murray. “She thought he was a little self-absorbed. She also thought that he used her as a sounding board. When he read the stories to her, she
flattered him because she did think they were interesting and rather comical. He read the stories to her because he thought she understood his writing. He was anxious for her comments and she was
supportive.” They talked about other writers as well. “She introduced him to Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Salinger had never heard of them. He was so absorbed in himself. But
Mother told him to go out and read
The Great Gatsby
at once and he did. He had never read it before.”

In all of the conversations Salinger had with Elizabeth Murray in the fall of 1938 and the winter of 1939, he did not dwell on his latest failure in academia at Ursinus. He mostly talked about
writing, which had begun to dominate his thinking. He talked to Murray, or so it seems, because, unlike his father and maybe even his mother, she would encourage him in his effort to write.
“All writers need this sort of encouragement at the beginning of their careers,” Gloria Murray says. “My mother was the one who gave that vital encouragement to Salinger. Their
relationship never became anything more than that—her supporting him as a fledgling artist. But what a gesture my mother made to him. I do believe he was aware of the importance and
selflessness of the gesture at the time, too.”

3

“There was one dark-eyed, thoughtful young man who sat through one semester of a class in writing”—the
second class of its type he had signed up for—“without taking notes, seemingly not listening, looking out the window. A week or so before the semester ended, he suddenly came to life.
He began to write. Several stories seemed to come from his typewriter at once, and most of these were published. The young man was J. D. Salinger.”

The person who would one day make this observation was Whit Burnett. In the life of many writers, one person emerges, usually as a result of fate or circumstances, to become a mentor figure for
the writer. In the life of Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell proved to be the role model she needed, which she discovered when she, along with her friends Anne Sexton and George Starbuck, signed up for
Lowell’s writing class at Boston University. In Salinger’s life, that mentor figure was Burnett. This happened because, around Christmastime in 1938, after he had endured an academic
debacle made even worse by the fact that it occurred at a school no one had ever heard of, Salinger decided to act on his latest desire to learn about writing—from an
“instructional” or “analytical” approach. For the spring semester of 1939, he signed up for a class (for no credit) that was then one of the most highly regarded courses in
writing circles in the country, Burnett’s short-story creative-writing class at Columbia University.

A modestly talented short-story writer, Burnett had published his work in many of the day’s popular magazines and literary journals. He was also known for his teaching, which resulted in
his class at Columbia being heavily subscribed. Of everything, though, he was
most famous for editing
Story,
the literary journal he had founded in 1931.
Story
had achieved an excellent reputation mostly because Burnett had an eye for publishing the first work of writers who would go on to have substantial careers, among them, Joseph
Heller, Norman Mailer, William Saroyan, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Carson McCullers. Salinger may have known about Burnett’s reputation for spotting young writers.

For much of his first semester, Salinger sat in the back of the class, said little if anything, and seemed to do everything he could do to ignore what Burnett was saying. Later, Salinger even
apologized to his teacher for being lazy and shut-off emotionally during the class; he was blocked, he said, because of psychological problems. Maybe—or perhaps he just needed to adjust to
the decidedly peculiar routines of a creative-writing class. No matter what his outward appearance was, Salinger was not just sitting there, idly unaffected by Burnett or the class. In 1975,
Salinger wrote this about Burnett: “He usually showed up for class late, praises on him, and contrived to slip out early—I often have my doubts whether any good and conscientious
short-story course conductor can humanly do more. Except that Mr. Burnett did. I have several notions how or why he did, but it seems essential only to say that he had a passion for good short
fiction.”

Then there was the night Burnett came into the classroom, took his chair, opened a book, and, instead of either speaking extemporaneously or having students discuss their work as he normally
did, read out loud to the class William Faulkner’s “That Evening Sun Go
Down.” Without stopping, without offering his own edification, without providing any
real indication as to why he was even doing it, Burnett read the short story word for word in a flat, unaltered, unemotional voice. The characters were who they were; they said what they said. The
drama was in the story itself; it did not have to be manufactured by performance. “He abstained from reading beautifully,” Salinger wrote about the experience. “It was as if he
had turned his voice into paper and print. By and large, he left you on your own to know how the characters were saying what they were saying. You got your Faulkner story straight, without any
middlemen in between.” As Salinger sat in the class, he was able to witness and to understand the way a piece of literature can transport a reader to that special place where he can
experience the wonder of the power of art. Maybe something as simple as that—hearing Faulkner’s story read aloud the way Burnett read it—helped Salinger decide that he was going
to devote himself, more than he ever had, to writing fiction.

Following an uneventful summer, Salinger returned to Columbia in the fall to take Burnett’s course a second time. In that class Salinger appeared as noncommittal as he had been in the
first. Then something happened. Toward the end of the second semester, as Burnett would later recount, Salinger suddenly came to life. He was no longer the disinterested student sitting on the back
row; he was animated, engaged, alive. Soon he turned in his first story, then a second and a third. Burnett read the stories with studied interest to see if his silent student had any talent at all
for writing. And he was amazed. The stories were polished, stylish, even sophisticated, especially for a writer as
inexperienced as Salinger was. Burnett told his student he
had potential—no, it was more than that. Though Salinger was only twenty Burnett believed he showed unmistakable skill and accomplishment. His future was limitless, depending on how committed
he was to the profession of writing.

As if to make Burnett prove he meant what he said, Salinger submitted a story called “The Young Folks” to
Story.
Much to his surprise, Burnett accepted it at once and agreed
to pay him twenty-five dollars for the story. It was the first money Salinger had made as a writer—and he was elated. He wrote back to a colleague of Burnett’s to provide information
for the contributors’ notes. He was born in New York, Salinger said, and had attended public schools, et cetera. Tall and dark, he had a personality that tended to swing from happiness to
depression. He had butterflies in his stomach as he was writing the letter, he continued, because he was so overwhelmed by this event—the first acceptance of one of his short stories for
publication.

Taking the acceptance as a sign, Salinger wrote more stories and submitted them to magazines and journals. None was accepted, but that didn’t matter. He was waiting to see “The Young
Folks” in print. It was not a long wait. On the day Salinger got his first contributors’ copy (the issue was released on February 16, 1940, but advance copies were sent out before
that), he was overjoyed. Unfortunately, he would not always feel the same way about the publication of his work. That was later, though. Now here it was: “The Young Folks,” in the
indisputable black-and-white of print.

4

In the March-April 1940 issue of
Story,
there among a list of names on the contents page that a half century
later would be unknown to the reading public, Salinger looked until he found the one name that would be known—his own. Then, on the end pages in the contributors’ section, he looked to
see himself described this way: “J. D. Salinger, who is twenty-one years old, was born in New York. He attended public grammar schools, one military academy, and three colleges, and has spent
one year in Europe. He is particularly interested in playwriting.”

That latter fact became evident as soon as the reader glanced at Salinger’s story. For while “The Young Folks” has its occasional splash of prose narrative or description, much
of the story is composed of dialogue. Some passages may be flat and simplistic, but others display a true ear for the way people talk, and predict the kind of dead-on accurate dialogue that would
become a hallmark of Salinger’s prose. “The Young Folks” also showed another obsession Salinger would mine in the future—a fascination with the thinking and actions of young
people. Here “the young folks” is a group of college-age kids who have gathered one evening at the home of their friend Lucille Henderson to smoke cigarettes, socialize, and
“drink up her fathers scotch.” However, the focus of the story is not on Lucille Henderson, but on two people attending the party, Edna Phillips and William Jameson Junior.

Edna has spent much of the evening—it’s now eleven o’clock—sitting in a chair, smoking cigarettes, “yodeling hellos, and wearing a very bright eye which young men
were not bothered to catch.”
Jameson sits on the floor next to a blonde girl who has attracted the attention of three boys from Rutgers. When Lucille Henderson
introduces Edna Phillips to William Jameson Junior, the couple retires to the terrace where they hear the amorous mumblings of a couple in the dark, smoke a cigarette each, discover all the scotch
has been drunk, and momentarily engage in a spell of pointless conversation, the highlight of which occurs when Edna blurts out that she may or may not be a prude but she is
not
promiscuous. “I just have my own standards,” she says, “and in my own funny little way I try to live up to them. The best I can, anyway.” Not long after this exchange,
William Jameson Junior returns to the living room to sit at the feet of the blonde and Edna Phillips, following a brief tour of another wing of the house, goes back to her chair to resume her
cigarette-smoking. That’s how the story ends, with the reader feeling he has been given little besides a brief glimpse into the lives of these “young folks.”

Compared to narratives about young people that would come years later—novels such as Sylvia Plath’s
The Bell Jar,
Bret Easton Ellis’s
Less Than Zero,
and
Salinger’s own
The Catcher in the Rye
—“The Young Folks” was tame fare. This, however, was 1940, a time in America when the dominant emotion was optimism, when the
rules of decorum were well known and respected, and when young people did not gather at the home of the parents of one of their own to smoke cigarettes, flirt suggestively, and drink scotch. For
the day, the moral fabric of the story would have been considered disconcerting, maybe even suspect. Yet what was truly shocking about the story, what must have originally made Whit Burnett want to
publish this
story about a bunch of post-adolescents, was the story’s tone. At a time when stories about young people going through the crumminess of dating most often
had about them a tone of joviality and sweetness, Salinger achieved in “The Young Folks” a tone so flat and deadpan he seemed to be writing about a wake. There is a feeling of
emptiness, of outright shallowness, to the lives of these young people. William Jameson Junior’s speech is dull, inarticulate. Edna Phillips’s speech is perky and upbeat but, finally,
all but void of any real meaning or significance to her or her friends. The couple’s parting on the terrace is as arbitrary as their coming together. In his story Salinger has captured the
aimless actions of the children of the rich. In this way he was emulating the writing of the author his friend Elizabeth Murray had turned him on to—F. Scott Fitzgerald, who built his
reputation on writing about the wealthy, whose lives are often empty in their moral content, random in their purpose, yet endlessly fascinating to the reading public.