Salinger (8 page)

In the summer of 1941, while he was living and working at home, Salinger and William Faison, his friend from Valley Forge, went to visit Faison’s sister, Elizabeth
Murray, at her home in Brielle, New Jersey Salinger was still grateful to Elizabeth for the informal editorial sessions the two had had over dinners in Greenwich Village some time back; at a point
when he was unsure about how to proceed with his writing career, she had been encouraging to him. On this trip, they did not dwell on Salinger’s work; mostly they just socialized. As a part
of their socializing, one night Elizabeth took Salinger over to the home of a friend of her mother’s to meet that woman’s daughter—Oona O’Neill.

For some years, Elizabeth’s mother had known Agnes Boulton, who lived in Manhattan but kept a summer home on the Jersey shore near Point Pleasant. Boulton had been the second wife of
playwright Eugene O’Neill, who had written
Anna Christie,
The Hairy Ape,
Desire Under the Elms,
The Emperor Jones,
Strange Interlude,
and
Mourning Becomes Electra.
In 1941, he was already one of America’s most successful and respected playwrights. During their brief marriage, O’Neill and Boulton had one daughter,
Oona, who was fifteen. Raised by her mother in Manhattan, Oona attended the exclusive all-girls Brearly School, where she was close friends with the daughters of other wealthy families, among them
Carol Marcus and Gloria Vanderbilt.
At an early age, she was a fixture of the New York social scene. In the spring of 1942, she would be nominated as Debutante Number
One.

This would happen in large part because Oona possessed an almost mythical beauty and a hauntingly distant personality. When another extraordinary debutante, Jacqueline Bouvier, appeared on the
scene more than a decade later, she would be compared with Oona. With her classic features, her delicate looks, her dark hair, Oona routinely stopped conversation when she made an entrance into a
crowded room, a simple act she found to be profoundly difficult since she suffered from a paralyzing shyness. “Oona had a mysterious quality to her,” says Gloria Murray,
Elizabeth’s daughter. “She was quiet but she was stunning in her beauty. One night I remember going over to her house and she was getting ready to go out with some boy. So my
grandmother asked her, ‘Do you like this boy?’ And she said, ‘No, I can’t stand him.’ But she was going out with him anyway. She was a blank, but she was stunning in
her beauty. You just couldn’t take your eyes off her.”

When Elizabeth took Salinger to meet Oona on that night in the summer of 1941, he had a typical reaction. “He fell for her on the spot,” Murray says. “He was taken with her
beauty and impressed that she was the daughter of Eugene O’Neill. For her part, she seemed to be impressed that he was a writer, too.” Some connection must have taken place instantly
between them, for by the end of the evening they had agreed to see each other after both of them returned to Manhattan.

Back in the city, they went to movies and plays. They met for dinner at cafés and restaurants. They took long walks through Central
Park. It was an odd union,
really—the classically beautiful young woman dating this wisecracking, intellectual young man (who was so “above it all” he had not even bothered to take college seriously). Oona
obviously was attracted to Salinger’s sharp wit and brilliant mind and Salinger was attracted to Oona’s breathtakingly good looks. As they dated that summer, Salinger fell in love with
Oona. Around this time, he got to see in print a story he had written, which dealt with the subject of love, although he probably had gotten the idea for the story well before he met Oona.

In September,
Esquire
published Salinger’s “The Heart of the Broken Story.” In “Backstage with
Esquire,
” Salingers photograph
appeared. His dark, soulful eyes, his full lips, his black hair slicked back and combed to one side, all combined to create a studious and youthful look for Salinger, who was pictured in his sports
jacket and tie. In a biographical note, Salinger was described as having been “born in Manhattan twenty-two years ago, educated in city schools, a military academy, and three colleges, never
advancing beyond the freshman year.” Then the note went on:

Upon reading the story, the reader learned that it was actually about writing a story. The story-within-the-story concerns Justin Horgenschlag and Shirley Lester, would-be lovers who are
supposed to meet in order for the boy-meets-girl story-within-the-story to take place, but who don’t because the author in the story “couldn’t do it with this one.” Instead,
in Salinger’s version of the boy-meets-girl story, Justin and Shirley never meet. Shirley goes off to become involved with a man “with whom she [is] in love” but who is
not—and never will be—in love with her, while Justin starts dating a woman “who [is] beginning to be afraid she [isn’t] going to get a husband.” In short, the boy and
the girl do not fall in love with each other, but with people who do not love them and never will.

In his fourth published story, Salinger may have exhibited his considerable skill at handling irony and satire, but he also offered his first take on the idea of love, a subject on which he had
little experience, except for his relationships with Oona and—perhaps—with the young girl in Vienna. Still, Salinger’s impression of love was clear enough: He rejected it, or,
more to the point, he rejected the possibility that a true and reciprocal love could exist. In Salinger’s world, apparently, one did not end up with one’s true love but with someone who
had his or her own agenda—and more than a few ulterior motives.

3

But early in 1941, Salinger had found the subject matter about which he was supposed to write. For some time he had been
searching for that special character or milieu; as it is with most writers, much of this process of discovery had been unspoken, even accidental, as if he were going about it by instinct. Then,
even though he was only in his early twenties, he came to understand that the vehicle through which he was destined to examine the world in such a way as to make his fiction distinctly his own was
Holden Caulfield.

The story was “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” and in it Holden is a kind of teenage Everyman. “While riding on Fifth Avenue buses,” Salinger wrote, “girls who knew
Holden often thought they saw him walking past Sak’s or Altman’s or Lord & Taylor’s, but it was usually somebody else.” Holden is a study in ordinariness, as evidenced
by the events documented in the story. He comes home from prep school; kisses his mother; meets his girlfriend, Sally Hayes, for a drink and a night on the town dancing; tells Sally he loves her in
the taxi just before she tells him she loves him; and goes with her the next night to see the Lunts in
O Mistress Mine
on Broadway. This is just the sort of life East Side WASPs raised
their children to lead, and from all indications Holden is going to do his part to carry on the lifestyle. It’s implied he will finish prep school, go to college, marry Sally Hayes, get a
respectable job, buy an appropriate apartment, and have children who will be raised to be like their parents.

Or at least that’s what Holden
is supposed to do.
However, Holden is in the middle of an emotional meltdown. Over drinks, he bares his soul to Sally in a long monologue during
which he confesses he hates
“everything.” “I hate living in New York,” he says. “I hate the Fifth Avenue buses and Madison Avenue buses and
getting out at the center door.” That’s not all, either. He hates plays, movies, even fitting sessions at Brooks Brothers. So he tells Sally he wants the two of them to leave New York,
go to Vermont or “around there,” and live in a cabin near a brook until the money he has—one hundred and twelve dollars—runs out. Then he’ll get a job up there so they
can live in the country. Always the good WASP, Sally cannot begin to understand the motivation behind Holden’s “slight rebellion.” “You can’t just
do
something like that,” she tells him.

The story ends with Holden making a drunken telephone call in the middle of the night to Sally to tell her that he will join her to trim her Christmas tree as planned. Even so, there is a
disturbed, and disturbing, quality to the conversation. Holden’s line “Trim the tree for ya,” which he repeats over and over like a mantra, has a pleading, desperate quality to
it, as if he is asking Sally to give him some sign she still wants him despite what he has told her before. She says what he hopes she will say—yes, she wants him to come trim her
tree—but still, that answer doesn’t seem to be enough.

By inventing Holden Caulfield, Salinger had entered an arena where he would be able to produce significant fiction. Holden was that genuine article—the literary creation that speaks from
the soul of the author to the heart of the reader. Salinger had to realize Holden was special because he started another story about him right away. At this rate, perhaps he would end up with a
series of stories about Holden. There was one other fact Salinger knew, and it was important. As
Salinger would admit years later, Holden was an autobiographical character.
Holden’s drunken telephone call to Sally, for example, was based on an episode Salinger himself had lived. In the future Salinger would repeatedly contend that fictitious events had to sound
real to the reader. In Salinger’s case, he may have ensured that authenticity by basing his characters on real people, himself among them.

Salinger wanted to do something with “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” right away. So, at his urging, Olding submitted the story to the
New Yorker,
and in November, much to
Salinger’s surprise, the editors accepted it, probably looking to run it right away since the story is set during the Christmas season. When he got word of the acceptance, Salinger was
overjoyed. He had been eager to break into the pages of the
New Yorker;
at the amazingly young age of twenty-two, he had been successful. Elated, Salinger wrote to William Maxwell, who
would be his editor for this story at the magazine. He had another story about Holden, but he was going to hold off on sending it to him, Salinger said. Instead, Salinger told Maxwell, he would try
a different story on him—another one about prep-school children, an obese boy and his two sisters.

As the
New Yorker
prepared to publish “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and all the warnings Roosevelt had made through
the years about radical nationalism growing uncontrollably in parts of Europe and Asia seemed more than justified. Within hours, Roosevelt asked Congress, and Congress agreed, to declare war on
Japan. The start of war meant the editors of the
New Yorker
did not feel it was appropriate
to publish—so soon after Pearl Harbor—a story about a
neurotic teenage boy whose “slight rebellion” is prompted by the fact that he has become disenchanted with the life he leads as the son in a wealthy family in New York. Holden’s
problems were trivial compared to world developments. So the magazine’s editors postponed the publication of Salinger’s story. Although he would not know it at the time, the editors
would not publish “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” until after the conclusion of World War II. It would be years, then, before Salinger realized his dream of seeing his work appear in the
magazine he respected most.

However, Salinger had larger concerns than the question of whether the
New Yorker
was going to run his story. At twenty-two, he was prime material for military service. Earlier in 1941,
he had tried to join the Army, but military doctors turned him down because he had a minor heart condition. With the United States about to enter a world war, it was only a matter of time before
Salinger’s heart condition would be considered negligible, making him eligible for the newly sanctioned draft.