Salinger (9 page)

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A week after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Salinger discovered he still couldn’t join the Army—because of his minor heart
condition. He wrote a letter to Colonel Baker at Valley Forge to seek his advice. In his letter Salinger caught up Baker on what he had been doing for the past two years. He had had two years of
ROTC and two years of college, he wrote, and was beginning to publish short stories in magazines such as
Esquire,
Story,
Collier’s,
and the
New Yorker.
His
inability to join the Army, however, made him feel unnecessary. This said, Salinger asked for guidance from Baker, who, perhaps to Salinger’s surprise, gave it to him in the form of a letter
suggesting that Salinger become an Army volunteer. Salinger was apparently coming to the conclusion that military service had to take precedence over everything. But, according to an interview he
would give much later, before enlisting, he left Manhattan to work for a
brief stint as an entertainer on the
Kungsholm,
an ocean liner that sailed the Caribbean.
Salinger held the job only briefly, but the experience left such a lasting impression on him that years afterward he would still remember fondly his one real venture into live show business.

In the wake of the entrance of the United States into World War II, the government redefined classifications, which allowed Salinger to join the Army. On April 27, 1942, Salinger reported to
Fort Dix, where he was given his serial number, 32325200, only to be assigned to the Officers, First Sergeants, and Instructors School of the Signal Corps in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. There, he
went to classes in the morning and drilled recruits in the afternoon. During his first weeks in the Army, Salinger did not have the time or the mental concentration to write fiction, although in
many ways life in the Army was not completely different from life at Valley Forge. In fact, at the start, Salinger loved the Army so much that he decided he wanted to go to Officer Candidate
School. To make such a step, which many recruits could not do, he needed letters of reference from individuals who had known him or worked with him in the past. To write those letters, Salinger
solicited Colonel Baker and Whit Burnett.

Dated June 5, 1942, Baker’s letter was gushing. “I am of the opinion,” Baker wrote, “that [Salinger] possesses all of the traits and character which will qualify him as
an outstanding officer in the Army. Private Salinger has a very attractive personality, is mentally keen, has above-average athletic ability, is a diligent worker and thoroughly loyal and
dependable . . . I believe he would be a genuine credit
to the country [as an officer].” Burnett’s letter, dated July 1, was more guarded. “I have known
Jerry Salinger, who has taken work under me at Columbia University, for three years,” Burnett wrote, “and he is a person of imagination, intelligence, and capable of quick and decisive
action. He is a responsible individual and it seems he would be a credit to an officer’s rank if he sets his mind in that direction.”
If he sets his mind in that
direction
—it was the sort of phrase that cuts both ways, suggesting, as it does, that if he did not set his mind “in that direction” he might
not
be a credit to the
officers’ rank.

In the early summer of 1942, Salinger was turned down for Officer Candidate School. By July 12, the date he wrote to Burnett to thank him for accepting “The Long Debut of Lois
Taggett” for
Story,
Salinger knew he had not been chosen. Instead he was going to be sent to Governor’s Island, where he would take exams to be transferred to the Army Aviation
Cadets. That transfer came through, and by the end of the summer he was assigned to the post of Army Aviation Cadets instructor at the Army Air Force Basic Flying School in Bainbridge, Georgia.

In September, as he carried on a correspondence with Oona, whose absence from his life only proved to him how much he loved her, he wrote to Burnett from Bainbridge. He may have been in the land
of Faulkner and Caldwell, he said, but he would rather have been slightly north of where he was—about a thousand miles north! It was just too slow and too sticky for him down South. He was
not so lucky, of course. Despite his unhappiness with the location, he remained in Georgia for a while. He was there when he received his
author’s copy of the
September-October edition of
Story,
which included, much to his delight, “The Long Debut of Lois Taggett.”

“[H]e is one of many of ‘our boys’ who are doing an important job and we are rooting for all of them,” read
Story’
s contributors’
note about Salinger. “He is a native New Yorker, twenty-three years old, and his first story ‘The Young Folks’ appeared in the March-April, 1940, issue of
Story.
”
Earlier in the note, the editors included an excerpt from a letter Salinger had written to them. He was a member of the Officers, First Sergeants, and Instructors School of the Signals Corps, he
said, and, in part because the other soldiers in his tent were always listening to the radio, he hadn’t “written a line” since he was inducted into the Army.

He may have stopped writing for the time being, but he had not stopped publishing, as evidenced by “The Long Debut of Lois Taggett.” Set in the privileged world of Manhattan’s
high society, where coming-out balls at the Hotel Pierre, nights at the Stork Club, and seasonal trips to Rio were considered essential occurrences, the story traces the eventful yet oddly empty
life of Lois Taggett. Specifically, Lois marries “a tall press agent named Bill Tedderton,” a man with a penchant for physically abusing her (he burns her hand with a cigarette on one
occasion, then crushes her bare foot with his brassie on another). She divorces Bill in Reno (where else?) only to remarry someone named Carl Curfman, “a thick-ankled, short young man who
always wears white socks because colored socks irritate his feet.” She then suffers an unspeakable tragedy when the child—a boy—she
has with Carl
“toss[es] peculiarly in his sleep [one night] and a fuzzy woolen blanket snuff[s] out his little life.” Of the stories Salinger had published so far, “The Long Debut of Lois
Taggett” was the most bleak and pessimistic. It seemed to say that, above all else, life is defined by loveless unions and random acts of tragedy. The negative view of marriage was especially
alarming coming from an author so young, especially from someone who was then in love himself. Did Salinger believe that his love for Oona, no matter how strong it might have been, was doomed to
fail?

On December 12, 1942, Salinger published “Personal Notes on an Infantryman” in
Collier’s.
Like “The Hang of It,” his short short story that had run in the
magazine a year and a half earlier, “Personal Notes” used as source material life in the military and relied on an O. Henry–style ending. An unnamed first-person narrator recalls
how a middle-aged father joins the Army to avenge his son, also a member of the Army, who had been severely wounded at Pearl Harbor (he lost an arm). It is not until the story’s conclusion
that the reader learns the narrator is talking about his own father who wants to avenge the wounding of his son, the narrator’s brother.

Despite the subject matter of the story, despite the fact that the story’s main throughline concerns a father driven by the rage he suffers over his gravely injured son, the story still
has a feel of innocence to it. The narrator has a “thrill” when his father says he
wants
to see action, since the son admires his father’s desire for revenge. Both father
and son feel the kind of blind emotional glee experienced by any patriot. The father’s proposed act of aggression is deemed worthy
of praise and valor; no consideration
is given to the possibility that the father himself might be killed or wounded or emotionally disturbed as a result of going to wan Instead, in “Personal Notes on an Infantryman,” the
characters celebrate the glory of the military and battle. In its own way, the story was as much pure propaganda as the movies put out by Hollywood at the time and the disinformation then being
released by the U.S. government. In time, however, Salinger would make a complete reversal on the topics of the military, war, and all related issues, once he had endured one of the worst
experiences of his life—live combat.

During that year, 1942, Salinger sold another story, “Paula,” to
Stag
magazine, but it was never published. Still, Salinger was encouraged by the
story’s sale. Then, in late 1942, he was given more reassurance when Burnett wrote to Olding to tell her he wanted to see a novel from Salinger. “I am very much interested in
Salinger’s turning his hand to a novel, if he is not too busy,” Burnett wrote. “I have watched his developments since he was in my class at Columbia and I wish you would sound him
out about a book for the Story Press–Lippincott imprint.” Not too long after getting this note, Salinger wrote back to Burnett to tell him that, while he was trying to find a way to
write stories again, Army life would not allow him to work on a piece of fiction for a number of days running, something he would have to do to write a novel. Maybe he would try the novel once he
found himself in an environment more conducive to writing.

But Salinger had other concerns. He had been stationed first in New Jersey and then in Georgia, so he had not been able to spend any time with Oona since entering the
Army. He had written her long, passionate, strangely morose letters, and she had answered them all, but, as the year progressed, Oona must have lost interest in Salinger, for she decided to move
from New York to Los Angeles, where her mother lived with her new husband. This marked the end of Salinger’s romance with Oona. It was, at least, the second time a serious romance had ended
for Salinger. The first had been with the girl in Vienna. Oona and the Viennese girl were about the same age—their mid- to late teens—when Salinger met them although he had aged by
seven years. Indeed, he was twenty-three to Oona’s sixteen. In the future, while he continued to mature, the girls on whom he would focus his affections and those whose lives he described in
his stories would remain approximately the same age—the age of both Oona and the girl he knew in Vienna.

In the early part of 1943, while still stationed in Georgia, Salinger wrote to Burnett saying that within the last couple of weeks he had sold a story called “The Varioni
Brothers” to the
Saturday Evening Post
—the first time he had made a sale to that magazine, which at the time had one of the largest circulations in the country. If he kept
making money as he was now doing, Salinger said, he planned on getting married. Interestingly, Salinger did not say he wanted to marry Oona O’Neill, but instead a girl he had dated before he
entered the Army,
who attended Finch Junior College. Perhaps Salinger was merely trying to save face with Burnett, who may have known that Salinger had once dated Oona,
because by then, the early months of 1943, it was widely known that Oona was having an affair with Charles Chaplin, the legendary Hollywood actor and director, who was fifty-four years old when he
first met Oona.