Salinger

by Paul Alexander

  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:

  Lovelorn Department: Question—I go with a boy who is so very confusing. Last Wednesday night I refused to kiss him goodnight and he became very angry. For nearly ten minutes he screamed at the top of his voice. Then suddenly he hit me full on the mouth with his fist. Yet, he says he loves me. What am I to think? Answer—Remember, dearie. No one is perfect. Love is strange and beautiful. Ardor is to be admired. Have you tried kissing him?

  “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.”

  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 g
lanced 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.”