Salinger

by Paul Alexander

  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 Yet what was truly shocking about the story, what must have originally made Whit Burnett want to publish this story about a bunch of post-adolescents, was the story’s tone.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.

  Because Story was known to be a trendy journal where aspiring writers often published, members of the publishing community read it religiously. One person who saw the issue in which Salinger’s story appeared was Jacques Chambrun, a New York literary agent. He wanted to represent Salinger; apparently Salinger let him try to sell one story. Not too much later, though, another agent, Harold Ober, offered to represent Salinger, and Salinger signed on with him for good. At Ober’s agency, Salinger was assigned to a woman named Dorothy Olding. “Ivan von Owl should have been Salinger’s agent,” Robert Giroux says, “but Salinger got mixed up with Dorothy Olding because he was writing stories for magazines. Dorothy was a puzzling choice for Salinger from the start because Ivan was the one who handled excellent novels.” As it turned out, even Giroux would have to acknowledge that Salinger’s pairing with Olding worked out for the both of them. Olding may not have been the most likely appropriate choice for him to begin with, but their association would end up being one of the most productive and profitable Salinger would form in his entire career.

  Many young writers go for years without being represented by an agent. In his case Salinger was able to get an agent after publishing his first story. If nothing else, this had to provide him with some tangible reassurance that his decision to try writing was a good one.

  Inventing Holden Caulfield

  1

  Coming off an eventful spring, which saw him enjoy the dual accomplishments of having his first story published and of signing on with a literary agent, Salinger wanted to get out of New York for the summer. In the quiet surroundings of the countryside, he could better concentrate on his writing and produce even more stories for Dorothy Olding to submit to magazines.

  In the early days of the summer of 1940, Salinger headed out of Manhattan. For some weeks, he stayed on Cape Cod, a calming and beautiful vacation spot. Then, by early August, he had moved on to Canada. On August 8, he mailed a postcard to Whit Burnett from Murry Bay, a charming resort in Quebec. On one side of the postcard was an elegant rendering of the Manor Richelieu—the hotel, Salinger pointed out on the other side of the card in a brief note he jotted to Burnett, where he was not staying. While Salinger was summering outside of New York, he was doing so on the sort of shoestring budget that was appropriate for a struggling young author. Salinger had not dropped Burnett a note to comment on Canadian hotels, however. He had written to tell him he was working on a long short story, a departure for Salinger since his stories tended to be relatively short. Finally, after revealing that he was playing bingo on Tuesday nights, Salinger signed off, offering good wishes to Burnett and his colleague at Story, Martha Foley.

  On the surface Salinger’s note appeared innocuous enough, but even at his young age, Salinger knew that to make it in the publishing business he needed to form and foster professional relationships that could further his career. To date, by publishing “The Young Folks,” Burnett had helped Salinger more than anyone, something for which Salinger was obviously grateful. Salinger still got along with editors and publishers. He had not yet formed the opinions, as he would in years to come, that the author-editor relationship is adversarial and that most editors and publishers are uncaring and duplicitous. Of course, this general opinion—that he could not trust the very people whose job it was to publish his work—would later inform his decision to stop publishing his fiction. But that was later. At the moment, he had larger concerns, since he had not yet found that one invention—a character, a genre, a voice—that would inspire him to produce work that was special and original.

  By September, Salinger was back in Manhattan. On the fourth, he wrote to Burnett to say he had decided to try an autobiographical novel; naturally he would show it to Burnett first. As for why he had gotten away for the summer, he had done so, he said, because he was starting to have second thoughts about being a writer. When he began thinking about becoming an actor again, which he had started to do just before the summer, he realized he needed to get away. Back in New York, he planned on attacking the writing business with new zeal. Then, in a letter dated September 6, Salinger told Burnett he had decided to use the initials “J. D.” instead of “Jerome,” because he was afraid readers would confuse him with Jerome Faith Baldwin.

  Finally, on September 19, Salinger revealed to Burnett, in yet another letter, that he had recently pulled out an old story called “The Survivors” and started looking at its ambiguous ending. Already Salinger was experimenting with a technique he would come to rely on in his writing. When he reached the end of a story, instead of closing it off with some kind of definitive piece of action, he would leave the ending unresolved, open to interpretation. In this way Salinger hoped the endings of his stories would force his readers to ask additional questions concerning the characters and events about which they had just read. With “The Survivors,” Salinger had not yet developed enough confidence in what he was doing to leave the ending unclear. Ultimately, he rewrote the story and opted to finish off the story’s action with a sure ending. In mid-September, when Salinger submitted “The Survivors” to Story, Burnett turned it down.

  There was a presidential election in 1940. Franklin Roosevelt had first been elected in 1932, and he was now running for an unprecedented third term in office. This time, the Republicans had nominated as his challenger Wendell Wilkie, who could not have felt confident about running against Roosevelt, since in the 1936 election Roosevelt had defeated Kansas governor Alfred Landon in the electoral college by the staggering margin of 523 to 8. Since 1937, Roosevelt had been trying to focus attention in America on the cultural and political developments taking place in Europe and Asia. Roosevelt had repeatedly warned Americans about the threat to world peace posed by Fascism, which was taking hold in both Europe and Asia. Many Americans dismissed Roosevelt as a warmonger trying to scare people just to get reelected. Still, throughout the fall campaign, Roosevelt cautioned voters about the nationalism that was taking over important segments of the population in Japan, the moves Hitler was making in Europe, and the cooperation Mussolini was offering him in Italy. Regardless of whether the majority of Americans believed Roosevelt to be a warmonger, they still credited him with lifting the national economy out of the Great Depression, so, in early November 1940, they reelected him for the third time, a feat no other president had accomplished. Although Wilkie fared better than Landon before h
im—it would have been hard for him to get fewer electoral votes than 8—Roosevelt still won in the electoral college by a margin of 449 to 82. In November, Salinger voted for the first time in his life. He voted for Roosevelt.

  Salinger ended 1940 on a positive note. Earlier in the year, he had submitted a story called “Go See Eddie” to Esquire, but the magazine had rejected it. Then, in the fall, he sent the story to a literary journal named the University of Kansas City Review. The editors accepted the story and ran it in the issue that appeared in December. It was Salinger’s second published story, and it gave him, if he still needed it, the sort of reassurance young writers often require to keep on trying to make it in a business filled with criticism and rejection.

  2

  In the spring of 1941, Salinger was still living in his parents’ apartment. He was strapped for cash because, while he had seen two of his stories in print, both had been published in small literary journals that did not pay well. In fact, for all of the effort he had put into starting a writing career, so far he had made only twenty-five dollars. One of his first efforts to make some money with his writing was a story called “The Hang of It.” Remarkably, that spring, when Olding submitted the story to the editors at Collier’s, they bought it. One of the most prosperous magazines in the publishing business, Collier’s paid writers well—extremely well. For a story of normal length, the magazine paid as much as two to three thousand dollars. Salinger would not receive that much money for “The Hang of It” since it was a short short story. Still, he looked forward to seeing the story in print—the first time his work would appear in a national magazine. More to the point, he could hardly wait to get paid.

  Collier’s ran the story on July 12, 1941. In the story, which in a slogan below the story’s title the magazine advertised as “A Short Story Complete On This Page,” Salinger examined a subject that would play a vital role in his fiction—the lives of people in the military. Obviously this was also a timely topic, since serious political problems continued to plague Europe, raising the possibility that the American military might become involved at some point. In “The Hang of It,” Salinger was writing about a father whose son, Harry, a foul-up in the Army, reminds him of another foul-up from years ago, Bobby Pettit, who was famous for telling his fellow soldiers that one day he would get “the hang of it.” It’s not until the very end of the story that the reader learns the father, now a colonel, is Bobby Pettit, which provides undeniable proof that he did get “the hang of it” and implies that his son will, too.

  In many ways “The Hang of It” is an insignificant story—not at all in the same league as the important stories Salinger would go on to write. But the story represented something else for Salinger: his ability to craft stories that he could sell in the marketplace. At the time, Colliers, along with Esquire and the Saturday Evening Post, was among a small number of magazines that controlled the commercial fiction market. During the 1930s and 1940s, before television, magazines that published popular fiction attracted enormous audiences and generated substantial sums of money in advertising revenues. To ensure their competitiveness, magazines paid those writers who could produce material so much money that some authors were able to make a living writing nothing but short stories.

  As he wrote his early stories, Salinger soon saw that to improve his chances of selling a particular story to the commercial magazines, he had to tailor that story for a certain publication. Take “The Hang of It,” for instance. In 1941, with the prospect of another world war looming, the American public was interested in reading about Army life. So, Salinger chose the Army as the story’s backdrop. What’s more, Salinger wrote the story so that its success relied on an O. Henry–style twist at the end; he did this because readers judged a story successful if it pulled off just such a gimmick. Collier’s was much more apt to accept “The Hang of It,” which dealt with the United States Army in an entertaining way, than “The Young Folks,” which dealt with the empty, aimless lives of spoiled rich kids from Manhattan—not the kind of subject a mainstream magazine editor could easily sell to America’s middle-class reading public.

  Of all the magazines Salinger dreamed about publishing in, however, the New Yorker stood out above all others as his ideal. Its audience was sizable and sophisticated. Its pay scale was among the highest in publishing. Its editorial staff was widely known for treating writers with respect and consideration. More than anything, to appear in the New Yorker meant that one had reached the upper echelon of the publishing business.

  Through his agent, Salinger had been submitting stories to the New Yorker for some time, all to no avail. Just this year, 1941, on March 17, he had submitted “The Fishermen” to John Mosher at the magazine. Salinger had mailed in the story himself because Olding was in the hospital. On Salinger’s letter, someone at the magazine had written in large block letters the word NO, then circled it, although Salinger would never know this. Instead, to Salinger, Mosher simply wrote a brief note turning the story down. Undeterred, Salinger already knew the next story he would submit to the New Yorker. As he had with “The Young Folks,” he wanted to write about rich, jaded teenagers from Manhattan. This time, Salinger had come up with a new character around which to focus the story—an animated yet neurotic teenage boy from the Upper East Side with the unusual name of Holden Caulfield.

  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:

  He visited pre-Änschluss Vienna when he was eighteen, winning high honors in beer hoisting. In Poland he worked in a ham factory and slaughterhouse, and on returning to America he went to a small college in Pennsylvania where, he says, he wrote a smug little column for the weekly paper. Then he attended Columbia, and studied with Whit Burnett’s short-story group. His satire on formula fiction, “The Heart of a Broken Story,” appears on page 32.