Salinger

by Paul Alexander

  Theirs was an affair the nation read about not just because of the dramatic age difference between them, but because a former girlfriend of Chaplin’s, Joan Barry, announced around this time that Chaplin was the father of the child she was carrying. That scandal overshadowed the romance of Oona and Chaplin, who had originally met in late 1942 at the house of an agent who believed Oona was right for a part Chaplin had been looking to cast. (Now that she was in Hollywood, instead of attending Vassar College where she had been accepted, Oona was pursuing a career in acting.) “Contrary to my preconceived impression,” Chaplin would one day write about the first time he saw Oona, “I became aware of a luminous beauty, with a sequestered charm and a gentleness that was most appealing. While we waited for our hostess, we sat and talked.” Their conversation lead to a passionate affair, which ended on June 16, 1943, when the couple married in a civil ceremony in Carpenteria near Santa Barbara in California. They would have married earlier, but they had to wait until Oona turned eighteen, since her father, horrified that she would marry a man of Chaplin’s age, refused to consent to the marriage. In fact, after Oona married, her father, who was the same age as Chaplin, disowned his daughter and, for the next ten years until his death, never spoke to her again.

  Needless to say, the press coverage of the Chaplin-O’Neill wedding was extensive. Newspapers around the world published photographs of the event. With no advance warning, Salinger read about the wedding in the paper just like everyone else. In a letter to Whit Burnett, Salinger seems clearly upset about the loss of Oona. By then, June 1943, he had been transferred to a base in Nashville, Tennessee. There, his job included issuing the morning report, an activity at which Salinger, who had been promoted to staff sergeant, made mistakes fairly regularly. He also socialized with the locals. On one three-day pass, he went to Dyersburg, Tennessee, where he played golf, drank heavily, and danced with girls, presumably in bars. He also tried to forget about Oona by looking forward to the Saturday Evening Post publishing “The Varioni Brothers.” He anticipated this story’s release because he hoped a Hollywood studio might buy it, possibly as a Henry Fonda vehicle. He wanted the money he would earn by such a sale more than ever, but he hoped as well to make a splash in the community that had just accepted Oona. Salinger had gone out of his way to remove “The Varioni Brothers” from any connection with the war by setting it in the 1920s, a decade closely associated with F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author who had become one of Salinger’s favorites and an influence on his own writing.

  The Saturday Evening Post published “The Varioni Brothers” on July 17. The story focuses on two brothers who form a highly successful singing act that ends when one brother is mistakenly killed by a mob hit man who has a contract to murder the other brother for bad gambling debts. “The Varioni Brothers” is a passionate, moving, cautionary tale set in “the high, wide, and rotten twenties.” Despite its deep emotion, memorable characters, and unquestionable literary quality, however, “The Varioni Brothers” did not find a buyer in Hollywood. Salinger’s grave disappointment was compounded by the fact that—as the summer gave way to fall, according to letters he was writing at the time—he seemed more, not less, disturbed by Oona’s marriage to Chaplin.

  During these months, Salinger was transferred again, this time to the Eighty-fifth Depot Supply Squadron at Patterson Field in Fairfield, Ohio. From there, he finally wrote to Burnett to complain about the O’Neill-Chaplin wedding. The photographs of the newlyweds in the newspapers offended him deeply, he said. Then he painted a grotesque if humorous verbal picture of the two of them—Oona and Chaplin—in what can only be described as a bizarre mating ritual involving Chaplin perched on a dresser and Oona running around the bedroom wearing an evening gown.

  As for Salinger’s wedding plans, they were off. The girl he had mentioned to Burnett—the junior-college coed—was no longer interested in him, probably because, as even he had to admit, he never bothered to write or call her. At the moment, all he had going for him was a pending promotion, if it was a promotion, to the base’s public-relations department. This was happening because his superior officers had seen “The Varioni Brothers” in the Saturday Evening Post Earlier, Salinger had again applied for admission into the Officer Candidate School (in June and July, Burnett and Baker had been approached by government officials to supply another round of recommendations for Salinger), but his second application had been rejected as well. “[H]e wrote publicity releases for Air Service Command in Dayton, Ohio [Fairfield was near Dayton],” William Maxwell later reported, “and used his three-day passes to go to a hotel and write stories.” Finally, at the end of 1943, Salinger was transferred into the Counter Intelligence Corps, which required him to be relocated once more—now to Fort Holabird in Maryland where he would undergo training.

  2

  Salinger was encouraged by the events transpiring in his life in the early days of 1944. First, he had received the news that Stuart Rose, an editor at the Saturday Evening Post, had bought three of his stories. He would have been happy with the sale of one—but three! It was an astonishing number for a magazine to buy all at once, especially a magazine as powerful as the Saturday Evening Post. Heartened by this sale, Salinger felt comfortable enough with the routine of Army life that he began work on a novel after all. What’s more, he decided the novel would be narrated by Holden Caulfield—a move that showed Salinger knew just how important the invention of Holden could be to his career.

  On January 14, 1944, Salinger wrote to Burnett to say that even though he expected to be transferred overseas soon, probably to England, he felt a new sense of urgency about his writing—this, of course, excited him. A week later, still feeling enthusiastic, Salinger wrote to Woolcott Gibbs, a New Yorker fiction editor, to let him know that Dorothy Olding would soon be submitting a new story, “Elaine,” and that he had one request: that not a single word of the story be changed—not one. Reject it rather than edit it, Salinger ordered Gibbs in his letter—with no room to negotiate. This said, Salinger entered into a breathless discussion about how he had improved as a writer and how the New Yorker should push its regular contributors, writers such as John Cheever and Irwin Shaw and John O’Hara, to produce more meaningful stories. Finally Salinger revealed that he was depressed because he had given the Army two years of his life—a much longer period of time than he had anticipated—and he saw no end in sight. Two weeks later, on February 4, William Maxwell wrote to Olding to reject “Elaine.” “This J. D. Salinger just doesn’t seem quite right for us,” the letter said, with no stated reason for the decision.

  Next, on February 26, the Saturday Evening Post ran “Both Parties Concerned,” the first of the three stories Stuart Rose had bought. Originally, Salinger entitled the story “Wake Me When It Thunders,” but the Post had changed the title without even consulting him—a move that infuriated Salinger, especially in light of the stand he had just taken at the New Yorker regarding “Elaine.” If he was not suspicious of the actions and motivations of editors before, this had changed his mind. In fact, Salinger was about to decide that he knew more about editing his stories than his editors did. He was also coming to see how an editor would presume ownership of a story, which was alarming to Salinger since an editor usually had nothing to do with the creation of the story in the first place. Unfortunately Salinger was only beginning to experience these troubles with editors—troubles that would become so bad in the future, he would eventually come to question the very financial and ethical foundations on which the publishing business is based.

  “Both Parties Concerned,” a love story about a couple who are in conflict over how to live their lives now that they are the parents of a newborn, was what it was—a piece of commercial fiction meant to entertain a mainstream audience. Salinger had succeeded, though, at least in terms of making money. For “Both Parties Concerned,” he received two thousand dollars, as he would for each of the other two stories the Post had bought. Six thousand dollars was a handsome sum in 1944 and m
ore than passing encouragement for Salinger to continue writing—if he still needed encouragement.

  But Salinger could not dwell on his success at the Saturday Evening Post. Within a few weeks of the story’s publication, he was transferred to England.

  By March, Salinger had settled into his new life at the headquarters of the Fourth Infantry Division in Tiverton, Devon, England. There, the Army continued to train him in counterintelligence operations with the intention—although Salinger did not yet know it—of including him in the Allied forces’ invasion of occupied Europe. In Tiverton, Salinger enjoyed going to the local Methodist church to listen to the choir. When he found the time, he also worked on his fiction. Mostly, though, he went about his Army duties; for Salinger, after two years, those duties were becoming tiresome and predictable.

  On April 15, “Soft-Boiled Sergeant,” which Salinger had originally entitled “Death of Dogface,” appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. Again without Salinger’s permission, the magazine had changed the story’s title, further confirming Salinger’s growing distrust of editors and publishers and underscoring the arrogance he was coming to believe they often displayed toward a writer and his work. The story consists of one extended flashback to the occasion when Philly, the story’s main character, met Sergeant Burke, the “soft-boiled sergeant” who had been Philly’s mentor in the Army. The most interesting moment of the story occurs when Philly and Burke go to a Charlie Chaplin movie. Halfway through the picture, Burke leaves the theater. Following the movie, Philly finds Burke outside. “What’s the matter, Mr. Burke?” Philly says. “Don’t you like Charlie Chaplin none?” Philly’s side is “hurting from laughing at Charlie.” To this, Burke replies, “He’s all right. Only I don’t like no funny-looking little guys always getting chased by big guys. Never getting no girl, like. For keeps, like.” There is a lot of heavy-handed irony, juvenile cynicism, and even self-indulgence in the passage. Charlie Chaplin may have been “funny-looking,” he may have been “always getting chased by big guys,” but, in real life at least, he did get the girl—Salinger’s girl, Oona—and he had got her for good. “For keeps, like.”

  In mid-April, Burnett wrote Salinger a letter congratulating him on the publication of “Soft-Boiled Sergeant,” which Burnett considered to be a “very fine piece of work.” Along these lines, Burnett had an idea he wanted Salinger to consider. Burnett was wondering if Salinger had given any thought to publishing a short-story collection; if he had, Burnett would be interested in acquiring it for Story Press’s Lippincott imprint. “I thought the book might be called The Young Folks,” Burnett wrote. “And all of the people in the book would be young, tough, soft, social, angry, etc. Perhaps the first third of the book would be stories of young people on the eve of the war, the middle third in and around the Army, and then one or two stories at the end of the war.”

  On May 2, Salinger gave Burnett his thoughts on the story collection. First, he was moved that Burnett felt so favorable toward his work that he would want to publish a collection of his stories. Even so, Salinger was scared of releasing a story collection because, according to his own standards, so many of his stories were failures. Still, he listed eight that could be used as the core of a book: “The Young Folks”; “The Long Debut of Lois Taggett”; “Elaine”; “Last Day of the Last Furlough”; “Death of Dogface” (“Soft-Boiled Sergeant” in the Post); “Wake Me When It Thunders” (“Both Parties Concerned” in the Post); “Once a Week Won’t Kill You”; and “Bitsy.” In addition to these, Salinger said, he had six Holden Caulfield stories, but he wanted to save them for the novel he was writing. Giving up on the third person, he now wanted to narrate that novel in the first person. By doing so, the prose would have a more immediate, personal feel.

  3

  By late 1943, the war in Europe had been raging for more than four years. The Allied community, fearing that the war would drag on much longer, moved to coordinate their efforts more closely.

  On November 28, 1943, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin met in Teheran, Iran, in the first of their “Big Three” conferences, to arrive at decisions about the strategies Allied troops should undertake to accomplish the goal of liberating France. On January 12, 1944, those discussions were continued when the Big Three arrived at a general plan for invading France through the English Channel. The troop buildup began right away—the reason soldiers like Salinger had been shipped to England in the first place. By the late spring of 1944, some five thousand Allied ships waited in ports throughout England to transport approximately two million men across the Channel from England to France. To protect the invading troops, the Allied forces gathered twelve thousand airplanes in England to be used in bombing missions over northern France. In late May, all forces—the troops, the ships, the airplanes—were in place, ready for an Allied assault. Because of various factors, among them the weather, it was determined that the invasion, whose code name was “D-Day,” would take place on June 6.

  On the morning of D-Day, Salinger awoke knowing that he, like so many of the other ground troops, was about to go into battle. The assault began early, and word spread quickly among the troops back on the British shore that—even though the Germans had been taken off guard by the massive Allied assault—they were putting up a surprisingly strong resistance. Even so, on amphibian troop movers, the Allied forces sent line after line of troops from England to France, securing a sixty-mile-long section of the French shore. As the first hours passed, Salinger, along with the other men in the Twelfth Infantry Regiment, waited for the Fourth Division’s turn to move forward as part of the invasion. Soon it became known that both sides had already sustained considerable casualties.

  Four hours or so into the invasion, Salinger’s regiment boarded an amphibian troop mover that would take them across the English Channel. The hour it took for the troop mover to cross the Channel from England to Utah Beach in Normandy must have been the longest hour of Salinger’s life. In the sky overhead, anti-artillery shells were exploding. As the troop mover approached the French shore, soldiers could hear the deadly real-life soundtrack—bomb blasts mixed with the constant litany of gunfire. Regardless of all their training, there was no way these invading soldiers could have prepared themselves for the earthquake-like rumblings, the constant barrage of shelling. It was even worse when the door to the troop mover opened and the men on board, Salinger among them, rushed out into the cold water, heading for the beach. On shore, they found cover. Digging in, they started to fire back at the enemy.

  By the end of the first night, Salinger’s regiment had progressed two miles into France. For Salinger, it was the beginning of a tour of Europe that would last for the next four months.

  Over the next several days, Salinger’s regiment advanced from Utah Beach to Cherbourg. As a counterintelligence agent, Salinger was a part of an operation that destroyed avenues of communication. Agents did this by shutting down telephone lines and taking over post offices as soon as Allied troops arrived in a new town or village. It was also the duty of these agents to uncover Gestapo agents by interrogating French locals and German prisoners of war. On June 12, not a week after D-Day, Salinger revealed his general feeling about what he was doing when he wrote Burnett a brief postcard in which he mentioned conducting interrogation work. Most citizens, he said, were anxious about the shelling but thrilled the Allied troops had come to defeat the Germans. He had not had time to work on fiction, he added. Still, always the writer, Salinger wanted to know if Olding had sent Burnett some new stories she was supposed to show him.

  Two weeks later, Salinger was feeling the effects of the war. His June 28 letter to Burnett was written in a new—and unmistakably somber—tone. For the better part of the month, Salinger had been in a war zone where, as he witnessed mass death and destruction, he knew he, too, could be killed at any moment. As a result, the light-hearted, jovial tone he had affected in many of his past letters was gone, replaced by a solemnity usually foreign to Salinger. In fact,
in his letter, Salinger told Burnett he simply could not describe the events of the last three or four weeks. What he had witnessed was too horrendous to put into words. Yet even as he was making this gut-wrenching and dramatic revelation, Salinger still felt compelled to discuss, of all things, business. Apparently, Burnett had last written Salinger to suggest Salinger publish his novel before his story collection. In response, Salinger agreed, adding that he could be finished with the novel in six months once he returned to the States. That’s how Salinger left it with Burnett before he thanked him for accepting “Elaine,” the story the New Yorker had rejected. “Elaine,” which centers on a mildly retarded girl with few prospects for happiness, was a longish, informal-feeling piece written before Salinger’s experiences in late 1944. But it was a story about the end of beauty, Salinger said, just as war is about the end of beauty. This was why it was so meaningful to Salinger that Burnett accepted the story at this time.

  On July 15, as Salinger remained in the middle of the fighting in France, the Saturday Evening Post published “The Last Day of the Last Furlough,” the third of the three stories the magazine had bought from Salinger at the beginning of the year. The story had a feel of ambition to it, as if its author knew that by writing it he was attempting a serious piece of literature. Beyond this, the story marked the first time Salinger used John F. (“Babe”) Gladwaller, a character with personal traits strikingly similar to Salinger’s. Like Salinger, Babe had an adoring mother who doted on her son unabashedly. Like Salinger, Babe loved to read, especially the Russian novelists and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Babe even had the same dog-tag number as Salinger, one undeniable clue that the story—or at least elements of it—was autobiographical.