Salinger

by Paul Alexander

  In the story, Babe, who is visiting his parents’ home in Valdosta, New York, plays host to an Army buddy, Vincent Caulfield, who, on a recent trip home to Manhattan, discovers his brother, Holden, is missing in action. “He wasn’t even twenty, Babe,” Vincent says to his friend later that night. “Not till next month. I want to kill so badly I can’t sit still. Isn’t that funny. I’m notoriously yellow. All my life I’ve even avoided fist fights. Now I want to shoot it out with people.”

  Much later, when Babe can’t sleep, he goes into his younger sister Mattie’s bedroom, wakes her up, and, in his own way, tells her good-bye. “Babe, don’t you get hurt!” Mattie says anxiously. “Don’t get hurt.”

  Finally, the story ends after Babe returns to his bedroom, only to be joined there by his mother who comes in to say good night. As they talk, it becomes clear from their short conversation that both she and her son know she may never see him again after this night, the night of the last day of the last furlough.

  During July and on into August, Salinger continued his job with the Fourth Division. The high point of what he had seen so far occurred on August 25, when Salinger was a part of the Allied troops who marched into Paris and liberated the city from the Germans. When they saw the Americans, Salinger wrote to Burnett, the Parisians jammed the streets of the city. They cried. They laughed. They held their babies up for the Americans to kiss. There was the shooting of guns in the air throughout the city in celebration. There was the general sense of relief and jubilation. There was the unbridled elation Parisians felt over their lives being given back to them. For Salinger, it was a profoundly memorable scene—a joyous moment in a war experience that, since D-Day, had had very little joy in it.

  4

  A newspaper correspondent during the war, Ernest Hemingway was in Paris on Liberation Day. As soon as he set up headquarters at the Ritz Hotel, many soldiers heard he was staying there. At that time, Salinger was intrigued by the prospect of meeting a writer as renowned as Hemingway. So, armed with a copy of the Saturday Evening Post that contained “Last Day of the Last Furlough,” Salinger set out for the Ritz to meet Hemingway.

  Once he got to the hotel, Salinger saw to it that he had an audience with Hemingway. In an aggressive move, Salinger, who would later shun this type of self-assertion, gave Hemingway the Post so he could read “Last Day of the Last Furlough.” Telling Salinger he was not only familiar with his fiction but had even seen a picture of him in Esquire, Hemingway read “Last Day of the Last Furlough” at once. Not surprisingly, since it was a well-written story about two families caught up in the horrors of war, just the kind of subject matter about which Hemingway himself had written, Hemingway loved it. “Jesus, he has a helluva talent,” Hemingway later said about Salinger. For his part, after meeting Hemingway, Salinger wrote in a letter to a friend that the “Farewell to Arms man” was “modest” and “not big-shotty,” which, Salinger said, made him appealing.

  On a subsequent occasion, Hemingway dropped in on Salinger’s infantry unit and, according to published reports, got into a discussion with someone—perhaps Salinger—about which gun was more preferable, a U.S. .45 or a German Luger. Hemingway liked the latter, he said. To prove the Luger was better, Hemingway pulled his out and, taking aim at a chicken that happened to be nearby, shot the chicken’s head off. Considering Hemingway’s history, with all of the bullfighting and boxing and big-game hunting, this demonstration of unbridled male machismo certainly would have been in character for him. At the same time, considering Salinger’s background, with the Park Avenue address and the prep-school education and his father’s social aspirations, shooting the head off a chicken would not have been an action Salinger could have understood, much less condoned. Salinger was horrified.

  At this point in the war, however, Salinger had other atrocities to cope with. During the next four months—from early September until the end of December—the Fourth Division’s Twelfth Infantry—Salinger’s unit—was directly involved in a significant part of some of the most savagely contested fighting in World War II. Salinger was still trying to cling to a patriotic, almost romantic view of war and the military, but after these four months his view of both would change forever.

  Leaving Paris, the Fourth Division was deployed, along with several other divisions, to the Hurtgen Forest, a treacherous, heavily wooded piece of terrain a good distance from the city. In the Hurtgen Forest, the American forces encountered a surprisingly strong resistance from a much larger number of German troops than the Americans had expected. In the forest the fighting was bitter, intense. What should have been a relatively quick campaign turned into a terrible—and deadly—conflict that stretched into November. One companion unit to the Fourth, the Twenty-eighth Division, a National Guard unit from Pennsylvania whose shoulder insignia was a red keystone, sustained so many casualties its insignia became known as “the bucket of blood.” The Fourth Division amassed similar casualties, perhaps even more. The battle in the Hurtgen Forest would go down in history with the nickname “bloody Hurtgen.”

  In all, during its eleven months of combat in Europe, the Fourth Division suffered some two thousand casualties a month with the vast majority of those casualties resulting from conflicts such as the battle in the Hurtgen Forest. The unusually high number of dead and wounded the division sustained was bad enough, but, according to future military scholars, the Hurtgen Forest contest should probably never have been fought in the first place—an irony that, when those involved found out, would be mind-numbing to them. In short, the battle took place because potentially dangerous troop movement was not stopped due to, as one scholar later contended, “an extraordinary series of command failures all the way up to Omar Bradley,” the main American ground commander for troops throughout northwestern Europe. From local to high command, a string of bad decisions put the Fourth and other divisions into jeopardy so that hordes of men were killed for no reason at all. “The horrors of Hurtgen can never be forgotten by the men who were there,” wrote the division’s official reporter for the division records. What he did not record was this: The battle did not have to occur at all. It did happen for no other reason than bureaucratic foul-ups.

  Soon after the Allied forces finally won the battle of the Hurtgen Forest on December 16, 1944, the struggle for Luxembourg began. The Germans were on the attack. They hit the Americans’ First Army front hard, and the conflict, which resulted in substantial casualties on both sides, came to be called the Battle of the Bulge. Salinger’s regiment was involved in defending Echternach, one of the battle’s key points of conflict. After several days, Echternach fell to the Germans, making it appear as if the Allied forces could lose the entire battle. Then, the Allies sent up from the back ranks inexperienced troops such as cooks and mechanics to fight on the front line, and somehow these novice soldiers pushed the Germans back until the Allied forces won the Battle of the Bulge on Christmas Day.

  For Salinger, the year 1944 ended on this disturbing note. For four long months, he had been directly involved in some of the worst fighting of the war. In the Fourth Division alone, he had witnessed at least fifty to sixty casualties a day (with ten or more dead); some days, the casualties reached two hundred. Seeing so many of his fellow soldiers either killed or wounded had been the sort of life-altering experience that would permanently change his view of war. To make matters worse, he probably knew, as did a number of soldiers, especially those who had access to intelligence information, that some of the actions the military had taken, particularly toward the end of the war, were not even necessary.

  Back in the States, the newspapers were full of field reports detailing the severity of the fighting at the front. Naturally, the friends and family members of American soldiers were worried about the fate of the Allied troops. “If possible,” one of Salinger’s friends from California wrote to Burnett in late December, “would you let me know any information available about Jerry Salinger since the German breakthrough? I think he was near Echternach or even
closer to the front, perhaps in some lovely detachment; reports are garbled so far. . . . He is a valued friend and would scorn me for this letter. I know you would keep it confidential and would be very grateful should you write me anything you may have heard.” No doubt Salinger’s friend had written to Burnett because of Salinger’s connection to Story. In fact, in its November-December issue, the magazine published Salinger’s “Once a Week Won’t Kill You,” a plainly written, quasi-sentimental story that recounts the final actions of a young man as he prepares to depart for war. Readying himself to leave, he admonishes his young bride to take his favorite aunt to the movies once a week. The story shows a family coping with the enormity of war through attention to small details.

  Late in 1944, Salinger sent a V-mail to Elizabeth Murray. In the letter he told her that for some time he had been feeling sullen and depressed. He had written eight stories since he had been shipped overseas, he said, three of them after D-Day. Then, with a certain true pleasure, he told her he had seen a good deal of Hemingway. Next, he recalled the VE-Day events in Paris, which clearly left a joyful impression on him. Yet memories of these events had not been enough to brighten his spirits. The fighting had taken its toll. He was ready to go home.

  5

  In the first months of 1945, Salinger’s unit advanced deeper into Germany. After the strenuous fighting that took place in the final months of 1944, the Germans were unable to put up much resistance. On this deployment, Salinger continued to work in his capacity as a counterintelligence officer. In March and April, as he continued to go about his duties in the Army, Salinger published two more short stories. One of them represented a fundamental shift in the way he looked at war and the military. That story, “A Boy in France,” appeared in the Saturday Evening Post on March 31, 1945. Previously, Salinger had been carefree, even fanciful, in the way he treated war; his characters were often anxious to go into combat to kill the Germans or the Japanese. Now, Salinger painted a much different picture. In “A Boy in France,” the central piece of action concerns a boy, Babe Gladwaller, who is so weary of fighting one night that, when he finds a foxhole, he removes the effects of a dead German soldier (principally a “heavy, bloody, unlamented kraut blanket”), gets into the foxhole, and begins to hallucinate about going home to be with “a nice, quiet girl . . . not anyone I’ve ever known.” Finally, he rereads a letter from his younger sister Mattie, which ends with her telling him, “Please come home soon.” Finished with the letter, Babe lies back in the foxhole, the weight of his entire war experience crashing down on him. “Please come home soon,” he starts to repeat to himself out loud. Please come home soon.

  Gone is the cute, ironic tone of “The Hang of It” and “Personal Notes on an Infantryman.” That mood has been replaced by a dark tone of anguish and despair. When Babe speaks at the end of the story—“Please come home soon”—it is not so much a wish as a plea, a despondent cry. The cruel fighting Salinger had seen so much of had obviously changed the very way he thought and wrote about war and the military. His romantic view of the two had been destroyed by the abject reality of what he had seen—death, pain, destruction.

  Soon after “A Boy in France” appeared, Story finally published “Elaine,” which Burnett had bought after the New Yorker rejected it. This story did not deal with war, but with a subject that was equally compelling to Salinger—the actions of a young girl nearing puberty. It would be this fascination with very young female characters that Salinger would explore in story after story in years to come.

  Sylvia

  On May 5, unable to maintain the military action they had kept up for years, the Germans finally surrendered to the Allied forces. At the time, Salinger’s unit was stationed at Nauhaus. From later pieces of evidence it appears that Salinger, like so many others who had fought in the war, was exhausted, disenchanted, and confused by what he had been through. As each day passed during May and June, he did not improve. Exhaustion turned into despondency, disenchantment into despair. Salinger had more and more trouble coping with living life on a day-to-day basis, now that the war was over. Finally, in early July he checked himself into an Army general hospital in Nuremberg where he was evaluated by doctors as being in good physical condition but suffering from what amounted to a nervous breakdown. It may have been a mild breakdown—it would not require extended psychiatric care or admission to a mental institution—but it was a breakdown nevertheless. Exposure to live combat over a prolonged period of time had left Salinger depressed, angry, and unable to cope with the routine nature of ordinary life.

  While he was in the hospital in Nuremberg, Salinger wrote a letter to Hemingway and mailed it to Hemingway’s home in Cuba. Addressing the letter to “Papa,” the nickname Hemingway was called by close friends and family, Salinger said he checked into a hospital because he had become deeply despondent. During his time in the hospital, he said, the staff had asked him questions about his sex life, his childhood, and his feelings about the Army. His sex life was ordinary, his childhood was uneventful, and, yes, he liked the Army—those were the answers Salinger said he gave to their questions. Next, Salinger asked Hemingway about his new novel, quickly adding that Hemingway should not sell the book to Hollywood. Using a playful but serious tone, Salinger told Hemingway that, as chairman of various Hemingway fan clubs, he did not want to see Gary Cooper involved in any Hemingway motion-picture project.

  As for his own life, Salinger had asked the Army to send him to Vienna, the city where he had once spent the better part of a year, but he had not yet heard what his orders were going to be. Salinger wanted to go to Vienna, he told Hemingway, to put ice skates on the feet of a Viennese girl again—a reference, though Hemingway could not have known it, to the Viennese girl Salinger had met years earlier and whom he recalled for many years afterward. In addition to asking to be sent to Austria, Salinger had written a couple of his “incestuous” stories, some poems, and a play, which contained a character named Holden Caulfield, who, Salinger said, he might portray himself if he ever finished the script. Finally, Salinger wanted to write a novel but, because it was going to be emotional, he did not want to be discharged from the Army for psychiatric reasons, something he was concerned about. He was a jerk, he admitted to Hemingway, but he didn’t want to be called one by people who didn’t know him when his novel was published—and then he speculated on a year—in 1950.

  Salinger ended his letter by saying that the next time Hemingway was in New York, Salinger hoped he could see him. Then, in a long postscript, Salinger mentioned a recently published Fitzgerald scrapbook Edmund Wilson had edited called The Crack-Up. Salinger disapproved of critics attacking Fitzgerald for his inability to develop as a writer. When an author produces a masterpiece like The Great Gatsby, Salinger theorized, he can’t “develop” beyond that.

  A few weeks later, Salinger was released from the hospital. For much of the summer, he continued to recuperate. In September he met a young woman named Sylvia. In the future, details about Sylvia would remain mysterious, the result of Salinger’s unrelenting drive to prevent information about his life from becoming public knowledge. He spoke about his marriage to friends, but just a few.

  A mere handful of facts are known about Sylvia. She was French. She was a doctor, probably a psychologist. Salinger had been involved with her for only a brief period of time, maybe only a few weeks, when the two were married. In November, Salinger was given a non-psychiatric discharge from the Army; following this, the newlyweds lived in a small town in Germany for a while. They seemed to be, for a time at least, a happily married couple. To support himself, Salinger lined up a six-month contract for civilian work with the Department of Defense. Despite the distractions of his work and married life, however, he still found time to write and publish.

  In October, he published “This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise” in Esquire. In this story Vincent Caulfield, back home from the war, is upset because his brother Holden, as he was in “Last Day of the Last Furlough,” is missing in a
ction. “Missing, missing, missing. Lies!” Vincent says. “I’m being lied to. [Holden]’s never been missing before. He’s one of the least missing boys in the world. He’s here in this truck; he’s home in New York; he’s at Pencey Preparatory School (‘You send us the boy. Well mold the man. All modern fireproof buildings . . .’); yes, he’s at Pencey, he never left school; and he’s at Cape Cod, sitting on the porch, biting his fingernails; and he’s playing doubles with me, yelling at me to stay back at the baseline when he’s at the net.” Again, the sentimentality Salinger once felt about war is absent, replaced by the anguished lament of a young man who has lost his brother in action.

  Next, on December 1, Collier’s published another story that grew out of Salinger’s new take on war and the military. With “The Stranger,” Salinger returned to the collection of characters he used in “Last Day of the Last Furlough”—Babe Gladwaller, his sister Mattie, and Vincent, Holden, and Kenneth Caulfield. The plot of “The Stranger” centers around a visit made by Babe and Mattie to Vincent’s former girlfriend Helen to tell her the details of Vincent’s death, which she had been informed about by the Army, but only in general terms. In the Hurtgen Forest, Babe tells Helen, Vincent and four fellow GIs were warming themselves around a fire they had built when a mortar shell hit, instantly killing Vincent and three of the four other men. Breaking down, Helen is distraught. Soon the visit ends, with Helen and Babe both in tears as they remember Vincent. Then Babe and Mattie leave the apartment and go outside into the warm New York afternoon. As they walk along the sidewalk, trying to decide what to do next—maybe they’ll see a Broadway play—they hold hands with each other, lovingly.

  It is only then, at the end of the story, that the odd nature of the episode becomes clear. Babe has gone to the apartment of his friend’s former girlfriend to tell her about his friend’s death and he has taken with him, of all people, his younger sister. “The more serious trouble,” Warren French would one day write about the Babe Gladwaller stories—“Last Day of the Last Furlough,” “A Boy in France,” and “The Stranger”—“is that the attachment of a soldier to his young sister, which had seemed touching in ‘Last Day of the Last Furlough,’ becomes a morbid preoccupation when it persists past the occasion that legitimately prompted it. We can sympathize with a soldier about to be shipped overseas who attempts pathetically to cling to his childish innocence by seeking the affection of a child. But when he continues to dream in a battlefield foxhole, from which he has just removed the bloody remains of a dead enemy, about this same little sister and when he later takes her along to visit a dead buddy’s ex-girlfriend, we begin to feel that his sentiments approach those that Vladimir Nabokov [would] exploit . . . and satirize . . . in Lolita.” This was what was disturbing about the way Salinger was writing about young female characters: he seemed more than willing to ascribe to them emotions that were not conducive with their age—emotions that were more appropriate, in fact, for adults.