The genesis of theme in Salinger: a study of the early stories

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Authors Taiz, Nard Nicholas, 1939-

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Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/317934 THE GENESIS OF THEME IN SALINGER:

A STUDY OF THE EARLY STORIES

by

Nard Nicholas Taiz

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

19 6 6 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR

This thesis has been submitted in partial fulfill­ ment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this thesis are allowable without special permission? provided that accurate acknowl­ edgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his judgment the proposed use of the material is in the inter­ ests of scholarship« In all other instances9 however, permission must be obtained from the author.

APPROVAL BY THESIS DIRECTOR

This thesis has been approved on the date shown below:

CECIL ROBINSON Associate Professor of English ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank my mother and father, who got me graduate school; my wife and children, who got me through and my mentor, Dr. Cecil Robinson, who made it all worth­ while O I also wish to thank Alan Shucard, a friend and colleague whose critical insights were indispensable. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ABSTRACT » « * o @ o o » » n o @ @ @ * » a 0 0 0 *v"

I. THE OUTSIDER, LOOKING IN . 1

II. MARRIAGE A LA MODE 29

III, THE GLADWALLER-CAULFIELD STORIES ...... 71

IV, THE DESTROYED ARTIST: SEYMOUR IN EMBRYO , , , 112

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 146

iv / ABSTRACT

Jo D. Salinger1s early and generally unknown stories are of varying degrees of literary merit. Nevertheless, during his apprenticeship he had already begun to develop themes which were to figure largely in his later and more celebrated works. His major theme is always emotional estrangement. In the earliest stories, however, the characters find themselves on the outside, looking in at a world from which they are excluded by some physical grotesquery o Although these characters often possess a kind of inner sensitivity, Salinger had not yet made this their sole badge of alienation. In those stories which deal with marriage, Salinger's characters, either through some personal magnanimity or through the compassion of others, are able to find happiness and understanding. In the G1adwaller-Caulfield stories, Salinger's theme becomes more clearly defined. His characters are no longer alien­ ated by some obvious physical difference but rather by their own hypersensitivity, their own overawareness of the world's lovelessness, insensitivity and indifference. In the last two stories, Salinger portrays his protagonist as an artist beset by the slick inventiveness of the waste- landers, the inhabitants of the "phony" world who succeed vi in destroying the hypersensitive, often too submissive, and ultimately lonely artist. I. THE OUTSIDER, LOOKING IN

J. D . Salinger, as a relatively unprolific writer, has prompted more critical interest than perhaps any other post-war novelist. Although most of this interest has been directed at his first and only full-length novel, The Catcher in the Rye, and although some critics insist that the Salinger vogue is "out," the appearance of a new Salinger story is still something of a literary sensation. The numerous articles also reveal an interesting diversity of critical modes: sociological, psychological, linguistic, structural, and religious - Most critics, nevertheless, see Salinger as either a sociological or religious writer. Those who write from a sociological viewpoint see Salinger's theme as individu­ alism versus conformity or man versus society, often im­ plying that Salinger embraces a kind of Rousseauistic faith in a natural goodness that social institutions have cor­ rupted. At the other end of the critical spectrum are

those critics who see Salinger as essentially a religious writer. These critics are, I think, closer to the truth, for Salinger's species of crisis is too personal, too much

an inner concern, to be completely Rousseauistic or, for

that matter, strictly sociological. Since Salinger leads the life of a recluse and since 9 as he himself has said, it is not important M * to know a writer’s birthplace, his children’s names, his working schedule, the date of his arrest for smuggling guns (the gallant rogue!) during the Irish Rebellion,"^ only those biographical facts which seemed inextricably a part of this study have been included» Salinger has petulantly refused re-publication rights to his early stories and often has gone so far as to attempt to discourage critical examination of them. Thus, because most of these early stories have not been reprinted, critics have failed to give them the attention they deserve * There are only two other studies which deal in any detail with the early stories. Of these, Warren French1s J . D . Salinger is the most extensive and indeed the most useful. On the other hand, Gwynn and Blotner’s The Fiction of J. D. Salinger, the first comprehensive study of Salinger’s fiction, is criticism in the limited sense of the word, often devoting to the early stories no more than a breezy quip. Neverthe­ less, though of varying degrees of literary merit, these early stories are significant and interesting because they reveal--despite Salinger’s disclaimers--the development of central themes and techniques which were to be later dealt with in greater depth®

1 ® [Autobiographical Note] , in Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait, ed« Henry Anatole Grunwald (New York: Pocket Book, Inc®, 1963)? p* 23« In each of the stories in this chapter, the basic predicament which all of Salinger1s characters must face is outlinede They are all alienated from the society in which they live; they are misfits« Their homeliness, doltish­ ness, promiscuousness, or age--often only the outer badges of their exclusion from society--clothe something of an inner sensitivity which is more the real reason for their exclusion<> And they are usually further estranged because they are unable or unwilling to articulate their need for love and understanding. Salinger's first published story, "The Young Folks," was the product of a short-story class at Columbiae Ernest Havemann reports that the teacher, the noted editor of Story magazine Whit Burnett, was not at first impressed with Salinger: "1 He was a silent fellow. Almost never a question. Never a comment » I thought he was nothing. 1" Nevertheless, at the end of the semester, Salinger turned in his first manuscript, "The Young Folks," which was polished enough for Burnett to publish in Story magazine 2 without changes* This story was the first of five known stories to be published in the "little" magazines (magazines offering an outlet for stories not fitting the mode of the slicks), and French is correct in assuming that these

2 * Ernest Havemann, "The Search for the Mysterious J * D« Salinger: The Recluse in the Rye," Life, LI (November 3 , 1961), 138. stories "are important as examples of what he [Salinger] undoubtedly regarded as the most serious of his early work »"3 This concentrated and witty story is a fair beginning for the author of The Catcher in the Rye» The overly efficient hostess at a college students’ drinking party-observing that Edna Phillips has been unsuccessfully vying for male attention for three hours— introduces her to William Jameson, Jr., who also has been sitting alone, "biting his fingernails and staring at a small blonde girl 4 sitting on the floor with three young men from Rutgers." Despite Edna’s repeated attempts at small talk, Jameson remains disinterestedly reticent, insisting that he must go home to write a theme. Under the pretense of getting a drink, Edna maneuvers him onto the terrace where, amidst the hushed voices of petting "young folks," Jameson still remains densely uncommunicative. In an attempt to pique his jealousy, she describes her relationship with an artist-graduate of Princeton in whom she was greatly interested until he "asked too much" of her® Again, how­ ever, Jameson fails to respond, interested only in her catty innuendoes about the small blonde. Left on the

3® Warren French, J . D ® Salinger (New Haven, Connecticut: College and University Press, 1963)) P e ^7° 4. "The Young Folks," Story, XVI (March-April 1940), 26. 5 terrace, Edna learns from the matchmaking hostess that Jameson has not gone home but rather has ensconced himself on the floor near the blonde» After insinuating that Jameson has made advances toward her, she retires to the house, remaining upstairs for nearly twenty minutes. She then returns with a replenished supply of cigarettes to her once-happily-vacated chair and pretends that she is still very much a part of the fun• Although the story has received little critical interest, the critics who do discuss it are--as is usually the case in Salinger criticism--in opposite camps. Gwyim and Blotner, in a slight but perceptive summary, see Edna as a wallflower Hwhose pathetic chatter and insinuations are skillfully rendered." Since "stupid Bill" is uninter­ ested, Edna retires "presumably to cry" and then returns "to pretend that she1s still part of the gaiety." 5 Warren French, on the other hand, makes a more exhaustive analysis of the story but has been unduly influenced by The Catcher in the Rye. Because, among other things, Edna uses the word "grand" (which Holden abhors) and because she drops catty innuendoes, French sees her as a "phony" and--believe it or not--"an adolescent vamp"; as such, she is a prototype of the "phonies" who later plague Holden. Jameson, French continues, although "doltish" and "retarded," is a prototype

5» Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, The Fiction of J . D. Salinger (Pittsburgh, 1958), pp. 10-11• 6 of Holden Caulfield, since his "innocent desire to admire young ladies from a distance but not to engage in passionate pastimes is a sign of gallantry» In the pursuit of his argument, French even finds it necessary to alter the chronology of story; he states that Edna enters the house to pilfer cigarettes before she implies to the hostess that Jameson has been romantically aggressive• Literary criticism, in its attempt to establish generalizations which connect an author1s body of works, cannot divorce itself from the reality of a specific story; Edna and Jameson are easily recognizable types and do indeed exist beyond any projected concerns of prototypal signifi­ cance* Once their identities have been recognized, however, it is not difficult to place both Edna and Jameson in the

Salinger canon• Although the story has little plot, there are structural elements which convey the dramatic tension and which embody the ultimate thematic definition: the first and most obvious element is the pattern of dialogue; the second is the use of gesture as a mode of character delineation. As French points out, the story does evidence the novice1s bias for the affected language cultivated in writing classes; but it also affords an early indication of his well-trained ear for the idiosyncrasies (culminating in

6 © pp * 48-49. the magnificent dialogues and monologues of The Catcher in the Rye) of syntax and diction of the teen-age idiom. Both Edna and Jameson are alienated from the anxious sophistication, the ephemeral triviality, and the insensibility which constitute the milieu not only for this story but for most of Salinger 1s later works as well. But whereas Edna desperately wants--and tries-~to belong to this setting, Jameson (with his Hlarge nose,” ”flabby mouth,” and ”narrow shoulders”) is uncomfortable in it. Although more resigned to his inability to enter the circle with the blonde, he also wants to belong, to be accepted» The pathetic futility of Edna's attempts to com­ municate is successfully rendered by Salinger's use of questions answered by questions and of the familiar teenage answer ”1 don't know,” In fact, this pattern of dialogue closely parallels much of the dialogue in The Catcher in the Rye. Compare for example Edna's attempt to communicate with Jameson: E : ”1 say what's your theme on, anyway?” Edna asked.

J : ”0h, I don't know, ” Jameson said* E : ”Mmm, I see that sounds hard»” J: ”Wudga say?” E : ”¥ho's the rat that wrote it?” Edna said»

J: ”¥hat?” Jameson said* E: "Oh, boy,” Edna said 0 "You're in for it, fella.” J : ffWudga say? with Holden's unsuccessful attempt to communicate with Bernice in the Lavender Room: H: nDid you ever hear of Marco and Miranda?" B: "What?" she said. "She wasn't even listening to m e »

H: "You know when a girl's really a terrific dancer?"

B: "Wudga say?" she said. She wasn't listening to me, even. II: "Where you girls from?" I asked her again. .B: "What?" she said. II: "You're a very good conversationist," I told her. "You know that?" B: "What?"8 Edna's small talk, catty innuendoes, and fabricated,

romances — all pathetic rationalizations— are not the prevarications of a "phony", teen-age "vamp" as French suggests; they are rather defense mechanisms against the

insecurity of the emotionally estranged. At her initial

confrontation with Jameson (and no doubt with other males) her phony facade is thrown up immediately since she auto­

matically assumes male disinterest. Edna's plight is further delineated by Salinger's

use of tragi-comic gestures. While walking with the shorter Jameson, for example, she is described as

7. "The Young Folks," p. 2?. 8. J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (New York: The New American Library , 1953) , PP • 66-6?. Q "crouching slightly and brushing off imaginary ashes from what had been her lap since eight o'clock." Later, after discovering that Jameson has ensconced himself near the small blonde, "Edna fish-lipped her mouth and tapped her cigarette ashes" in an attempt to appear casually indif­ ferent. Jameson is also alienated from the "young folks"; but rather than contenting himself with the readily obtainable Edna, he prefers the vicarious pleasures afforded from sitting "a few men away from the small blonde" and gnawing on a hangnail which had been plaguing him the entire evening. Any parallels between Holden and Jameson, however, must necessarily end with their common disquietude and incommunicability in a predaceous society. But whereas Holden is unable to communicate because his threshold of sensibility is too low, Jameson and Edna are unable to communicate because theirs is too high. In fact, the point of this story is its apparent pointlessness. While the satirical title initially conjures up an image of fresh, unspoiled youth, the story itself presents two pathetic— but first-class— clods.

Because there is no index to many of the literary magazines which appeared before 19^8 (Allan Swallow's Index

9. See a similar gesture in "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period," Nine Stories (New York: The New American Library, 195(0 > P« 105 = to Little Magazines did not begin publication until 1948)

and because the recluse Salinger generally refuses to dis­ cuss either his life or his work (he demonstrates a marked

aversion for his early stories especially,"^ petulantly refusing re-publication rights and even attempting to dis­ courage critical examinations of thenf^), an early Salinger short story "Go See Eddie" has gone unnoticed for nearly twenty-five years. The story appears in the University of

Kansas Cjty Review (December 19^0, pp. 121-124) and only recently was discovered by J» C. Cederstrom of Carleton

University, Ottawa, Canada. Along with a brief explication

of the story, the discovery is reported by Warren French in

College English (February 196$, pp. 394-395)°

While stationed in Germany during the war, Salinger

contributed a brief autobiographical sketch of himself (a rare phenomenon in itself) to Story magazine. In this

letter he stated that since his first publication, "The

Young Folks," he had been "hitting some of the bigger X 2 magazines, most of the little ones." Since, except for

four contributions to Story, most of Salinger9 s early

stories did indeed appear in the "bigger magazines," his

10. Henry Anatole Grunwald, "The Invisible Man: A Biographical Collage," in Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait, p. 21.

11. French, p. 33°

12. "Contributors," Story, XXV (November-December 1944), 1. 11 statement has been something of an enigma* There are several possible explanations: first, Salinger is renouned for his legpulls and this statement may be but another; second, Mhittingn a magazine does not necessarily imply publication (although it seems unlikely that the profes­ sional Salinger would have wasted his time in sending his obviously slick stuff to "little" magazines); third, there may be still other early stories hidden in the unindexed literary magazines of the early forties. "Go See Eddie" is apparently Salinger’s second publication. Differing radically from his slick contribu­ tions which were soon to follow, this story, along with "The Young Folks," is important as an example of the author’s serious concerns early in his career. Helen Mason, an unemployed showgirl with a "glamor kisser," enjoys the luxury of a maid-attended and professionally decorated apartment. Her brother Bobby (apparently a talent scout of some kind), having recently returned from

Chicago, visits the apartment and suggests that she take a job in the chorus line of Eddie Jackson’s new show. Helen, however, is unmoved by his repeated pleadings "Go see Eddie." After threatening bodily harm, Bobby warns her that he will call the wife of Phil Stone, Helen1s bene­ factor. Helen states that Phil’s wife "knows all about it"; but Bobby again pleads with his sister to let Phil

alone, saying that the wife merely has a "nice" face and 12 not a "glamor kisser„" Despite Helen's assurances that she would not accept Phil's "all this" unless she truly loved him, Bobby tells her that while in Chicago he overheard two men crudely discussing her in connection with another "boy­ friend" Hanson Carpenter. Helen, of course, denies that

Hanson is anything more than a casual acquaintance; and

Bobby, obviously unconvinced, informs her that because of her liasons, he is the butt of everybody's "horse-laugh."

Before Bobby leaves, he tells Helen that he recently had lunch with Phil's wife, who is a "swell kid" with "class."

Promising to call his sister soon, he leaves. Helen, "very upset" because her brother knows of her promiscuity, immediately calls Phil and breaks a date with him for that evening. She hangs up and immediately calls Hanson

Carpenter, who is obviously more than a casual acquaintance.

•This early story, although slight, clearly indicates certain preoccupations with language, structure, and theme which Salinger was ultimately to refine in his later stories and brilliant novel. Some of the language of this story-- although perhaps not as French suggests "affected" 13 --at least smacks of the creative writing class. The dialogue, for example, is somewhat stilted, and such verbs as "little- girl’d" and "moused" are not found in his later works =

Despite these instances of mechanical falsification of

13« "An Unnoticed Salinger Story," College Bnglish, XXVI (February 1965), 39^. ' language, Salinger does, nevertheless, display an ear trained to the nuances of everyday speech and thought--the idiosyncracies of diction and syntax which are most readily apparent when Salinger writes in the teenage idiom but which are no less effective when he deals with urbanized and exurbanized New Yorkers. His use of italics, compounds ("Vasser~facedn), and hyphenated constructions, for example, enables the reader literally to listen to what he reads. Thus the adjective goddam yields to the more emphatic god damn; and when Bobby asks Helen if she has ever seen Phil's wife, she mimics, "Yes-I've seen-his-wife, tf the staccato of which again perfectly imitates the rhythms of speech. Another language device which Salinger frequently utilizes is the grammatical error. In The Catcher in the

Rye Mr. Antolini warns Holden about picking up n » . , just enough education to hate people who say, 'It's a secret between he and I.'" Holden, however, despite~-perhaps more precisely because of-~his self-consciousness about gram­ matical errors and their social implications, uses this and other "hyper" forms. The natural spontaniety of the objec­ tive "me" has been sacrificed because of his overawareness of institutionalized demands. In "Go See Eddie," when Helen calls Phil to inform him that her brother knows of their relationship, she tells him, , that adorable little Vassar-faced wife of yours told him about you and

I." Shortly thereafter she calls Hanson Carpenter: 14

"Hanson? • , * This is me * U s « We * You dog." Helen1s self-consciousness of grammatical errors is but one indica­ tion of her self-absorbed "phoniness," Several adjectives which in themselves, since they embody theme, become increasingly important in the Salinger canon are also found in "Go See Eddie," In describing Phil to Bobby, Helen says, "He *s really a grand person»" Her use of the word grand (later she uses the word marvelous) links her unmistakably with not only Edna of Salinger 1s first story, "The Young Folks," but more accurately with

Sally Hayes and numerous other "phonies" in The Catcher in the Rye» Bobby, on the other hand, shares Holden1s abhorrence for the word, Salinger also consistently employs two other adjectives which seem to connote the antithesis of phoniness--nice and swell. Bobby, when describing Phil's wife to Helen, says (using Helen's adjective) that she does not have a "marvelous" face, a "glamor kisser," as Helen does; she merely has a "nice" face. And Bobby him­ self, with "his dandruff and the pockets under his eyes," is not "half as good looking as" Phil, Although the explicitness of the contrast in this story between internal and external beauty is not as marked in his later fiction, and although Phil's wife and Bobby are certainly not in the same category as such sensitive protagonists as Raymond Ford, Holden and Vincent Caulfield, and the Glasses,

Salinger often isolates his sensitive characters from the 15 insensitive world through some physical handicap» Thus the myopic Ramona of !,Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" and Raymond Ford of "The Inverted Forest" are further isolated, while Helen Mason of this story and both Stradlater and Sally Hayes of The Catcher in the Rye--all externally attractive but self-absorbed, insensitive, and unscrupulously self- assertive--have no difficulty in adapting to an insensitive world where external appearance alone is the shibboleth of the materially successful. That this is the case is suggested by a passage from The Catcher in the Rye, de­ scribing Holden’s meeting with Sally at the Biltmore: "Holden!" she said, "It’s marvelous to see you! It’s been ages." She had one of these very loud, embarrassing voices when you met her somewhere. She got away with it because she was so damn good-looking, but it always gave me a pain in the ass, "Swell to see you," I said. I meant it, too. "How are ya, anyway?"!^ This passage is also interesting not only because it defines the adjective swell but also because it adds marvelous, along with grand, to Salinger’s repertoire of "phony" adjectives. In Salinger’s most recent story, "Hapworth l6 , 1924" (coming after six years of silence and in the form of a 28,000 word letter written by Seymour Glass at the age of seven), Buddy Glass, Salinger’s "alter- ego and collaborator," briefly introduces Seymour’s letter.

In it he states: "This last fact has some small but, I

l4. The Catcher in the Rye, p . 113• 16 think9 rather marvellous relevance to the letter at hand. Not a nice word, I grant you, ! marvellous , f but it seems to suit»tf 15 Thus marvellous is the antithesis of nice and 9 along with grand ^ connotes the phony world--the world of lust, fear, conceit and hypocrisy• Nice and swell, on the other hand, connote the world of non-phoniness, of truth and purity. In MGo See Eddien one excerpt from the dialogue in which Bobby uses the word swell specifically demonstrates the relationship between this story and many other Salinger works: nYou used to be such a swell kid,n Bobby stated briefly• "Oh! and I ain't no more?" Helen littie- girl'd * He was silent,

French perceptively adds that Bobby's remark is reminiscent of Eloise's final desperate pleading 17 --when she realizes her loss of innocence and the magnitude of her degenera- tion--at the end of "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut": "I was

a nice girl, . , • wasn't I?" Helen appears to be an even more degenerate and insensitive "bitch" than Eloise, for

she seemingly lacks any apprehension of her plight. But this is not entirely the situation; the sibling relationship

1 5 . The New Yorker, XLI (June 19, 196$), 3 2 . 16 . University of Kansas City Review, December 1940, pp. 123*^12¥7 ~ ~

17 ® "An Unnoticed Salinger Story," p. 394, &»

17 central to this story and to much of Salinger’s later fiction does indeed indicate that Helen retains some sensitivity. While essentially corrupt, with— as in ’’Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut ” - -only flashbacks to a past purity possible, Helen does care what Bobby thinks of her reputation, Unconcerned about the feelings of Phil’s wife, Helen is, however, upset by the realization that Bobby knows of her numerous liaisons and lies desperately and conspicuously in an attempt to assert her innocence. The reader discovers the truth-**-that Helen’s assurances have all been lies and that Bobby’s expostula­ tions have all been fruitless--through Salinger’s use of a final telephone conversation which is reminiscent of the similar, but more effective, use of the telephone device in ’’Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes • ” Despite Salinger’s general refusal or at least ambiguous reluctance to fix the blame for a character’s corruption, there is in this story an intimation as to where, if anywhere, the blame may be placed. Thus, although Salinger holds Helen essentially accountable for her be­ havior, the sarcastic understatement of her retort to

Bobby’s promise to call suggests that part of the blame may rest on one of the failings of the human condition--indif- ference:

Helen chided, ”0h , you’ll give me a ring soon! When? The Fourth of July?” 18 "No. Soon. I've been busy as hell lately. Where's my hat? Oh, I didn't have one."18

Bobby, of course, basically cares about his sister's moral corruption; but there is throughout the story a strong sense of his neglect. His visit to Helen's, for example, is precipitated not by any genuine and unselfish concern for her but by concern for Phil's wife and his own damaged reputation. Bobby's sensibilities, therefore, lack the spontaniety and selflessness, the intuitive sympathy, evidenced in Holden's relationship with his sister, Phoebe. It is precisely Bobby's indifference and his own partial corruption which produce the humor, irony, and ultimate pathos in this story: as a panacea for Helen's promiscuity, Bobby is only able to offer a job in a chorus line; this seems hardly the way to redeem one's sister. Thus, both brother and sister, in this urban, apartmented milieu which Salinger frequently employs, cannot bring themselves to any gentle and genuine interchange of love and affection.

After publishing two stories in the little maga­ zines , Salinger made his first contribution to the slicks.

In 19^1, Collier's--a highly remunerative slick--published "The Hang of It," a short-short story complete on one page.

It was the first of many of Salinger's early stories to be

1 8 . "Go See Eddie," p. 124. 19 published in the high-paying and widely circulated maga­ zines* Those stories, however, which did not fit the mode of the slicks Salinger continued to send to Story magazine; and while on the battle front in 19^4, Salinger sent two hundred dollars (representing earnings from the large- circulation magazines) to Story to be used to encourage young writers* 19 This short-short indicates, if nothing else, that Salinger is a professional. Most teachers of creative writing will almost vindictively warn (if not during the first class period, then assuredly during the second) that the young writer’s notion of "potboilers" to finance serious "literary" endeavors leads to nothing but wasted time and energy. One teacher further adds that "a writer must take seriously and must feel whatever he is working on. He cannot look down his nose at his medium.^20 But

Salinger, the professional, seems adroit at easily forma­ lizing the demands of a particular publication and then (with perhaps contempt for both the formula and the medium) mechanically producing salable stories *

Although the 0 » Henry trick ending was almost entirely out of vogue in most commercial stories, it

19 * "Contributors," Story, XXV (November-December 1944), l. ----

2 0 • Richard Summers, Craft of the Short Story (New York, 1948), p . 9 . O 1 continued to be popular in the short-short o In ^The

Hang of Itn the surprise of the denouement comes with the revelation of carefully concealed identities «> The father 22 of a recently inducted army recruit --noting a similarity between his son and a World War I recruit, Bobby Pettit— relates Pettit’s comically inept attempts to master the tasks of basic training. After each of Pettit's attempts and subsequent failures, tough Sergeant Grogan shouts,

"Wutsa matter with ya? Ain'tcha got no brains?" To these queries Pettit answers reassuringly, "I'll get the hang of it." He finally predicts to the enraged sergeant: "You'll see. No kidding® Boy, I like the Army. Some day I'll be 23 a colonel or something. No kidding." The father then describes his son's equally inept maneuvers during a spring parade. The son's tough sergeant turns out to be First

Sergeant Grogan (he has ascended the chain of command a little more slowly), and the commanding officer is the boy's father--Colonel Pettit,

2 1 . Summers, pp. 103-104®

22. Since the story was published almost five months before Pearl Harbor, its humor and farce were inoffensive. The publishing date also accounts for Salinger's reliance on stock characterizations (sergeants, mothers) since his own induction was more than a year away.

23® "The Hang of I t ," Collier's CVIII (July 12, 1941), 22. 21

The story begins and ends with the father as a first person narrator» To conceal his identity and at the same time to suggest that he was perhaps in Bobby Pettit’s platoon, the narrator relates the World War 1 episodes in the third person. The repeated promise "I’ll get the hang of it" serves a dual function: first, it unites a loosely episodic structure; second, its subtly--almost coyly-- foreshadows the surprise ending.

Slight as the story is, Levine is correct in suggesting that the Pettits’ predicament serves as a vague prototype of the dilemma faced by Salinger’s later "misfit" heroes wbo--because of their sensitivity--remain alienated from a pragmatic environment.^^ But since this short-short is aimed at popular and traditional sentiments, Bobby

Pettit did--and assuredly Harry Pettit will--"get the hang of it."

In 19^1 Salinger made his first contribution to

Esquire. "The Heart of a Broken Story,” labelled a

"satire" and an "Rx," is at best remotely experimental and at worst slight. It is a parody of the typical boy-meets- girl situation dominant in the slick, romance fiction

(sought by Collier * s) and the Nelson Eddy-Jeanetie

Mac Donald movies of the times— fantasies all, in which

2(t. Paul Levine, "J. D. Salinger: The Development of the Misfit Hero," in J» D. Salinger and the Critics, ed. William F . Belcher and James W . Lee (Belmont, California, 1962), p. 1076 22 the primary concern was that the boy and girl "meet cute»"

Salinger's Rx is that "to write a really good boy-meets- 2 5 girl story it's wise to have the boy meet the girl."

The story is narrated in the first person by a writer who after having constructed the situation in which

Justin Horgenschiag stands amorously over Shirley Lester in a bus (the one girl in 75?120 with whom he has fallen in love at first sight), discovers that there is no possible way to have their meeting "make sense." Although the story contains all the ingredients of satire (criticism, ironic humor, wit), incidental lampoons, and the fustian of parody, the structure of the story suggests that Salinger is toying with a theme which promises to develop into something quite serious =

There is in this story no illusion of reality (thus yielding even more room for satire and humor). In fact there are successive tiers or gradations of unreality.

Since the story lacks any definite plot form, it is the dramatic presentation of the act ;of writing which gives it a detectable structure. The first tier of unreality is the actual story for Collier's which the author begins and ultimately forsakes. The intervening and futile attempts of the writer to effect a meeting between Justin and

Shirley represent tiers further removed from reality.

25 o "The Heart of a Broken Story," Esquire, XVI (September 194l), 3 2 . 23 Justin Horgenschlag» although not the sensitive and estranged character of Salinger’s later fiction, is never­ theless alienated from the New York to which he had come

"to become rich and famous and well-dressed and suave." In fact, he is "one of the thousands of young men in New York who simply exist," while suffering from the "giganti-c monster of loneliness. ..."

Shy, ineffectual, and inarticulate, Justin

Horgenschlag--even within the latitude of a fictional world--cannot alter, or worse even communicate, his emo­ tional estrangement and need for love. (Salinger’s use of the letter device here, as in his later fiction, suggests both alienation and incommunicability.) Although his anonymity persists, Justin's loneliness is assuaged when he meets Doris Hillman, "who was beginning to be afraid she wasn't going to get a husband."

Shirley Lester, on the other hand, serves as a rough prototype of many of Salinger's later female protago­ nists. While insensitive and indifferent, she is immersed 26 in the "phony" world of Nelson Eddy movies. But in this

"satire," poetic justice reigns: Shirley loves Howard

Lawrence who thinks of her as a "darn good sport, but that was as far as it went."

2 6 . I am assured by a reliable witness to this era that those who were fond of Nelson Eddy movies are remark­ ably similar to those today who consider themselves "terribly" cultured for subscribing to and perhaps reading Reader's Digest. 24

Due to a slight cardiac condition, Salinger was classified 1-B when the United States first entered the war• He wrote Colonel Milton G » Baker, then adjutant at

Valley Forge Military Academy, that he wished to enlist; in

1942, however, when the Selective Service standards were sufficiently lowered, Colonel Baker’s intervention was unnecessary: Salinger was drafted. Between the two

Collier’s short-shorts, Salinger published a "satire" in

Esquire and made a second contribution to Story magazine»

In 1942 Collier *s published "Personal Notes on an

Infantryman," the second short-short story complete on one page. In fact, the 0. Henry trick ending of this story represents only a minor variation of the concealed identity formula which Salinger employed in "The Hang of It." In this story, however, the military and familial relationship is reversed o Mr. Lawl or, a middle-aged foreman in an important war industry and the father of two sons (one an army officer and the other a wounded navy ensign), gives up his job to enlist in the army. Despite his age, his wife’s obvious reluctance, and the officer-narrator’s attempts to discourage him, Lawlor succeeds in volunteering. After a successful basic training, he is left behind when his outfit ships abroad. Transferred then to another batallion,

Lawlor--"the best man in his company"--earns his sergeant's

27« French, J. D. Salinger, p. 24. 25 stripes and? as he had wished, is finally shipped overseas.

In an effort to console Mrs. Lawlor after her husband's embarkation, the narrator relates that he and his wounded brother--rather than merely returning Sergeant Lawlor's salute--had kissed their father goodbye.

The surprise ending is foreshadowed not only by the narrator's seemingly undue concern for Private Lawlor's affairs but also by the narrator's use of several equivocal expressions. For example, while talking over the telephone with Mrs. Lawlor, the narrator reflects: "But I couldn't 28 be unkind to that voice. I never could." The auxiliary

"could"--although seemingly used in a predictive sense-- indicates, instead, a comment on the past. The use of the telephone device in this story does not have, of course, the symbolical significance that it assumes in Salinger's later fiction; but the description of Mrs. Lawlor's voice

(it sounded "as though she'd spent most of her life telling little boys where to find the cookies") evidences his early concern with the vocal qualities of his characters.

While the story also demonstrates Salinger's preference for first-person narration and his preoccupation with familial relationships, French perceptively detects two other Salingerisms. The narrator of this story is a prototype of numerous later characters who--unab1e to speak

2 8 . "Personal Notes on an Infantryman," Collier's, CX (December 1 2 , 1942), 9 6 . 26 when facing another person "directly"--must communicate

over telephones9 from behind shower curtains, or (to add

further to French's list) by notes and lettersWhen

Lawlor insists $hat he wants action, the narrator says, "I had to avoid his eyes a I don't know quite why»" French, therefore, is essentially correct but does not go far enough in interpreting this gesture. Since the narrator- son (like Zooey) expresses his tenderness matter-of-factly, often toughly, he must--in a further attempt to exorcise the uncomfortable embarrassment occasioned by another's emotion--avoid any direct eye contact«

French also observes that in this story Salinger uses the word "phony" for the first time, (Actually he first used it in "The Heart of a Broken Story,") After his father has been sent overseas, the narrator considers

alluding to him as "one of our gallant boys" in an attempt to console his mother. But he rejects this phrase as being

"labored and phony," (French, after misquoting the title of the story, misquotes this as "learned and phony,") The narrator then rejects other phrases as being "on the long­ haired side, too," French's misquotation no doubt leads to his misinterpretation of at least this aspect of Salinger's notion of phoniness. He censors Salinger's equating

"phony" with "long-haired" and Suggests that the author is

29. J, D, Salinger, p» 55° 27 trying to "disassociate" himself from the serious artist» 30 However 9 Salinger’s contempt (as manifested in "Frariny") is not for the serious artist but rather for the coterized phoniness of the standardized academic intellectual; that is ^ he apparently despises the conscious mores of self- conscious intellectualso The story is ostensibly a potboiling tear-jerker buttered up with patriotic "schmaltz *" But there seems to be a second9 if not altogether redeeming 5 element in the story. In the first paragraph, Salinger describes Lawlor as a man past the age (forty) at which American men announce to unimpressed wives their plans for physical rehabilitation« L awlor, in fact, has taken the first step in this rehabilitation program: he has quit smoking. Later--when the narrator-son suggests that Lawlor e s replace­ ment in industry will require years of training and experience--Lawlor retorts, obviously disillusioned: "I used to think so myself." Still later, after discovering that his name has been dropped from the shipping list ^ he tells the narrator: "I want action. * . , Can’t you understand that ? I want action." French implies (and certainly the story suggests) that Lawlor’s desire for combat duty is motivated by the loss of his son8 s arm at Pearl Harbor. But Lawlor 1s desire for action also seems to

30 o Jo D e Salinger, p * 55® 28 be the by-product of a peculiarly American phenomenon« As a member of the cult of youth, he--like the middle-aged man for whom the mechanized golf cart becomes a symbol of spent youth— abhors the thought of being too old and the associ­ ated feeling (whether entirely imagined or not) of useless­ ness o II. MARRIAGE X LA MODE

All of the stories in this chapter deal in some way with marriagee In nThe Long Debut of Lois Taggett” and MBoth Parties Concerned 9 n the protagonists 9 given the capacity, must mature before they are able to genuinely love or understand their mates• Although sensitive and able to love, the title character in "Soft-Boiled Sergeant,M because he is grotesquely ugly, is forever alone. In the last two stories, the characters find love and understand­ ing in unlikely places ® Thus, in "Once A Week Won’t Kill

You," the young man about to go to war finds compassion not in his predaceous wife but in his aunt who has been out of touch with reality for twenty-five years. These stories also deal with the "phony" world of the movies, which offers a debilitating escape from reality and which is contrasted with the world of spontaneity, genuineness, sensitivity, and love» However, the title character in "Elaine," because she is a beautiful moron, is "ecstat­ ically" happy in this darkened world of the movie theatre«, 0 After publishing two stories in the more remunera­ tive slicks (Collier1s and Esquire) , Salinger made his second appearance in Story with the publication in 19^2 of

"The Long Debut of Lois Taggett." Although certainly more impressive than the Collier? s "short-short" or the "satire"

29 30 which Esquire published, this story (despite the fact that the Burnetts thought it good enough to anthologize seven years later in their Story: The Fiction of the Forties) is not as well done as his first two stories <* It is similar to them in that it centers on a female protagonist; but it differs radically from them and most of Salinger 1s later works (with the exception of "Both Parties Concerned 9" an overly sentimental piece in the Saturday Evening Post, and the justifiably celebrated "For Bsm^--with Love and Squalor") in that it has an affirmative ending» Lois Taggett, after graduating from a private school in the upper one-half (just barely) of her class, makes a debutante * s entrance into Manhattan society--*a society whose pretentious and ephemerally trivial social concerns Salinger sharply satirizes by capitalizing each frivolous vogue * Lois, for example, fortunately was con­ sidered "Intelligent" since "that was the first season when

Intelligent was the thing to be» Also, since to "Do Something" was considered chic that season, Lois tries working as a receptionist for her uncle» After eleven days on the job, however, she leaves on a summer jaunt to Rio.

That fall she returns and enrolls in several courses at Columbia, all of which seem catalogued for the dilettante. In the spring, she falls in love with Bill Tedderton, a

1 o "The Long Debut of Lois Taggett," Story, XXI (September-October 1942), 28. 31 press agent who 9 despite the unvoiced objections of Lois8 parents, marries her for her money, (The parents said nothing because "it wasn’t fashionable any longer to make a row if your daughter preferred the iceman to that nice Astorbilt boyo Everybody knew, of course, that press agents were icemen*n) Although happy--impressed by such considerations as Bill's ties, shirts, telephone voice (a preoccupation of

Salinger's), and his fascinating way of hanging up clothes-- Lois becomes "madly happy" only after Bill, seeing her looking her morning worst, falls in love with her. For fifteen days after Bill's revelation, Lois is befriending and considerate to everyone, The next day, however, Bill in his ecstasy smashes a lit cigarette into her hand, Lois forgives him, but a week later returns to her parents when Bill crushes her foot with a golf club * At home, her father gives her a thousand dollars in an attempt to console her * Lois, eager "to get it over with," goes to Reno where after her divorce, she has to repulse an overly ardent ranch-hand because she is "afraid of tall, good- looking men," Two months after her return from Reno, Bill, having undergone psychiatric treatment, attempts a recon­ ciliation; Lois, however, refuses and begins dating Carl

Curfman, who she thinks is a "dope *" He wears "white socks becaus'e colored socks irritated his feet," insists on 32 elaborately diagraming the proper route to take to Satur­ day’s game9 takes mincing steps on the dance floor, slicks down his hair with grease, and doesn’t inhale when he smokeso In short, he is the kind of person "you always felt a little sorry for. * » One evening Carl proposes, putting the question in the negative, of course: "You wouldn’t wanna marry me, would you, Lois?" She politely refuses; but a week later, while at her favorite haunt the Stork Club with Middie Weaver, she rationalizes Carl’s numerous shortcomings:

"But he wasn1t a dope. He was just sensitive and shy and terribly sweet." Middie, who serves "the conversation as nodder and cigarette-ash-tipper" (Salinger almost viciously satirizes her phoniness), agrees with Lois: "Well, %_ always liked Carle I think he1s a grand person." Lois, nevertheless, thinks Middie is "swell" and "really intel­ ligent." (Although Lois uses the word grand, she is some­ what redeemed by her use of swell , which, in part at least, foreshadows her unselfish gesture at the end of the story.)

Less than a month after their marriage, Carl complies with Lois 8 numerous, but petty, demands: he begins by wearing colored socks. After three months of married life, Lois becomes a compulsive movie-goer, pre­ ferring the fantasy world of Hollywood to the boredom of her domestic chores, visits to her nagging mother, and gossip-sessions with "the girls." She also befriends 33 Cookie Benson (one of the girls with whom Lois had gone to Rio and for whom she had never before had any great fond­ ness) and with her whiles away the tedious hours at the Stork Club over dirty jokes and catty chatter. Demonstrat­ ing the same insights that she did with Middie Weaver, Lois thinks that Cookie is a "grand, intelligent person,"

Shortly after denying Carl1s plea for a return to white socks, Lois discovers that she is pregnant. Her interest in the movies abating, she prefers, instead, to lunch with her mother, talk of maternity clothes, and peek into baby carriages. Despite these new-found interests, Lois continues to cry in her sleep. When the baby boy is born, both Carl and Lois love it; Lois, in fact, becomes devoted to the baby and when Carl regretfully observes that the baby does not recognize him, Lois says: "Tommy. Tommy, look where Mommy's pointing. Look at Daddy. Look at the big man. Look at Daddy." Then, six months after her baby smothers in its sleep, Lois becomes the object of peoples? admiration and benevolence: butchers give her the best cuts of meat, and women no longer look merely at her clothes but rather at her face. The end of the story marks her debut as a mature woman: she grants Carl, who at the moment had never "looked more stupid and gross" in his life, permission to again wear white socks.

As is the case with most of Salinger’s early stories, "The Long Debut of Lois Taggett" has received little critical attention® Ihab Hass an mentions only that 2 it centers on a female protagonist? and Levine suggests that Eloise5 s plight in "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,T is 3 reminiscent of Lois’ loveless marriage to Carl Curfman* In the most extensive explication of the story 9 Warren French charges that it is reduced to "soap-opera" because the affirmative "ending is imposed upon the story rather Zj. than developed from it." Before discussing the validity of this accusation, however, there are several elements in this story which, because they shed light, I think, on some significant aspects of Seymour’s behavior in "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters5" should be noted here® Although Lois’ first husband, Bill, in no way resembles Seymour Glass, the poet-genius who has dominated Salinger’s most recent fiction, the circumstances under which he falls in love with Lois closely parallel the account of Seymour’s love for Charlotte’s dress* Bill, for example, unaccustomed to seeing women’s "morning faces," falls in love with Lois at a moment when, her face dis­ torted by sleep, "she never looked worse in her life *"

Seymour on the other hand, when describing Charlotte’s

2 a "The Rare Quixotic Gesture," in Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait, ed * Henry Anatole Grunwald (New York : Pocket Books , Inc * 7 1963), p * 156 *

3 o "J » Do Salinger: The Development of the Misfit Hero," p * 110 *

4 * J « D „ Salinger, pp, 49-50® 35 yellow dress, in "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters," rr writes that he loved it "because it was too long for her."

Lois, too, who for ihost of the story is critically aware of

Carl's appearance, proclaims her debut into maturity at the

moment when Carl had never before "looked more stupid and

gross." There is in each of these accounts a sense of

genuineness, a lack of pretense, and a careless disregard

for propriety--the appeal of which seems irresistible,

Bill’s violent behavior, presumably precipitated by the ecstasy of new-found love, is closely aligned with this appeal of genuineness• While it seems if not unfair at least overly hasty to dismiss Bill as a "sadist" as Gwynn and Blotner do or a "psychotic" as French (more timorously) does, Gwynn and Blotner are correct in implying that within the context of the story itself. Bill's violence serves as one part of the inexplicable evils of life which Lois en~ 6 counters before making her debut» But it also roughly parallels Seymour1s seemingly unaccountable brutality in

"Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters»" Buddy relates that

Seymour at the age of twelve, seeing Charlotte in the drive­ way petting Boo Boo8 s cat, threw a stone and seriously in­ jured her» Buddy then explains that everyone in the family knew tfiat Seymour threw the stone at Charlotte "because she

5» Jo D« Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Car- penters and Seymour; An Introduction (Boston; Little* Rrown and Co . , £i963J ) v P® S'&o"" 6 . The Fiction of J. D . Salinger, p . 11. looked so Beautiful sitting there in the middle of the 7 driveway with Boo Boa’s cat a"

French is surely incorrect and indeed shows little understanding of Seymour’s behavior in ascribing the in­

cident to e . Seymour's violent jealousy of the girl's 8 beauty, personality or talent." On the contrary, Seymour

is a "perfectionist" with an "understanding or taste for

the main current of poetry that flows thrpugh things, all

things." Thus, it seems, he throws the stone not because

he is jealous of Charlotte's beauty but rather because

(excluding his knowledge of Zen and the principle of

essential chaos in the universe), as a perfectionist, he

has to improve upon it. As, for example, the beauty of a

piece of statuary is enhanced by the added interest of a missing arm, or as the stillness of a lake almost invites

the disturbing stone, so Charlotte is made more interesting

by Seymour's violence. A tension is created between perhaps

an almost crystalline perfection and the rock-inflicted flaw

which makes her more beautiful. Bill, too (although again

hardly resembling the poet-seer Seymour), in his ecstatic

happiness of love, "had" to be brutal.

As stated earlier, French argues that the ending of

"The Long Debut of Lois Taggett" is.imposed upon rather than

7• Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour An Introduction, pi 104".

8. J. D, Salinger, p. 153» developed from the story« He states that Lois "inexplica­ bly" turns into an admirable and mature person after the death of her baby, since "such a traumatic experience would have made Lois more bitter and vindictive than she had been...." 9 French bases these conclusions on the premise that Lois is an "empty-headed" girl "without wit enough to think for herself in an irrationally cruel world.,.," Al­ though "the same kind of bitch," he continues, as Eloise in "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut," Lois lacks Eloisefs sensi­ tivity; her final gesture of "unselfish love," therefore, is not "credible." French, however, in describing Lois as "empty- headed," "bitter," and "vindictive," misses altogether the point of the story. Lois' initiation into maturity is, of course, the theme of the story--an old theme which Salinger treats in a fresh way. (Less than two years later he employs the same theme, injected with overt sentimentality, in "Both Parties Concerned," his second contribution to the Saturday

Evening Post. Still later, in "A Young Girl in 19^1 With No Waist At All," Salinger varies the theme by having Bar­ bara, "just past the last minutes of her girlhood," decide against a marriage-out-of-boredom.) Lois marries Carl, in part, because she is bored; but the marriage is also a selfish attempt to balance the loss of her first unsuccess­ ful union, to retrieve the self from an isolated and

9® Jo D « Salinger, p. 49. deteriorated position» Although she does have the capacity for mature and unselfish affection, it remains untapped throughout most of the story because of the fake milieu which surrounds her

In her relationship with Carl, she is not the "bitch" that French makes her out to be; never vicious (as Eloise), she is tough on Carl only in an offhand way. Because she is, nevertheless, shallow and more sophisticated than Carl, she quickly becomes bored with the marriage, preferring instead the fantasy world of the movies. (With this story, the movies began to play an increasingly important part in the Salinger canon, culminating in Holden's urgent disclaim­ er: "The goddam movies. They can ruin you. I'm not kidding. ) But the whole point of this story is t° show how a shallow person can, given the capacity and the time

(thus the adjective long of the title) reach another level of existence. This is suggested, in fact, by Salinger's double use of the word debut: while it commonly means

"the formal introduction of a girl to society," in the

French it means "the beginning of something."

The birth and death of her child bring out a mature and unselfish aspect of her nature, and at the end of the story, her relationship with Carl is diametrically opposed to her earlier relationship with Bill. Whereas her glamorized marriage to Bill was but an immature infatuation,

10. The Catcher In The Rye, p. 96. 39 her union with Carl^ although loveless, becomes an amalgam of affection, concern, and (with the child as a kind of sacrificial victim) sacrifice.

Early in 1944 Salinger made his second contribution to the Saturday Evening Post. ,fBoth Parties Concerned,"

similar in theme to "The Long Debut of Lois Taggett," re­ lates the process by which both Billy and Ruthie awaken to mature understanding and responsibility* Despite repeated

objections by both the girl *s mother and the boy's acquaint­ ances, that they are "too young,” Billy, who is nearly twenty, and seventeen-year-old Ruthie marry* Unable to enter college until she is eighteen, Ruthie, who graduated

from high school at fifteen, apparently marries because there is nothing else to do * (This motivation is similar not only to Lois' but also to Barbara's in "A Young Girl In 1941 With No Waist At All.") Billy, who slaves all day at an aircraft factory, is bored at home listening to the baby "bawl its head off"

and insists, therefore, on going out "once in a while«" Leaving the baby with a sitter, they apparently go out partying not "once in a while" but rather every night. The ( young wife, on the other hand, justifiably wants her husband to spend more time at home and to accept some of the domestic

responsibility. During their ensuing argument, Ruthie,

crying, rushes from the bar; and husband and wife drive 4o . home in silence, At home, alone in the room with the baby,

Billy is sensitive and affectionate; but when Ruthie enters, he, in order to vent his irritation with her, insists that the obviously healthy baby looks sick.

The next day, worried about his argument with Ruthie,

Billy has a bad day at work. Arriving home that evening, he discovers that Ruthie and the baby have gone to her mother's.

In a brief note, Ruthie informs her husband that since their marriage, he has failed "to grow out of certain things" and

"to get a new kind of fun." After memorizing the note backward, acting out a Humphrey Bogart movie role, drinking a bottle of bourbon, and pretending that Ruthie is at the front door, he telephones his wife. Ruthie comes home when, after seeing her mother in a hair net, she realizes that she belongs with Billy. During a storm that same evening, Billy awakens to find Ruthie, who is afraid of the thunder, down­ stairs. She cries when her husband tells her that he memorized the farewell note backward, but she cries even

"harder" when he tells her to wake him up whenever the thunder frightens her. This final unselfish gesture, of course, signals Billy's awakening to mature responsibility.

After the publication of The Catcher in the Rye,

Salinger composed a brief autobiographical note which, because such documents are a rarity, has appeared, fre­ quently abridged, in numerous biographical sketches. In it, 41 he wrote: I?I worked on The Catcher in the Rye on and off for ten yearso" 11 That this is true is suggested by several chronologically interesting details* As early as 194l^ The New Yorker is reported to have purchased ^Slight

Rebellion Off Madison,1* 12^ a story which, although not pub­ lished until 1946, deals with Holden Caulfield* French speculates that this story of 1!a mixed-up kid" was not published in 194l because our entry into World War II meant that many such young men were headed overseas* 13 The story, however, with some major changes and elaborations, outlines Holden9s theatre date with Sally Hayes.(Chapter 17)5 his drinking date with Carl Luce (Chapter 19)9 and his drunken phone call to Sally (Chapter 20) in The Catcher in the Rye * That The Catcher in the Rye was long in an embryonic stage is also corroborated by William Maxwell’s report that the original version of The Catcher in the Rye had been a ninety-page novelette which, although accepted by a publisher in 1946, Salinger, dissatisfied, decided to rewrite,If this version seemed to Salinger attenuated, other early

11 * Eloise Perry Hazard, "Eight Fiction Finds," Saturday Review, XXXV (February l6, 1952), l6, 12e John K, Hutchens, "Jo D, Salinger," New York Herald-Tribune Book Review, August 19, 1951, p * 2, 13® J* D, Salinger, p, 24 * l40 William Maxwell, "J* D„ Salinger," Book-of-the- Month Club News, Midsummer, 1951, p * 6, 42

versions must have appeared padded to him. Ernest Havemann,

for example, reports that Salinger * s friends insist that

early versions of the novel were anywhere from four to ten 15 times as long as the published version.

The inclusion of the foregoing biographical data,

although Seemingly superfluous, is pertinent to a consider­

ation of "Both Parties Concerned." Whether Salinger, after having worked on The Catcher in the Rye, dashed out this

sentimental tale with a still-anxious pen or whether this

story is, in fact, a rejected chapter of the novel (perhaps

an early Holden married Jane Gallagher), the story is written

entirely in Holdenese. One need only compare several

excerpts from both the story and the novel to see that both

Billy and Holden speak substantially the same informal teen­

age vernacular, with its numerous idiosyneracies of diction

and syntax. In an excellent discussion of the language of

The Catcher in the Rye, Donald P „ Costello catalogues and

explicates the specific ingredients which Salinger used in

producing "... an authentic artistic rendering of a type

of informal» colloquial, teenage American speech.With

Costello’s catalogue as an outline, it is an easy matter to

compare the language of Holden and Billy.

15 ° "The Search for the Mysterious J . D . Salinger: The Recluse in the Rye," p. I3 7 .

l6 ° "The Language of The Catcher in the Rye," in Studies In J. D . Salinger, ed„ Marvin Laser and Norman Tru­ man (New York, 1963), p Y 103 » 43 Perhaps the most obvious similarity is the tone and style with which both works begino Billy begins his story:

"There really isn't much to tell--l mean it wasn't serious or anything = , «"; and Holden begins: "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, , , Both boys continually end their sentences with the dangling "or anything" or "and

all." They also repeatedly use the same slang or colloquial words (nice, swell, lousy* crazy* killed) and expressions.

Holden, in fact, specifically comments on one of his favorite

slang expressions:

I also say "BoyI" quite a lot. Partly because / I have a lousy vocabulary and partly because I act quite young for my age sometimes.^7

In light of Holden's explanation, Billy's frequent use of the same expression indicates, in part at least, the problem which he faces: he %ust "grow out of certain things."

Commenting on Holden's habit of direct repetition,

Costello suggests that it indicates not only that Holden is

conscious of his speech but also that he 'realizes a 18 difficulty in communication." Billy's numerous repetitions

seem to indicate that he too is aware of his speech. Some­

times the repetition is exact:

Billy: Boy, that's a lousy feeling when Ruthie does that. I mean that's a lousy feeling. .

17= The Catcher in the Rye, p. 12.

l8 . "The Language of The Catcher in the Rye," p. 101. 44

Holden: . . he was a very nervous guy -~I mean he was a very nervous guy« H At other times there is a negative repetition: Billy: It's smart * I mean it 8 s not dumb or anything• Holden: » o e I'd get the hell out of Pencey-- right that same night and all, I mean not wait till Wednesday or anything,

And finally % both boys interpret slang terms: Billy: « 0 « it's a swell song» I mean it isn't a bad song» Holden: She killed Allie t too, I mean he liked her ^ too. The frequent use of "hyper" forms is another in­ dication that both Billy and Holden are overly aware of the conventions of language* Thus Billy says, "I mean not if everything's Jake between she and you;" and Holden9 making the same mistake % says, "* , * I used to play tennis with he and Mrs * Antolini quite frequently *" In fact, Billy is keenly aware of the existence of grammatical errors and tries to correct them:

It made me kind of sore that she was sleeping so good~-well, I mean--because I hadn't slept good--well, at all,^9

While both boys also employ numerous trite figures of speech, hyperbole, and faulty syntax, there are several dissimilarities in language which should be noted * First, Holden is more literate, using such words as "ostracized,"

19 o "Both Parties Concerned," Saturday Evening Post, CCXVI (February 26, 1944), 48. "exhibitionist," "unscrupulous," and "bourgeois"; second,

Holden’s numerous profanities are missing from Billy’s speech= This fact, however, is not at all surprising since the story appeared in the widely circulated Saturday Evening

Post, The similarity between this story and The Catcher in the Rye does not end with a con#oh language. There are several gestures in this story which Salinger again employs in the novel and which, when closely scrutinized, help to account for Billy’s final gesture of mature responsibility«

Thus, Ruthie, impatient and solicitous, begins lighting matches just as Holden does at the skating rink with Sally

Hayes; and both Billy and Holden are unaware of their grow­ ing agitation= Compare, for example, Billy's remark:

I asked her, very calm like, who said I didn't love the baby = "Please dnn’jt shout," she says, with Holden's rejoinder:

"Don't shout, pleaseg" old Sally said. Which was very funny, because I wasn’t even shouting,

Warren French, briefly commenting on "Both Parties

Concerned," states that Billy’s "transformation" is not

"convincing," for "it occurs with remarkable rapidity and on under the influence of alcohol*" But French misses the point of the story, since Billy's transformation is not sudden nor is he the only one who matures. He is, as

BO, J, D «> Salinger, pp, 58-59 = 46

Holden, essentially a sensitive young man, concerned about

Ruthie 1s health and affectionate with the baby. After the argument with Ruthie, Billy makes several gestures which indicate his sense of alienation and loneliness: Re gives a coworker whom Re cannot "even stand" a friendly slap on the back; and, during lunch, he twice begins to phone

Ruthie but never completes the pall.

Billy’s response to the discovery that Ruthie has returned to her mother also takes the form of several in­ teresting gestures, each of wh$ch embodies his sensitivity, loneliness, and alienation. After repeated readings of

Ruthie’s farewell note, Billy memorizes it backward.

Hassan labels this the !'quixotic gesture," which, he continues, is one ". . . of pure expression and of expecta- 21 tion, of protest and prayer; . . ." Billy then fanci­ fully assumes a movie role which not only foreshadows

Holden’s playacting but also conveys again Billy’s desperate sense of loneliness and alienation:

I kept thinking about how drunk Humphrey Bogart got in Casablanca when he was waiting for Ingrid Bergman to show up. Humphrey Bogart had that colored piano player, Sam, with him, and after I had a few drinks I began to make believe Sam was in the room with me. Boy, was I nuts. I’Sam," I said, making believe Sam was around, "play Moonlight Becomes You for me." Then I was Sam too.^

2 1. "The Rare Quixotic Gesture," p. 154.

22« "Both Parties Concerned," p. 48. 4? After an abortive attempt to call a friend (again fore­ shadowing Holden's many uncompleted telephone calls which symbolically represent his inability to communicate), Billy is forced to make a final fanciful gesture: he goes to the front door and pretends Ruthie is outside.

Thus, it seems that French is incorrect in suggest­ ing that Billy's "transformation. « .occurs with remarkable rapidity and under the influence of alcohol." But there is in this story another transformation which is indeed rapid 5 this is suggested not only by the title of the story

(Salinger's titles are almost always efficacious) but also by the Post editor's blurb: "Before announcing that he knows a girl like a book, a man had better make sure he has read to the bottom of the last page." Early in the story there, is the suggestion that Ruthie constantly chastises

Billy for his irresponsibility by reminding him that her mother was correct in warning that they "were too young to get married." Billy, in fact, says, "I can't stand it when she brings up about her mother." It seems, therefore, that

Billy's irresponsibility is prompted not only by his immaturity but also by his attempt to assert himself before the "I told you so's" of a bothersome mother-in-law.

The degree to which French misses the point of this story is indicated by his choice of an adjective to describe

Ruthie's mother--"officious." Since the word denotes the offering of "unwanted advice or services," she is "officious" 48 only to Billy, Not until the end of the story, however— when Ruthie realizes that she "wouldn't be any good at home any more," at least not any good at her parent's home— does she become "officious" to Ruthie. Then, "both parties con­ cerned" have matured.

Salinger's third contribution to the Saturday

Evening Post, "Soft-Boiled Sergeant," was published only two months after "Both Parties Concerned" had appeared in the same magazine, In this story the author returned to the army setting which he had employed in his two Collier's

"short-shortse" However, since he was stationed in

Tiverton, Devonshire, training with a Counter-intelligence detachment of the Fourth Infantry Division, Salinger had the opportunity to become personally familiar with the nuances of army existence. Thus the picture of army life in this sentimental story, when compared at least with the two earlier army tales, is Only thinly falsified. The language itself--the narrator says "pitcher" (picture),

"should ought to wear," "wisht," "don't neirer marry no ordinary dame," "fantastict," "acrost"--shows that Salinger listened carefully to much that he heard.

The story is narrated by Philly Burns, a nearly inarticulate career soldier who is stationed in America

2 3 . [Jack Skow[ , "Sonny: An Introduction," in Sajinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait, ed. Henry Anatole Grunwaid (New York: Pocket Books, Inc», 1963), p. l4. 49 sometime after Pearl Harbor. Because his wife continually drags him to see unrealistic war movies which, whether de­ picting Dutch H arbor or Guadalcanal, are always the "same show" and because he has recently received a letter in­ forming him of Burke's death, Burns tells his wife and then the reader the story of soft-boiled Sergeant Burke. (Gwynn and Blotner, incidentally, in their squib on this story, incorrectly conclude that Burns is the soft-boiled sergeant.)

Four years after the end of World War I, Burns, a sixteen-year-old recruit, sits crying on his bunk, lonely and frightened amidst a company of tough, scarred veterans.

Sergeant Burke, a "real ugly guy" with a "two-toned" voice, is one of the rare individuals capable of doing "big things."

He gives his many medals— including "the best ones"— to the timorous recruit and tells him to pin them across his G.I. underwear,.where they are to remain for three weeks. Burke then takes the now-happy recruit, who feels "like a hot- shot" as he hears the medals chime, to a Charlie Chaplin movie. (in 1943, Salinger, interestingly enough, was 24 corresponding with Eugene O'Neill's daughter Oona, who within the year was to become Mrs. Charlie Chaplin.)

At the theatre, Burke sees the girl whom he loves with her new husband; and halfway through the movie, he

24. Grunwald, "The Invisible Man: A Biographical Collage," pp. 20-21. leaves, telling Burns to stay. After the movie he explains to Burns! "Only I don’t like no funny-looking little guys

always getting chased by big guys. Never getting no girl, 25 like. For keeps, like." Three weeks later, Burns is transferred to the Air Corps, after which he never again sees Burke. Then, after Pearl Harbor, almost twenty years

after having known Burke, Burns receives a letter telling him of the heroic death of a master sergeant with a "crazy voice." Burke dies while rescuing three buck privates during the attack on Pearl Harbor.

French concludes that the purpose of this story is not to eulogize Burke but rather to offer advice to the prospective bridegroom and to criticize unrealistic and

sentimental war movies.But French misses the delicacy with which Salinger does indeed eulogize Burke. The

connubial advice is merely a format for getting into and

out of the story of Sergeant Burke 5 and the unrealistic movies offer a convenient and effective frame for the reality of Burke’s plight. Before Burke’s story begins,

the narrator advises the prospective bridegroom not to marry

a woman unless she, out of pity, will smack her husband at

the sight of a dead rat. This is another example of what — — 2 5 . "Soft-Boiled Sergeant," Saturday Evening Post, CCXVI (April 15, 1944), 85. 26. J . P . Salinger, p. 59= ' 51 Hassan labels the "quixotic gesture*"27 It is the

embodiment of truth, honesty, and sensitivity; in short, it is the embodiment of non-phoniness. The gesture also in­ terestingly foreshadows the concern which later characters show for animals: Sergeant X, for example, is nauseated by

Corporal Clay’s senselessly brutal shooting of the cat in the celebrated "For Esme--with Love and Squalor"; Holden worries about the ducks in Central Park; and finally, in

"Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters," Seymour says that if the war ever ends he wishes to be a dead cat, because,

according to a Zen master, ". „ » no one could put a price on ito" .

Throughout "Soft-Boiled Sergeant," as throughout most of his fiction, there are other gestures which Salinger

constantly employs to convey a sense of genuineness or non- phoniness o The veteran soldiers, for example, are described

as "quiet tough," suggesting Seymour’s statement that "the 28 human voice conspires to desecrate everything on earthe"

Embodying the same concept is the narrator’s reluctance to use any form of direct address with Burke s "o » » the way

it is when you think a guy’s really hot— you don’t call him nothing, like as if you don’t feel you should ought to get

27• "The Rare Quixotic Gesture," p. l$4e

2 8 e Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour : An Introduction, p e ?8« -..' ' r - 52 too clubby with him * n 29 There is also something genuine or unaffected about the redheaded girl whom Burke loves: she is not an ffordinary dame" for she ndon81 wiggle much when she walks e Just kind of walks straight like * "

Burke 5s story is juxtaposed with, in fact precipi­ tated by, the numerous unrealistic war movies which the narrator, at his wife’s insistence, must attend« The heroes of these movies are always handsome, and their fatal wounds are never disfiguring® Surrounded by other "handsome guys," they always have time "to give their love to some doll back home" before they "croak." The movie-goer may

also be assured that a bugler will be readily available to

play taps and that the dead heroes will be mourned by the world® Thus, these movies are cloyingly sentimental,

pretentious, and "phony"; moreover, they appeal to the

insensitive masses® In The Catcher in the Rye, for example, Holden says: "You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phony stuff in the movies, and nine 30 times out of ten they're mean bastards at heart®" In portraying Sergeant Burke, Salinger offers his typical but perhaps too categorically pat contrast between

internal and external beauty» The narrator states that handsome men, because they are egoistic, are unable to do

29 * "Soft-Boiled Sergeant," p® 84®

30. p. 127, 53 "really big things *n On the other hand, " . • » a real ugly guy8 s just got himself from the beginning to the end, and when a guy's just got himself, and nobody's ever watching, some really big things can happen *n 31 Burke, although nearly as illiterate as the narrator, is a kind of seer: he knows, for example, of the idyllic reverie of the lonely young recruit and, more materially, anticipates the growing importance of the Air Corps* He is also something of an artist* While a "really great man," Sergeant Burke--because he is ugly— must go through life desperately alone* His greatness is unacknowledged not only by the insensitive world which perceives only exteriors; even those who are aware of his capabilities seem unable or reluctant to communicate their appreciation, Burke's death is the antithesis of the movie hero's gentle demise: he is ugly, grotesquely disfigured by the fatal wound, alone, and unmourned. The lament of the narrator's wife, Juanita, must serve as his only funeral* Although Juanita was initially attracted to sentimental movies, her pity for the dead rat and her tears for Sergeant Burke lead the narrator to his final bit of advice to the prospective bridegroom: "Don't never marry no ordinary dame, bud* Get one that'll cry for a Burke*"

31, "Soft-Boiled Sergeant," p» 82* 54 French, however, misinterprets this remark when he states that "the narrator's point is that one should shy away from the kind of girl who avoids Burke and marry only the kind that cries when she hears his story*" 3 2 But the two types of girl are not mutually exclusive, and this effects the ultimate pathos of the story. Even the girl who is not an "ordinary dame"— the kind, because she doesn't wiggle, that Burke loves and the kind who will

both pity a dead rat and mourn a Burke— is repulsed by the face and voice of the soft-boiled sergeant. Thus Burke's aioneness is total and inexorable.

Since his second contribution to Story in 1942,

Salinger published one story in Collier's and four consecu­ tive stories in the Saturday Evening Post. While overseas in 1944, however, he sent a brief autobiographical note to

Story; Whit Burnett relates that enclosed with the note was a two hundred dollar check which represented earnings from the above "slicks" and which the author wished to be used to encourage other writers. Specifically, he wished the money to be applied if possible to prizes for the magazine's annual short story contest for college students. 3 3 "Once A Week Won't Kill You," Salinger's third contribution to

32. J . D . Salinger, p. 59® 33 » "Contributors," Story, XXV (iSioveraber-Dec ember 1944), 1. 55 Story, appeared along with the note. As in "Last Day of the Last Furlough," the story centers on a young man about to be sent overseas ; but — as might be expected since the professional Salinger sent the manuscript to Story--the tale, lacking an affirmative ending, is too discomfiting to have appeared in the large-circulation magazines. In March, 1944 (just three months before D-Day),

Richard Camson is preparing to enter the army. As he packs in the early morning, Virginia, his wife, with her "pretty face" and "good" arms, sits watching him. In less than two pages, Salinger mercilessly and successfully characterizes this young woman as an insensitive bitch. Virginia, in fact, is much more deserving of the title which Seymour had dubbed on Muriel in "A. Perfect Day for Bananafish," for she is indeed a "Spiritual Tramp." Although her husband undoubtedly will leave for war, the wife of three years sits yawning, speaking to her husband in "italics" and the first person plural ("Give us a teeny kiss first. . , o You ole soldier boy"), and lamenting the early hour of his departure. Then, using a malapropism which, under the war conditions in 1944, seems to be grimly accurate, the wife says: "I hope they put you in the Calvary» The Calvary1s lovely." She also wishes him to maneuver for a commission; but, since a commission is apparently out of the question, she hopes, resignedly, that he may "at least" be stationed in London so that he can send her some tweed» (in "For Esme~-with Love and Squalor," Sergeant X receives a written request from his brother, who is as selfish and insensitive as Virginia, asking for souvenirs of the war.) She also suggests that he look up someone named Bubby while in London. Salinger uses this same name in his next story, "A Boy in France." The Dubby in this later story, however, is even more fortunate than his earlier prototype, for he spends the duration of the war stationed in New York City» When his wife reminds him that he must say good-bye to his aunt, the young man continues a conversation which had begun the night before. He insists that Virginia take his aunt to the movies once a week, saying: "It won81 kill you o . . « Once a week won’t kill you." Although she has asked much of her husband, and although in the past she apparently has paid little attention to the aunt, Virginia hedges at her husband1s simple request: "But, Sweetie, I mean she’s getting worse again» I mean she’s so batty, it isn’t even funny» I _, mean you're not in the house with her all day." Richard then goes to say good-bye to his Aunt Rena, a "very nice-looking woman in her early fifties," who busies herself by collecting stamps and listening to "all the old tunes" on the radio, to which she faithfully performs the radio-prescribed exercizes because it would

. "Once A Week Won't Kill You," Story, XXV (November-December 1944), 24 * 57 not be "fair to listen to the music and not take the exercizeson Although Richard apparently has few regrets about leaving his predaceous wife, he is reluctant to tell Aunt Rena that he must leave for war; he wishes her to be "the one woman in 1 9 ^ who did not have someone 5 s hourglass to watch." Aunt Rena then notes that Richard resembles his mother, her sister. She asks if he remembers his mother at all, and he recalls only that she was buoyantly active and that she whistled "I Can * t Behave on Sundays ?Cause I ?m Bad

Seven Days a Week." Aunt Rena also relates that until his parents were drowned in a sailing mishap, his father had only two interests in life: making money and watching his wi f e . Finally, Richard uncomfortably mentions to his aunt that there is a war in progress and that he will have to go. Aunt Rena, however, states "without panic, without bitter-sentimental reference to ?the last one ?" that she has known for two years that he would have to go. Thinking that his aunt is the "sanest woman in the world," Richard, after "setting his hourglass flippantly on the table," promises her that Virginia will take her to the movies. Going to her desk, Aunt Rena takes out an envelope addressed to Lieutenant Thomas E * Cleve, Jr. and gives it to her nephew. She explains that since she has known that Richard must go to war, she has written a letter of introduction to

Lieutenant Cleve, who is with the Sixty-Ninth and who will, 58 she thinks"look after" her nephew* She then shows Richard a picture of Tom dressed in the uniform of a World War I second lieutenant » After saying good-bye and

descending the stairs, Richard tears the note into small pieces and, not knowing what to do with them, jams them into his pocket. Meeting his wife, who has never explicitly stated that she would not take Aunt Rena to the movies, Richard again defensively insists that "once a week won’t kill you."

Gwynn and Blotner suggest that the story could have been successful if it were not "unhappily split into two separate scenes." They would have Aunt Rena and Virginia engage in a dialogue, thus making "the differences between them truly poignant *" They also state that Salinger fails

to exploit the reference to Richard’s dead parents. 3 5 French also condemns the story, stating that it is "point-

lessly depressing." Since Aunt Rena, French argues, has been out of touch with reality for twenty-five years and since the possible shattering of her delusions is insigni­ ficant when compared to the shattered illusions caused by war, Salinger’s attempt to muster up sympathy for any

distress that Richard’s departure might cause his aunt is but "rampant sentimentality." French concludes by stating that Richard, himself psychotically attempting "to arrest

35 « The Fiction of J . D . Salinger, pp. 13-16. 59 the passage of time,11 unrelentingly and unrealistically attempts to preserve his aunt's delusions. However, if this story is, as French states, merely pointless, then it should be insignificantly silly rather than depressing * In fact, the point of this story is precisely its depressing nature ® French predicates his condemnation on the point that the reader cannot sympathize with a woman who has lost contact with reality. However,

Aunt Rena, is redeemed by being, in many ways , not dis­ oriented o Her delusions, of course, cover the horrors of World War I, when the young second lieutenant in the Sixty- Ninth failed to return. Although Salinger does not, as

French complains, explicitly state why Lieutenant Cleve failed to return, there is little doubt that Salinger's allusion to the Sixty-Ninth must suffice as an explanation,

(The Sixty-Ninth, commonly and affectionately referred to as the Fighting Irish, fought in such battles as Relleau Wood and Argonne Forest, where they sustained heavy losses and became symbolic of the fighting, aggressive American spirit.) Although Aunt Rena still deludingly pictures her young lieutenant as being unchanged, she is well aware of the existence of World War II and genuinely concerned about her nephew's going to war.

36. J » D, Salinger, p , 51® 6o While Gwymi and Blotner are somewhat justified in complaining of the rather long reference to Richard's mother, it does not remain "unexploited,,r In fact, if for no other reason, it is successful because it is plausible o The reference serves first of all to establish sympathy for Aunt Rena, who, although pathetically deluding herself about the young lieutenant, fondly and accurately recalls her sistero It also provides an understanding of the relation­ ship between aunt and nephew: Aunt Rena knows that her dead sister's son must go to war, and Richard, despite his aunt's delusions and his efforts to preserve them, realizes the genuineness of her concern. To have Virginia and Aunt Rena engage in a dialogue would, rather than making the differences between them more poignant as Gwynn and Blotner suggest, merely detract from the effectiveness with which their responses to Richard's departure are contrasted. In fact, a very nice parallel linking the two conversations exists between Virginia's insensitivity and selfishness and Aunt Rena's pathetic but genuine concern for her nephew. Whereas Richard's un­ concerned wife hopes that he will be stationed in London, "where there's some civilized people" (that is, Bubby),

Aunt Rena, however disoriented, compassionately gives her apprehensive nephew a letter of introduction to a second lieutenant who will be "marvelously considerate" of him.

And for this reason, she is "not at all worried»" 61 After "Once A Week Wonf t Kill You" had appeared in Story, Salinger made his last appearance in the Saturday Evening Post with nA Boy in France." Within the same month, however, Story magazine also published its last Salinger story. "Elaine"--which, like most of his contributions to the little magazines, also centers on a female protago­ nist --is , with the notable exception of his next story, "This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise," the best of his early stories. When Elaine Cooney is six years old, her father drops dead at an indoor flea circus, leaving his wife enough insurance to bring her widowed mother, Mrs. Hoover, to live with them e With both the insurance and Mrs.

Hoover1s salary, the three live "in relative comfort" in a Bronx apartment house. The apartment house is managed by M r » Ereedlander, who childishly relishes and brags of his fancied intimacy with a since-murdered mobster Bloomy Bloomberg. By six years of age, Elaine had already won two "Beautiful Child" contests; a year later, however, she enters grammar school, where she is grouped with the "slower" children. Elaine r s mother and grandmother share the task of taking her to and from school so that Mrs.

Cooney’s weekly regimen of "at least four" movies will not be interrupted. Despite her grandmother8 s animosity,

Elaine is a happy child who laughs constantly at unfunny things. 62

In the fourth grade? her genuinely concerned teacher, despite the fact that she thought of Elaine as the 37 "sweet," "exquisite" Rapunzelv of the class, asks the maiden principal with "genderless fingers" to drop Elaine to a lower class. Reluctant, however, to drop the lovely child without first in some way being "disenchanted," the young teacher tries to explain to Elaine that she must be dropped. But Elaine is hopelessly uncomprehending. At sixteen, after nine and a half years in grammar school,

Elaine, wearing lipstick, finally graduates from the eighth grade. In the pageant following graduation (with the exception of Elaine and one other girl Theresa Torrini, who at eighteen is the mother of an illegitimate child, the graduating class ranges in age from eleven to thirteen),

Elaine enacts the part of the Statue of Liberty, "the only nonspeaking part in the pageant." Although Elaine is required to hold a solid lead torch for fifty minutes, she stands unflinchingly under both its weight and something even heavier— "unsung responsibility."

For an after-graduation treat, Mrs. Cooney shepherds

Elaine, Mrs. Hoover, and Mr. Freedlander to a movie she

37° There are also other interesting parallels between "Elaine" and "Rapunzel." Rapunzel, for example, is also dimwitted enough to "innocently" inform the witch of the prince's existence. And while Rapunzel is confined to a nearly inaccessible tower, Elaine is literally chained to the darkened world of the movie theatre. Finally, although Rapunzel's prince is ultimately more successful, Teddy, armed with a comb, momentarily and ineffectually removes Elaine from her bondage. 63 "had particularly wanted to see all week»" Before the

feature film, Elaine laughs uncontrollably at a Mickey

Mouse cartoon while, unnoticed by the all-engrossed Elaine,

Mr. Freedlander lecherously rubs his leg against hers.

Although physically mature enough to either encourage or

discourage movie-theatre intimacies, "0 . . she was totally unqualified to accommodate sex and Mickey Mouse simulta- O neously. There was room for Mickey; no more."

Having no girl friends and knowing no boys, the recent grammar school graduate spends the summer going to movies and listening to soap operas on the radio. In order

to avoid male attention, Elaine merely lies, stating that her mother will not permit her to date. It was not that

she was . . unwilling to go out with boys, but she was unwilling to be confused by unfamiliar, evadable issues."

In Elaine's "Hollywood-and radio-prompted world," the men

in her life assuredly have well-combed hair, deep voices,

and charm; and as Elaine, along with her mother and grand­ mother, walks the familiar path to the theatre amidst

thousands of Bronx people, "there was never one to cry out,

to wonder, to intercept...."

In September, shortly before Elaine is to enter

high school, she meets Teddy Schmidt, a slight, pale movie

usher who constantly combs his "wavy, effeminate hair."

38. "Elaine," Story, XXVI (March-April 1945), 4l. 64

Inviting her to the beach for the following Sunday, he pompously and uncouthly instructs her to meet him "down­ stairs-" As the picture begins, Elaine asks her mother if she may go; but she immediately becomes too engrossed to pursue the details of her forthcoming date and sits enraptured, biting her fingernails- On the following

Saturday, Mrs- Cooney buys her daughter a cheap bathing suit and gives her "certain motherly advice": "Don81 let nobody get wise with ya tomorrow," to which Elaine obtusely mutters, "What?"

After Elaine waits patiently for almost two hours, hardly realizing the passage of time as she naively out- maneuvers a masher (Salinger’s handling of the time sequence here is most effective, for the reader, just as

Elaine, is unaware of the two hour delay), Teddy finally arrives, accompanied by his friend Frank Vitrelli and

Frank’s date, Monny Monahan- Towards sunset, Frank, after posing as a muscle man with Monny oh his shoulders, leaves with his date to play paddle tennis. Elaine then observes

"basically" that Frank is strong, but Teddy jealously corrects her by stating that Frank is muscle-bound. Then, using the pretext that the hot sand is "killing" his feet,

Teddy suggests that they walk under the boardwalk.

At this suggestion, Blaine experiences a "private, terrible panic" not, as French implies, because of the possible consequences of Teddy’s request but because with 65 the beach deserted, she is estranged from "the dimensions of her own world." Although she had never been to the beach before, she had seen many newsreels of the crowded beaches of Coney Island. For this reason, the crowded afternoon beach had not been too unfamiliar; but noticing the deserted beach, she is suddenly confronted with some­ thing strangely new, and consequently something horrifying.

Teddy, therefore, undergoes a metamorphosis:

He was no longer Teddy Schmidt, pretty, wavy- haired, male; he was Teddy Schmidt, not her mother, not her grandmother, not a movie star, not a voice on the radio, not--39

Under the boardwalk, however, it is dark, cool, and clammy; there is also the smell of picnic garbage. Elaine finds this setting almost instantly "retreatful" because

(although French misses the delicacy of Salinger1s intent) it reminds her of a familiar world--the movie theatre.

Teddy, "his mediocre heart" pounding excitedly, suggests that they sit down. Then, employing "the eternal rakes despicable but seldom faulty intuition," he knows that

Elaine will be "easy" to seduce. At the same moment,

Monny, not trusting Teddy with fthat kid," suggests to

Frank that they return; but, finding him reluctant to leave, she says nothing more when she remembers that he makes sixty-five dollars a week. Mqnny, in fact, along

39. p. kko 66 with Elaine’s fourth grade teacher, is the only touch of sanity in the whole story.

Returning home, Elaine, despite the fact that it was her first date, is asked to relate very few events of the day. Finally, however, her insensitive and indifferent mother matter-of-factly asks: "Anybody get wise with you?"

Almost in the Same breath she asks Elaine to accompany her to a movie the next morning; but Elaine refuses, saying that she "can’t" because Teddy doesn't work the morning show and adding, proudly, that "he's going to learn me how to play bridge."

Although Salinger does not specify what happened beneath the boardwalk and although Elaine, after returning from her first date, "was almost ready to say something" to her mother, Elaine and Teddy are married a month later.

(French heavily hints that Elaine may be pregnant; but the suggestion, just as in "Franny," seems to me to be unfounded and irrelevant.) The wedding takes place at Teddy's house, and, despite a large gathering of Teddy's friends and relatives, Elaine is represented only by her mother, grand­ mother, and Mr. Freedlahder. While "« . . no Grade-B

Hollywood film had ever seemed to make Elaine as happy as she looked on her wedding day," Teddy is nervous, irritable, and disgusted at the inefficiency with which Elaine cuts the wedding cake. 6? Before long, however, Mrs. Cooney, finding it

necessary to defend the virility of a movie star against

the questioning accusations of Mrs» Schmidt, strikes her

daughter’s mother-in-law in the mouth» As Elaine weeps,

"all the happiness wrenched away from her," the frightened

Teddy pretends to console her« Finally taking Monny’s

advice, he tries to usher his bride away from the confusion;

but Elaine insists on informing her mother of her departure.

Mrs e Cooney fails to acknowledge what is in reality Elaine's

request, and Elaine stands pleadingly over h e r . Then,

suddenly, strangely, Mrs. Cooney tenderly kisses her

daughter and says good-bye. As Elaine and Teddy leave,

however, Mrs. Cooney stops her and, weeping, insists that

Elaine is too beautiful to leave with a "sissy boy."

As Teddy feebly defends his marriage vows, Mrs.

Cooney leads her daughter from the house; and Elaine merely

says in a friendly manner, "G'by, Teddy." Outside^ after

Mrs. Cooney dismisses Freedlander, she pleases everyone by

suggesting that they attend "a nice movie." Elaine, allowed

by her mother to select the movie (apparently in compensa­

tion for a lost husband), briefly notes that her beautiful

gladioli wedding corsage is dying. Then, told again that

Henry Fonda is playing at a nearby theatre, Elaine begins

"skipping ecstatically."

If it were not for the humor, this story would be

intolerably pathetic and sordid. In fact, the weakness of this story is its utter sordidness. The fault lies not in the story material itself but in a flaw in Salinger's technique« From the beginning of the story— when Elaine's, father| who was an assistant watch repairer, dies at an indoor flea circus--Salinger tries too hard to convey the desolating sordidness of the Cooney's mental deficiencies and their concomitant love of the darkened movie theatre.

He constantly interjects editorial comments in an attempt to make his point. After Elaine's graduation, for example, her mother rewards her by taking her to a "fourth-rate feature picture"; it could have been more effectively written off as merely a George Raft movie. Still later-- when Elaine observes "basically" that Frank is strong--

Salinger is trying too hard, for by this point in the story, it is already quite obvious that Elaine is a moron.

What saves this story, in fact what makes it successful, is the humor which pervades the sordidness. Thus, for example, Salinger wryly refers to the credits which introduce a film as "the names of the personnel responsible for the film."

Although French is correct in stating that the moronic Cooney family's preference for movies over reality is justifiable and that Salinger convinces the reader that both society and the Cooneys benefit if such mental midgets remain ensconced before a movie screen, he predicates the remainder of his explication on the assumption that when 69 Mrs» Cooney forces Elaine to abandon her husband, she has wakened "for one critical moment to reality," According to the story, French continues, to live in the fantasy world of "apparently virile Henry Fondas" who cannot

"violate" Elaine is more pleasant than to live in the "real world of effeminate Teddys," He c°ncludes that Salinger satirizes everything in the story except the Cooney's 40 "worship of movie stars,"

There is little doubt that the moronic Elaine's marriage to the effeminate rake Teddy would-have been dis­ astrous, and thus Mrs. Cooney's calling it off is her only stroke of insight in the whole story. But to suggest, as

French does, that Mrs. Cooney wakens to reality is to miss the point of the story. First of all, Teddy, as a movie usher, represents a false appendage to the movie world; thus, although Elaine apparently finds him attractive, to

Mrs. Cooney he represents the lighted part of the" theatre, a pseudo-world beyond the "familiar darkness." Fittingly, she forces Elaine to abandon her husband immediately after defending the virility of a popular movie idol against the accusations of Mrs. Schmidt, (This, incidentally, cannot be interpreted as anything but a satirical treatment of the

Cooney's movie idolatry.)

40. J. D» Salinger, pp. 51-53• 70

Just as she cannot accept an impotent movie actor,

Mrs. Cooney cannot accept Elaine’s "sissy1’ husband; and therefore, with a kind of cinematic insight, she saves her daughter from a hopeless marriage. She does not fear, as

French states, that the "flesh-and-blood" Teddy will, while the virile actor cannot, violate Elaine. Rather, she is kl disappointed that Teddy isn’t virile. Although no movie had ever made Elaine appear as happy as she does at her wedding, after being forced to leave Teddy, it takes no more than the promise of a good Henry Fonda movie to make her skip "ecstatically." Thus, since the moronic Elaine is little daunted, the effect of her mother's judgment— what­ ever the motivation--is good.

4l. The story is replete with Freudian symbols. Fof example, Elaine's grammar school principal, with her "thin, genderless fingers" manipulates a pencil; and the actors' "deep, trained voices . . . sometimes swooped pleasantly through a sixteen-year-old girl’s legs." III. THE GLADWALLER-CAULFIELD STORIES

The six stories which appear in this chapter are probably the most significant of Salinger’s early stories for they develop into not only The Catcher in the Rye but also "For Esme--with Love and Squalor" and the first story of the Glass sagas "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." Also evident in these stories is Salinger * s bent for starting his legends by killing off his main character» Thus, just as the Glass saga begins with Seymour's suicide in "A

Perfect Day for Bananafish" so the Caulfield legend begins in "Last Day of the Last Furlough" with nineteen-year-old

Holden missing in action in the Pacific. Since Salinger constantly experiments with ideas and constantly and meticulously revises his material, the central sibling relationship between Babe Gladwaller and his ten-year-old sister Mattie prefigures the relationship between Holden and Phoebe <. However, even before Salinger finished with the Gladwaller stories, he began to shift his interest to the Caulfields, first to Vincent and finally to Holden»

In fact, with some important changes, the last two stories in this chapter are reasonably complete outlines of material later incorporated into The Catcher in the Rye.

Although the protagonists in four of these stories are set against the backdrop of the demoralizing and dehumanizing war and although they are confronted by and alienated from the gross insensitivity, lovelessness, and indifference of the world, they wear no outer badges of exclusion as the earlier characters did. The war seems not a cause of the protagonist's plight but merely a catalyst.

Indeed, in these stories, Salinger's concept of the char­ acter alienated not by some physical grotesquery but rather by a hypersensitivity, a hyperawareness to the world's impurity began to talee form. These sensitive characters, therefore, look to the spontaneous innocence of childhood not as an irretrievable private kindergarten, as some critics suggest, but as a place of respite, a place where they may hope that children will grow up to be "swell" rather than "phony."

Three months after "Soft-Boiled Sergeant" had appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, the magazine pub­ lished its fourth Salinger story, "Last Day of the Last

Furlough." This story is important not only because it is one of the best of the early stories but also because it is the first of a series of independent but related stories about Babe Gladwaller and Vincent Caulfield. In the story, which mentions for the first time in print a boy named

Holden Caulfield, Babe and Vincent are army friends. Both in format and characterization this early story prefigures not only The Catcher in the Rye but also many elements in the Glass saga. The story is also the first in which 73 Salinger s despite his public reluctance to divulge such information, alludes to his favorite authors.

) In William Maxwell’s biographical sketch, which appeared after the publication of The Catcher in the Rye,

Salinger is quoted as having said:

I love Kafka, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Proust, O ’Casey, Rilke, Lorca, Keats, Rimbaud, Burns, E. Bronte, Jane Austen, Henry James, Blake, Coleridge. I w o n ’t name _ any living writers. I don’t think it's right.

Although Salinger refused to mention his favorites among recent American authors, most critics point out that the closest thing to a detectable influence both in technique and theme has been F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ring Lardner.

Thus Holden, for example, is "crazy about The Great Gatsby" and in "Zooey," Salinger’s "alter ego" Buddy Glass refers 2 to the same novel as "my ’Tom Sawyer’ when I was twelve."

As the title suggests, the story depicts the last day of the furlough for twenty-four-year-old Sergeant John

F. Gladwaller, Jr., called Babe by his family and friends.

He is to leave for camp the next morning and, unknown to his parents, is to be shipped overseas within a week. With so little time left, he is desperately trying to reacquaint himself with the books he loves: among others, Anna

Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Great Gatsby.

1. "J , D. Salinger," p. 6.

2= Franny and Zooey (New York: Bantam Books, 1964), p. 49- His readings however, is interrupted by his mother * s offering of cold milk and chocolate cake, which--as in

"Zooey," when Bessie Glass brings the disturbed Franny a cup of "consecrated chicken soup"-~is a sacred rite of love. He then prepares to take a sled to school where he will meet his ten-year-old sister Mattie. Before leaving, he gazes at his suits which hang in the closet, wondering if he will ever wear them again and recalling that when in the presence of Frances, the girl he loves, he always felt homely. (In "The Inverted Forest," Corrine, after having fallen in love with Raymond Ford, also becomes suspicious of her attractiveness.)

Mattie is late, however, because the teacher is reading Wuthering Heights to a small group of girls, many of whom Babe suspects (with the exception of Mattie) were merely "polishing apples." While waiting--even Mattie's half-hour delay is measured by the.amount of time remaining for Babe--Babe correctly guesses that Mattie wants Cathy to marry Heathcliff instead of "that other droop, Linton."

Walking home in the snow, Babe realizes that he is happier with Mattie than he is with either his books or Frances.

At Spring Street, Babe convinces Mattie, despite their father's warning, to sled down the dangerous hill with him as an indication of her trust in him. He relents, however, 75 o not, as French suggests, when his sister capitulates but when he becomes "finally aware" of her genuine fear.

Mattie*s anxious willingness to accompany him makes Babe even "happier."

At home they find twenty-nine-year-old Corporal

Vincent Caulfield, who ". . . has a kid brother in the Army who flunked out of a lot of schools." Before the war,

Vincent, just as Holden's older brother D. B., was a writer who also hacked out soap operas for the radio. Vincent's conversation with Mattie, which as French aptly notes is reminiscent of the one between Seymour and Sybil in "A

Perfect Day for Bananafish," is, in its very whimsy and humor, a desperate testament to the imminency of war.

Upstairs, alone with Babe, Vincent--in an oblique dialogue and with a casual facade, both of which reveal the agonies hidden beneath--informs Babe that his brother

Holden, who was the "noisiest, tightest kid" in the college

"beer joint," is missing in action. (Thus the Caulfield legend begins with the death of nineteen-year-old Holden just as the Glass sagas begin with Seymour's suicide in

"A Perfect Day for Bananafish." In "Last Day of the Last

Furlough," it is evident that Salinger had outlined the significant familial relationships of the Caulfield family.

Vincent, as D. B ., is Holden's older brother. He is a

3 . J. D, Salinger, p. 60. 76 writer who has prostituted his talent 9 and he has a ten- year-old sister* The significant difference, however, is that his father is an actor, foreshadowing not the lawyer- father of The Catcher in the Rye but the patriarch of the

Glass clan *) Vincent tells Babe that although he is

"notoriously yellow," he is eager to killo G.I,*s, he continues, belong together: "It1s no good being with civilians anymore® They don rt know what we know and we* re no longer used to what they know® It doesp91 work out so hot»

At dinner, Babe1s father, a college professor, almost fondly reminisces about World War I; and Babe, irritated because Vincent must humor the old veteran, vehemently denounces the too common tendency to romanticize waro As Harold Krebs in Hemingway's "Soldier 6 s Home," Babe is almost sickened by the ex post facto exaggerations of

World War I veterans who look back on the "last one" as a kind of "sordid game by which society . « , weeded out the men from the boys." Although he believe^ in the principles of World War II, Babe feels that it is the "moral duty" of the present day soldier not to romanticize war, not to even talk about it. Only by letting "the dead die in vain" can future generations learn to be "contemptuous of violence."

4. "Last Day of the Last Furlough," Saturday Evening Post, CCXVII (July 15, 1944), 62. 77 His diatribe finished, Babe feels foolish and immature before his father and Vincent, not, as French suggests, because he is a babe confronted by adult concerns but simply because, as a sensitive and shy young man, he is both afraid that he has injured his father's pride and self-esteem and embarrassed that a peer has witnessed his outburst of genuine emotion. Although feeling "windy and trite," Babe, at their laughter, resents "that what he felt so deeply could be reduced to a humoro" As in the case of many of Salinger's sensitive protagonists, Babe no doubt realizes the hopelessness of trying to communicate by means of speech; therefore, the genuineness of his feelings must be embodied in a gesture:

He went to the window where his father was standing, and put a hand on his shoulder« "It's snowing again," he said to him.5

On a double date that evening, Vincent escorts

Jackie, one of Babe's "old flames," and Babe, of course, takbs Frances« Returning from their date, Vincent reminds him--although Babe had hoped he wouldn't— that Jackie is warmer, and smarter, and more understanding than Frances could ever be. Babe, however, is hopelessly in love with the shallow, silly, and affected Frances: "The more unrequited my love for her becomes, the longer I love her, the oftener I whip out my dumb heart like crazy X-ray

3 ® p . 6 2 ® 78 pictures, the greater urge I have to trace the bruises.

o . . The reliable Jackie, on the other hand, although-- more precisely, be.cause--she doesn't make him miserable, remains unattractive to Babe.

Unable to sleep, Babe sits in his room, rehearsing to himself what he wishes to tell Mattie. While their relationship most obviously foreshadows that of Holden and

Phoebe, Babe's unvoiced advice to Mattie prefigures Zooey's concern for Franny. Babe wishes to tell Mattie that youth is transient and that in growing up one should always attempt to live up to his or her best. Then, using an adjective which in the Salinger canon typically connotes non-phoniness, Babe says: "But if you can't be smart and a swell girl, too, then I don't want to see you grow up.

Be a swell girl, M a t .

Babe then goes to Mattie's room and awakens her.

Because, of the genuineness of his feelings, he is as awkward and embarrassed as he had been before his father and Vincent; consequently, he reduces his prepared speech, stating simply that he wants Mattie to be a "good girl."

Mattie guesses immediately that Babe is to be shipped over­ seas, and, after promising not to tell her parents, repeatedly warns her brother: "Don't you get hurt!" Babe

8 e p e 2i e

7» p. 64. 79 returns to his room and thinks that although it would be

"swell" to return from the war, he must kill the enemy in order to protect the home in which he grew up and in which his sister now sleeps. Mrs. Gladwaller enters and to

Babe's amazement tells him that she knows he is "going over." In a final gesture of love, she simply reminds her son that there is cold chicken in the icebox; and Babe is happy.

In an extremely well written explication of this story, Warren French concludes that the story depicts the last day at home of a young soldier ". . . who attempts pathetically to cling to his childish innocence by seeking the affection of a child. . . . Throughout French's discussion there is the implication that Babe is attempting to avoid mature responsibilities. However, since Babe

Gladwaller is, in part at least, the fictional progenitor of Holden Caulfield, and since critics constantly define

Holden's plight as a quest for innocence, it is necessary to discuss what may appear to be (but assuredly is not) a bit of semantic nit-picking.

Both Babe and Holden search not for innocence, or what Milton condemned as a "fugitive and cloistered virtue," but rather for a kind of purity which arises from experience. Babe is not a fugitive from maturity; and the

8. J. Do Salinger, p. 62. story, rather than outlining, as French states, a boy's

"futile passion for innocence," depicts the sentimental journey into boyhood of a sensitive young soldier hyper- aware of the transiency of both the "last day of the last furlough" and childhood innocence itself. His visit to boyhood is a respite from this awareness, and at the end of the story his serenity is not that of an escapist but that of one ready to go to war.

In Mattie, Babe sees unsoiled innocence, a sponta­ neous and genuine love, a lack of pretense; but his appreciation is always that of the uncloistered man. His insistence that Mattie sled down the dangerous street with him is an almost ritualistic attempt to initiate her into the rigors of maturity. Mattie initially refuses to accompany Babe because she has promised her father that she will not sled down Spring Street. But her refusal on these grounds lacks the spontaniety and genuineness which

Babe seeks. As stated earlier, he relents not when Mattie capitulates but when he realizes that she is genuinely afraid; then, her capitulation becomes a happy-making testament of love.

That Babe is seeking an uncloistered purity is also suggested by his unvoiced advice to Mattie. Since the innocence of childhood is a "quick business," he wishes to tell his sister that in meeting adult experiences and responsibilities, she must be sincere, reliable, generous 81 (but never patronizing), and sensitive; in short* she must

be "swell" or non-phony. Only if the process of maturation

and the state of being "swell" are mutually exclusive (and

Salinger does not indicate in this story that they neces­

sarily are), does Babe want Mattie to remain an innocent

childo

Although French is correct in pointing out that

Babe — as a ". «. . withdrawn literary man with a penchant

for rereading favorite books . = . and old family letters"

--resembles Buddy Glass,^ less superficially he, along with

the whimsical Vincent Caulfield, is an early prototype for

Seymour Glass. French is also correct in stating that Babe

is attracted by Frances' "whimsicality, unreliability, and

silly affectation"; but in support of his argument that

Babe is trying desperately to cling to his childhood

innocence, he wrongly equates these characteristics with

childishness. Frances, in fact, is the antithesis of

the "swell girl" which Babe hopes Mattie will be.

His attraction for her, however, parallels Seymour's

curious attraction for Muriel, and Vincent’s distaste for

Frances foreshadows Buddy's disapproval of Muriel. Although both Frances and Muriel are simple and undiscriminating,

they are neither stupid nor phlegmatic. Rather, they have

9« J. D. Salinger, p. 6 0 .

10. J. P. Salinger, p. 6l . 82 a kind of elan, an animal verve, to which the intellectual

is often attracted. This same attraction, then, is

associated with the admiration which both Babe and Mattie

have for the lowering and romantically wild Heathclii'f, In

a diary entry in "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,"

Seymour writes of his love for Muriel:

"How I love and need her undiscriminating heart, , . « She worries over the way her love for me comes and goes, appears and disappears,"

"Oh, God, I ’m so happy with her. If only she could be happier with me."

"I’ll champion indiscrimination till doomsday, on the ground that it leads to health and a kind of very real, enviable happiness. Followed purely it's the way of Tao, and undoubtedly the highest way. But for a discriminating man to achieve this, it would mean that he would have to dis­ possess himself of poetry, go beyond poetry. "H

While far less complex, Babe, in his self-torment, shares

Seymour's ambivalent nature: sensitive and discriminating,

he is, nevertheless, "the happiest guy in the world" when

he receives even a letter from the insensitive, indifferent,

and undiscriminating Frances.

After a third appearance in Story magazine,

Salinger made his last contribution to the Saturday Evening

Post in 19^5— his most prolific year with the exception of

1948. Boy in France," the second story about Babe

11. pp. 77-78, 83, 86. Gladwaller, is the extremely well rendered meditation of a battle-fatigued young man in France more than a month after

D-Day. (Salinger himself had landed in Normandy with the

American Army's Fourth Division just five hours after the 12 first assault forces hit Utah Beach. )

Babe awakens frofii a short sleep and, his mind

"filled to its unhappy capacity" with grotesque war thoughts, realizes that he must ensconce himself for the night. With an array of dismal adjectives, the squalor which surrounds

Babe is vividly realized: "cold," "wet," "cheerless,"

"dirty," "stinking," "unwarm," "aching," "bloody," "un- lamehted," "rotten," "soggy," "filthy," "filthier," "sweat- stained," and "mud-crumbly." Utterly fatigued by this squalidness of war, Babe, despite the danger, is unwilling to dig a foxhole. He finally finds an unoccupied German foxhole into which, after removing the blood-soaked blanket and some bloody patches of dirt, he lowers his own blankets.

Positioning himself between his "unwarm" blankets, Babe finds that the hole is too short. To add to his discomfort, some loose dirt trickles down into his shirt and a red ant bites him "nastily, uncompromisingly" on the leg. Then, having lost a fingernail that morning, Babe rekindles the pain when he attempts to kill the ant.

12 itSonny: An Introduction," p. l4 84

To offset the squalor and pain, Babe, with some

Gele “abraeadabragM muses about being home. There, clean, he wishes to be with a girl other than Prances, a '’nice,

quiet girl" with "American ankles" and an "American voice."

He Would ask her to read some Emily Dickinson ("that one

about being charless") and William Blake ("that one about the little lamb who made thee") to him. The latter, of course, refers to Blake’s "The Lamb." In Songs of Inno­ cence , from which this poem comes, Blake (one of Salinger’s

acknowledged favorites) equates innocence, selflessness, and spontaneous love #nd happiness with the condition of childhood. Later, in Songs of Experience, Blake indignantly denounces the world of experience~-the world in which selfishness, cruelty, and hypocrisy destroy the spontaneous innocence of childhood. But Blake soon came to realize, as

Babe already knows, that purity can arise only from experi­

ence, that "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."

While it is more difficult to identify Salinger’s allusion to Dickinson, it seems probable that Babe.is. think­ ing of "Two lengths has every day." In this poem, the poet, with her usual skepticism, suggests that dying is not "veloc­ ity"; that is, to die is'not to go to the fixed realms of heaven or hell according to some fixed "signals." Rather,

the individual is "pause" in the sense of being essentially

the product of his own being, his own experience. 85 After musing about Dickinson arid Blake, Babe reads a syndicated Broadway column, the cuteness of which attests not only to the columnist1s indifference to the war effort beyond the latitude of Broadway itself but also to the trifling unconcern of civilians in general® The columnist reports his interview with a young actress who was in town for the premiere of her latest picture, "The Rockets' Red

Glare®" Although obviously a "phony" movie, it is labeled by the columnist, parenthetically at that, as "grand®"

Asked what she wanted to do most while in New York, the starlet answered that she wanted "a date with a real, honest-to-goodness G.I®" Her hopes are realized when she haply meets an old friend Bubby Beamis, now a major in public relations who is stationed "right" in New York City.

Crumpling the newspaper clipping, Babe drops it on the "natural ground" at the side of his foxhole; he then rereads "for the thirty-oddth time" a letter from his ten- year-old lister Mattie® Salinger is always masterful in composing a child's letter, and Mattie's is no exception®

Written almost entirely in simple sentences or compounds of very simple sentences, with typical misspellings, the laconic letter, in its spontaneous honesty and sensitivity

(at times inaccurately assumed by adults to be naivete), is the antithesis of the Broadway columnist's gossip sheet®

Mattie, at age ten, knows, as her mother wistfully does not, that Babe is in France. She then defends Jackie and condemns the haughty Frances as only an insightful child can: "She is very stuck up and Jackie is not. 13 Jackies hair is prettier also." She then relates that there is a shortage of boys at the beach and that the girls, therefore, go in the water more often. With a simplicity approaching pathos, Mattie also relates that the father of a dead soldier ("killed . . . where the Japs are"), although a good swimmer, merely sits on the beach with his wife. After telling Babe that she has cleaned his car, Mattie closes with two postscripts which beautifully reveal her devotion for him. She asks if she may accompany him on a trip to Canada when he returns, promising to say little and to light his cigarettes "without really smoking them." In the second postscript she simply states that she misses him and wants him to return home "soon."

In a discussion in which he forever forfeits his right to search for superlative horses, French states that

". . . the story reduces war to an outing by a group of inept Boy Scouts and makes Babe into a lazy tenderfoot mooning over his puppy love." French argues that Babe— unlike Sergeant X in "For Esme~~with Love and Squalor worries more about his lost fingernail and dirty underwear

13. "A Boy in France," Saturday Evening Post, CCXVII (March 31, 1945), 92. 8? than he does about his "dehumanization or the absurdities i % of human behavior that have caused it."

While it is difficult to speculate whether Babe will be as scathed by the war as Sergeant X ultimately was, it is necessary to remember (although French does not) that

Sergeant X*s reflections do not occur in the foxhole; his nervous breakdown and his awareness-~at least the manifes­ tation of his awareness--of the causes of the war occur after V-E Day. Picking up a book by the hatemonger Joseph

Goebbels in which a recently captured German woman, "a low official in the Nazi Party," had written, "Dear God, life is hell," Sergeant X almost illegibly quotes Father Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov:

"Fathers and teachers, 1 ponder "What is hell?* I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love. "3-5

Gross unconcern, selfishness, hatred, insensitivity, and lovelessness, the squalid forces which bring about war, constantly surround not only Sergeant X but also Babe

Gladwaller. In "Last Day of the Last Furlough," Babe, a week before being shipped overseas, had condemned the tendency to glorify war. Instead, he insisted, boys should be taught to have only contempt for violence. But in "A

14. J. P. Salinger, pp. 62-6 3 0

15. J. P. Salinger, "For Esme--with Love and Squalor," Nine Stories (New York: The New American Library, 195%), 79« 88

Boy in France," after reading the Broadway columnist’s trifling report, Babe is fully aware of the omnipresence of insensitivity and lovelessnesso On the other hand,

Mattie’s letter (again a written communication), like

Bsme's letter to the utterly distraught Sergeant X and

Zooey’s phone call to the disturbed Franny in "Zooey," is a covenant of genuine love which enables Babe to fall

"crumbily, bentleggedly, asleep*"

More than four years after Esquire had published

"The Heart of a Broken Story," Salinger made his second and last appearance in the magazine when "This Sandwich Has No

Mayonnaise" was published in 19^5» In fact, Esquire justifiably thought enough of this story to anthologize it in The Armchair Esquire in 1958; it is perhaps the best of his early stories and bears the first of Salinger’s highly imaginative titles* The protagonist in this story is

Vincent Caulfield, who' had initially appeared in "Last Day of the Last Furlough" as a friend of Babe Gladwaller* In the earlier story, Vincent and his family had just received word that his nineteen-year-old brother Holden was missing in action* Thus, although the last of the three Babe

Gladwaller stories, "The Stranger," had yet to be published,

Salinger had already begun to concentrate on the Caulfield

family. 89 The familial relationships in this story closely parallel those which finally appeared in The Catcher in the

Rye <, While the parents are still actors $ the progeny are to remain essentially unchanged; Vincent, for example, with minor alterations becomes D « B „ in the novel; his younger sister Phoebe is mentioned for the first time by name; a brother Red, although only briefly mentioned in this story, seems to be Alliee s prototype; and finally, the references to Holden, who attended Pentey Prep (changed to

Pencey Prep in the novel), indicate that Salinger's concept of what was to become his most memorable character was developing.

"This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise" is narrated in the first person present tense by Sergeant Vincent Caulfield

(he had been a corporal in "Last Day of the Last Furlough"), who is in Georgia in the Air Corps. Sitting on the protec­ tion strap of a dark, wet, miserable Army truck, Vincent— aware that only thirty of the thirty-four men in the truck will be permitted to attend the dance-— waits for the lieutenant from Special Services. The lieutenant, who had lived in the area as a civilian, apparently has been able to make provisions for no more than thirty men. Before the lieutenant arrives, in a very effective interior monologue-- the self-consciousness of which attests, as it even more effectively does in "Seymour: An Introduction," to the narrator's inability to cope with the memory of a dead 90 brother~-V"in.cent1 s despair over the news that his brother

Holden is missing in action is revealed to be insufferable.

The loss of his precious letters from Red^ Phoebe and

Holden, along with the gloom of a nine day rain, compounds his forlorhness.

Constantly aware that four of the men must be pared from the group, Vincent engages in seeming small talk with three soldiers, two of whom are anonymously referred to as

"the kid from Valentine Avenue!' and the "Memphis-Dallas man." The third young man, Fergie, whose job is to "empty out stuff," doesn't have the heart to tell his Clark Gable- inspired wife that he isn't a "gunner or something."

Despite the soldier's banter, Vincent is constantly reminded of his brother and frantically refuses to believe that

Holden, who ". . . can't reduce a thing to a humor, kill it off with a sarcasm, can't do anything but listen hectically to the maladjusted little apparatus he wears for a heart, is missing in action.

When the lieutenant arrives and discovers that there are four too many men, Vincent pretends that he is aware of his oversight for the first time. Ordered by the officer to reduce the group by four, Vincent inanely asks if there is anyone who did not sign up for the dance. Since he

l6 . "This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise," in The Armchair Esquire, ed. Arnold Gingrich and L. Rust Hills (#ew York: Popular Library, i960), p. 156. 1 91 receives no response«, Vincent g con juring up what he sarcastically considers to be a '’handsome alternative»11 asks if anyone would rather see a movieo Finally, the

Memphis-^Dallas man, who had stated earlier that young girls think of him as an "old guy," silently relinquishes his place. He is followed by Fergie, who, with mock casual- ness, says that married men should take advantage of the opportunity to write letters. Since no one else volunteers,

Vincent indiscriminately chooses two other soldiers, one of whom is an eighteen-year-old boy.

Terribly disappointed, the young soldier appeals to .

Ostrander to verify the fact that he had been the first to sign the dance roster. Afraid to jeopardize his own chances, however, Ostrander remains insidiously reticent.

The boy then desperately appeals to the lieutenant, who orders him back into the truck. Along with Vincent, the lieutenant wades through the mud to a telephone and calls home. After promising his mother that he will try to return home on Sunday, he talks to his sister Sarah Jane.

.(French misses this significant consanguinity.) So that there will be enough girls at the dance, the lieutenant finally orders his reluctant sister to attend. Walking back to the truck in the rain, Vincent, unable to "forget anything that's good," pathetically implores his missing brother to "stop playing around," to stop letting people think he is missing. 92 Gwyrm and Blotner argue that the weakness of this

story is the shift in interest from Vincent to the lieu­

tenant, who "graciously arranges" for the young soldier to

go to the dance. This gesture, they continue, should be performed by Vincent if his feelings for Holden are to be rendered to the reader "by more than wordy reminiscence," 17

French, agreeing with Gwynn and Blotner, ellaborates on

"why the story is irritating rather than moving," He

suggests, for example, that the reader unfamiliar with military routine misses the point that Vincent is respon­

sible for the excess men. If Vincent's irresponsibility

is not recognized by the reader, French correctly points

out that there is then no connection between the confused roster and Vincent's despair over Holden, French concludes

by stating that because Salinger wishes the reader to

sympathize with Vincent, he cannot expose him as the 18 irresponsible and self-pitying "culprit" of the story.

However, to have Vincent relinquish his own place

in the group (as the above critics would have him do) would be to reduce a very successful rendering of confused torment

to soap-opera sentimentality. The reader need not be

familiar with military routine to realize that Vincent is not only responsible for the extra men but also hyperaware

17• The Fiction of J» D. Salinger, p. 17•

18. J, D. Salinger, pp» 64-65» , 93 that they must be dropped from the group„ Just as Holden had been unable to "kill it off with a sarcasm11 so Vincent9 with his private sarcasm, futilely attempts to assuage his

depression, his loneliness, and his memories of Holden*

Moreover, the purpose of the soldiers' small talk is not,

as French suggests, to emphasize "the world's indifference

to Vincent’s plight" but rather to emphasize that because

of his thoughts, Vincent is alienated from the other men.

Despite his attempted cynicism, Vincent, when asked

if he has ever been to Miami, lies: "No, , » * Pretty

good?" Simply to have answered yes would have nipped the

conversation before it began, thus precluding at least one

opportunity for Vincent to forget his agony. Later, when

the lieutenant arrives and discovers that the sergeant has

failed to do his job, Vincent, pretending "to see the

gravity of the situation for the first time," again un­

successfully attempts to counter his sensitivity with

covert sarcasm: "I might suggest that we shoot four of

the men. We might ask for a detail of men experienced in

shooting people who want to go to dances,

After only two men relinquish their places, Vincent

bittersweetly muses:

I ’ll hound them. I'll hound these men because I hate their guts* They’re all being insufferably stupid. What's the matter with them? Do they

19o "This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise," p, 1 6 2 , 94

think they’ll have a terrific time at this sticky little dance? Do they think they're going to hear a fine trumpet take a chorus of "Marie"? What’s the matter with these idiots? What's the matter with me? Why do I want them all to go? Why do I sort of want to go myself? Sort of! o0 What a joke® You're aching to go, Caulfield.

Shortly thereafter, while the young soldier who has been dropped from the dance roster stands pleadingly in the rain,-

Vincent reaches out and adjusts the boy's collar.

Thus Vincent^ his sensitivity too great to be mitigated by sarcasm, is unable "to knife" the four extra men either before or after they are loaded on the truck.

It remains for the lieutenant to order him to do it. It also remains for the lieutenant to magnanimously provide a date for the eighteen-year-old soldier; for Vincent (it is immaterial whether he is or isn't constrained to remain with the men after the lieutenant's arrival), although he wants them all to go to the dance, is "drenched to the bone, the bone of loneliness, the bone of silence."

Because he is intolerably alone, unable to forget Holden, unable to "forget anything that's good," unable to forget that "this sandwich has no mayonnaise," Vincfent must go to the dance.

"The Stranger," Salinger's second contribution to

Collier's, is the last of the Babe Gladwaller stories.

Babe, out of the army only a week, takes his sister Mattie

20. pp. 162-163. to New York City ostensibly to have lunch and to see a show. However * they first visit Mrs. Bob Polk, nee Helen

Beeber, who is Vincent Caulfield’s ex-girl friend (although throughout the story she is referred to as "Vincent's girl"). Waiting in Helen’s expensive but ugly living room, Babe regrets having stopped "to take out his messy emotions , " to force "them on strangers .11 After admiring her many fine books over the artificial fireplace (Rilke and Fitzgerald among others), Babe, sneezing uncontrollably from hay fever, thinks about the many soldiers who did not return.

Helen, with "a grown girl's harsh, childish, acutely lovely voice," enters and, after mistaking him for the curtain man, ushers both Babe and Mattie into a brighter roomo Impressed by Helen’s "lethal size and shape and melody of beauty by chance," Babe, nervously unaccustomed to the civilian world (he is hyperaware, for example, of the design on his socks, of his low-cut shoes, and of his shiny cuff-links), finally asks Helen if she knows Vincent had been killed. Although Vincent’s father, in his dis­ tress having forgotten both her name and the fact that she and Vincent were no longer engaged, already had informed

Helen of his son's death, she asks Babe--who wants to tell her "the who16 business"--to spare no details»

Vincent was killed in the Htirtgen Forest by a mortar which, since it did not whistle, was unavoidable. Babe relates that after Vincent was hit? "e « 0 he had too much pain in too large an area of his body to have realized anything but blackness« He died with his eyes open, saying nothing; and before he had been hit, he had not been happy. Babe ends the rather graphic description of his friend's death when he notices that Helen is crying. She cries for only a short time, however, and Babe, since

Helen once loved Vincent, regrets that it must be ,fa stranger with hay fever'1 who tells her of his death.

Although Babe realizes that he is apologizing too much, he wants ". . .to apologize to every girl in the world whose lover had been hit by mortar fragments because the mortars 22 hadn't whistled." Babe also realizes (as he had in both

"Last Day of the Last Furlough" and "A Boy in France") that he must supply all the grisly details of war so that the civilian is left with none of the "comfortable lies," none of the romanticized movie-and-book versions of war.

Before giving her a poem which Vincent had written,

Babe asks Helen why, since apparently they were both in love, she and Vincent had broken up. She explains that although she loved "everything"— Vincent, his brothers, his parents, even his house--Vincent had not believed in any­ thing since before the war when his younger brother Kenneth 97 23 had died." After reading the poem twice9 Helen folds it and puts it into her jacket pocket 5 "as though concealment was necessaryo" As Babe prepares to leave 9 Helen states that she is very glad he came; at this, he cries. Then, while Babe waits for the elevator, Helen asks him what he is going to do now that the war is over, and he pessimis­ tically replies: "1 don't know. Is there something to do?

No, I'm kidding. I'll do something. I'll probably get an

M. A, and teach. My father's a teacher." Although she politely declines Babe's invitation to join them for lunch and the th'eatre, she asks him to call her sometime, suggesting that her husband (she refers to him as "Wuddaya- call-it") could get theatre tickets. At his refusal, Helen asks him to reconsider, but Babe merely says: "I'm all right. Don't be that way. I'm just not used to things yet»"

23» As French points out (p. 17^)? Gwynr and Blotner wrongly equate Kenneth with Holden (p. 17)° In "Last Day of the Last Furlough," Vincent, before going over­ seas, has just received word that Holden is missing in action. Also, in the same story he informs Babe that he has not had a good time in four years and that Helen is married. Since Helen, in "The Stranger," relates that she had broken up with Vincent before he entered the army, Kenneth cannot be equated with Holden. However, although the chronology is not fixed, Kenneth, along with Red in "This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise," is a prototype of Allie in The Catcher in the Rye. In these related Gladwaller- Caulfield stories there are several other discrepancies. In "Last Day of the Last Furlough," for example, Helen is pregnant; yet there is no indication in "The Stranger" that she has a child. Finally, while in "The Stranger" Helen describes their break-up as resulting from Vincent's cynicism, in "This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise" Vincent implies that he did not want Helen to marry a soldier. Walking with Mattie on the street s Babe notices a

fat apartment-house doorman who is walking a wire-haired

terrier; he thinks it impossibly possible that the man

walked the dog "during the whole time of the Bulge." When

Mattie asks her brother if he is glad to be home, he

squeezes her hand until she screams. Then as he watches

Mattie jump from the curb, Babe asks himself: "Why was it

such a beautiful thing to see?"

Again, both French and Messrs. Gwynn and Blotner

feel that this story is a failure because there is no

significant relationship between the parts. French, for

example, states that since Vincent and Helen had broken up

before he went overseas, Babe's impassioned apology to

girls whose lovers have been hit by silently approaching

mortars has no relationship to either Vincent or Helen.

French also argues that since the mortar barrage has had

nothing to do with the break-up, Vincent's death is merely

anti-climactic.

What these critics overlook, however, was not over­

looked by the editors of Collier's when they wrote in the

blurb: "He felt an alien in the civilian world and knew he

had to stay so until he found a way to tell Vincent's

wonderful girl how Vincent had died." The story is neither

about Vincent's break-up with Helen nor about Vincent's

24. J . P. Salinger, p. 63. death in the Hurtgen Forest; rather, the story depicts the attempt of a recently discharged, battle-weary, and highly sensitive soldier to stabilize and reorient himself in the civilian world-~a world whose gross unconcern for the war effort had plagued him in both "Last Day of the Last

Furlough" and "A Boy in France®".

Before leaving Helen's apartment, Babe tells her that he had "the best and worst motives" in coming® The

"best" motive is his mission to destroy the "comfortable lies" about the war which civilians almost fondly harbor.

In fact, Babe feels that he has been spared so that he might not "let anybody good down." Because he was

Vincent's friend and because Vincent, who was "good," loved Helen, he must destroy any romantic war notions which

Helen may entertain. Inextricably associated with his

"best" motive is his "worst" motive: his own compulsive need not only to mitigate the loneliness and lovelessness which had been so omnipresent but also to secure himself in the civilian world by sharing with it the unretouched truth about the war® But Babe finds his need to speak even more terrible than the truth which he does speak.

That Helen has already broken up with Vincent not only before his death but even before the war does not

(although French and Messrs® Gwynn and Blotner complain that it does) detract from the poignancy of the story® 100

Indeed, it indicates the degree to which Babe’s war thoughts, his uncivilian thoughts $ ar e indelibly impressed upon his mind. Although Helen is married, Babe constantly refers to her as "Vincent's girl," almost as if her civilian marriage did not exist. What, however, is too real in Babe's "soldier's mind" is that Vincent loved

Helen and that he loved her while both he and Babe were together during the war. Helen also is aware of Babe's uncomfortable unfamiliarity with the civilian world; and the anonymity of her reference to her husband as "Wuddaya- call-it," although perfectly in keeping with the elan of her childish simplicity, seems to be a gesture of benevo­ lence.

After leaving Helen's apartment and incredulously watching the doorman walk the dog, Babe notices a small boy in the middle of the street:

In the middle of the broad avenue a small boy in a blue suit was trying to get his small, relaxed dog, probably named Theodore or Waggy, to get up and finish walking across the street like some­ one named Rex or Prince or Jim.^5

The reality of the little dog with the probable unmovielike name and behavior, the reality of walking in the hot sun with Mattie's hand in his, and the beautifully childish

spontaniety of Mattie as she happily jumps off the curb--

all of this enables Babe to adjust somewhat to the civilian

25® "The Stranger," p. 77® 101 terra incognita where deludingly "comfortable lies" still exist o

William Maxwell reports that Salinger works "with infinite labor, infinite patience, and infinite thought for the technical aspects of what he is writingo" In fact,

Salinger has admitted to Maxwell that he finds writing "a 26 hard life." His studio, separated from the main house, is a tiny concrete shelter with a translucent plastic roof, in which the author spends as many as fifteen or sixteen 2 7 hours a day a$ his typewriter. Bertrand Yeaton, one of the few to have seen the inside of Salinger’s studio, describes the author’s working habits:

Jerry works like a dog. He’s a meticulous craftsman who constantly revises, polishes, and rewrites. On the wall of the studio, Jerry has a series of cup hooks to which he clips sheafs of notes. They must deal with the various characters and situations, because when an idea occurs to him he takes down the clips, makes the appropriate notation, and places it back on the proper hook. He also has a ledger in which he has pasted sheets of typewritten manuscript on one page and on the opposite one has arrows, memos, and other notes for revisions.28

As mentioned earlier, Salinger worked on The

Catcher in the Rye on and off for ten years. Although

Holden had been mentioned for the first time in print in

26. "J . D. Salinger," p. 6.

2 7 . "The Mysterious J. D. Salinger . . . His Woodsy, Secluded Life," Newsweek, LV (May 3 0 , i960), 93»

2 8 . p. 93. 102

"Last Day of the Last Furlough" and for a second time in

"This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise," he was only Vincent

Caulfield’s missing-in-action brother. However, in "I’m

Crazy," Salinger’s fourth and final appearance in Collier’s,

Holden Caulfield appears for the first time as the protag­ onist o Thus, the foregoing discussion of Salinger’s meticulous writing habits is interesting because "I'm

Crazy," published six years before The Catcher in the Rye, was to become, under the author's constant revisions, two chapters1 of the novel«

The story is in three scenes: the first describes both Holden's standing on Thomsen Hill as he tries to feel a good-bye for Pentey Prep (Pencey Prep in the novel) and his arrival at his history teacher's house (Chapter I in the novel); the second describes his interview with Mr a

Spencer, his history teacher, who is concerned about

Holden's expulsion from school (Chapter 2 in the novel); and the third describes his arrival home and his. subsequent conversation with his ten-year-old sister Phoebe (Chapters

21 and 22 in the novel).

Although much of the material in the story is retained in the novel, there are significant differences.

Both employ the same effective first person point of view, but conspicuously absent from the story is Holden's profane adolescent language. (It must be remembered, of course, that the story appeared in Collier1s .) Thus, whereas in 103 the short story Holden admits that although Spencer is old,

"he got a kick out of things in a half-shot way," in the novel the mof*e effective "half-assed way" replaces the earlier version® Also, when Spencer picks up Holden's exam paper in "I'm Crazy," Holden says: "Old Spencer handled ray exam paper as though it were something catching that he 29 had to handle for the good of science or something„ . . o"

In the novel, this becomes the uproariously funny simile:

"He started handling my exam paper like it was a turd or somethingo" » While the early Holden is essentially as sensitive as his later counterpart, he is also more condescending to and less critical of his old history teacher® He makes no mention of the "bumpy old chests" and "unhairy" legs of

"old guys" which so depress Holden in The Catcher in the

Ryeo Also absent from the story is Holden’s growing contempt for, and subsequent silent invective against, old

Spencer as he insists on reading the boy’s failing exam paper. When Spencer asks the Holden of "I'm Crazy" if he regrets flunking out of school, Holden catalogues what he will miss at the school« He tells Spencer that he feels sorry for his mother, who has just sent him some ski boots

(in Chapter 7 of the novel Holden is similarly depressed as he packs the ice skates which his mother has given him)o

29® "I'm Crazy," Collier’s, CXVI (December 22, 1945), 48® lo4

The early Holden also says that he will miss the train ride to and from Pentey and relates to Spencer his conversation with the mother of a Pentey "louse" (this too ip used in the novel when in Chapter 8 Holden leaves for home on the train). In The Catcher in the Rye, however, when Spencer asks him why he has difficulty in school, Holden merely replies: "Why? Oh, well it's a long story, sir. I mean it's pretty complicated." He reflects, however, that because he was "surrounded by phonies," he had difficulty in school.

In the third scene of the story, which outlines

Chapters 21 and 22 of the novel, Holden arrives home and goes to Phoebe's bedroom. In the novel, when Phoebe accuses Holden of being expelled from school, he lies, stating that school was recessed early; finally he admits to the expulsion and tells his sister that he is going out

West. Asked why he was expelled, he answers: "It was full of phonies. And mean guys." Yet in "I'm Crazy," Holden readily admits that he has been expelled and offers as an excuse: "They kept shoving stuff at me, exams and all, and study periods, and everything was compulsory all the time. 30 I was going crazy. I just didn't like it." To Phoebe's famous comment about Holden's not liking "anything that's happening," he replies in the novel that he likes his dead

3 0 . pp..48, 51» 10? brother Allie, the two nuns, and the suicide James Castle0

He also states that he likes being with Phoebe, talking and thinking, and finally admits that he would like to be "the catcher in the fye o" Replying to Phoebe’s same accusation in the short story, he merely states that besides being with her, he likes the girl he hasn’t met yet who sits a few seats ahead of him on the train and whom he knows only by the back of her head«

Although Holden's brother Do B „ is ndt mentioned in the short story, another member of the family who is dropped from the novel does appeare Viola, an infant sister who shares Phoebe's room and who can squeeze between the bars of her crib, tells "Holdie" that Jeanette, the maid, has taken her Donald Duck = Phoebe explains that Viola insulted the maid by telling her she had bad breathe (In

Chapter 23 of The Catcher in the Rye, Phoebe complains to her mother that the maid Charlene "breathes on everything =")

Finally and most significantly, Holden never confronts his parents in the novel and ends up in a sanitarium. In the short story, however, after confronting his parents with the news of his most recent expulsion, he returns to Phoebe’s room. After watching Phoebe sleep and after placing Viola’s Donald Duck in her crib, he arranges the "owels" (olives) which she had requested in a row on the railing of the crib. Then he returns to his room: 106

I lay awake for a pretty long time, feeling lousy» I knew everybody was right and I was wrong. I knew that I wasn’t going to be one of those successful guys, that I was never going to be like Edward Gonzales or Theodore Fisher or Lawrence Meyer. I knew that this time when Father said that I was going to work in that man’s office that he meant it, that I wasn't going back to school again ever, that I wouldn't like working in an office. I started wondering again where the ducks in Central Park went when the lagoon was frozen over, and finally I went to sleep.31

Realizing the heresy of his pronouncement, French states that although the boy in the novel is a "more com­ plex and touching figure than his callow prototype," the early Holden— ""the kind of lazy, romantic kid who loses his keys and breaks his radio and whose intellectual capacities simply do not measure up to his ambitious parents' expectations--is more realistic. 3 2 French, of course, is correct if by realistic he means representative, for the early Holden is by far a more common type.

But fiction is not a statistical consideration.

The later Holden, although less representative, is realis­ tically portrayed as a highly complex and sensitive adolescent; as such, he is a more successful fictional creation than his earlier prototype. The boy in the short story has failed to achieve the goals set by his parents; but as Vincent says of Holden in the early story "This

Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise" (Holden here, in fact, seems

31. P° 51. 32. J. P. Salinger, p. 6 7 . 10? closer to his ultimate stage of development than he does in

"I*m Crazy"), he ". . o can't reduce a thing to a humor, kill it off with a sarcasm, can't do anything but listen hectically to the maladjusted little apparatus he wears for a heart." This sensitive sixteen-year-old boy searches for purity while too aware that the world is full of impurity, unable to differentiate, and therefore unable to cope with the "phony" world in which he must live.

Almost a year after "I'm Crazy" had appeared in

Collier's, the long deferred "Slight Rebellion Off Madison" marked Salinger's debut in The New Yorker, the magazine with which he was soon to become exclusively associated.

As stated earlier, in 19^1 The New Yorker purchased an early version of this Holden Caulfield story but decided not to publish it when our entry into World War XX meant that many such young men were headed for.war. It is, of course, impossible to say just how this early story differed from the version finally published; but since

"Slight Rebellion Off Madison," just as "I'm Crazy," also was incorporated into The Catcher in the Rye, it is not

difficult to see how Holden developed under Salinger's constant revision.

The story is in three scenes: the first describes

Holden's theatre date with Sally Hayes (Chapter 17 in the novel); the second describes their subsequent quarrel at 108 the ice-skating rink at Radio City (Chapter 17 in the novel); the third describes Holden's meeting with the

"intellectual" Carl Luce at the Wadsworth Bar (the Wicker

Bar in the novel), his drunken phone call to Sally, his conversation with the piano player, and his leaving the bar, drunk and wet and sad„

While the Holden in this early story is also sickened by the "phonies" at the theatre, upset enough with the petty materialism and phoniness of life in both New

York City and Pencey Prep to suggest to Sally that they

"beat it" to the wilds of Vermont, lonely enough to ask the pompous Carl Luce for advice, and, finally, depressed enough to drink up "nine dollars' worth of Scotch-and sodas" before drmfkenly calling Sally, the desperate frenzy which Holden experiences in the novel is missing in this story. It is missing both because Holden is merely on

Christmas vacation and because the story is narrated in the third person without the contrapuntal effect of Holden's vulgar phrasings.

Since the story is narrated in the third person,

Holden's observations and commentaries, which in the novel so perfectly mirror his growing vexation and depression, are necessarily lost. For example, when Holden tells Sally that she is the only reason he came home, she replies in the short story: 109

"You're sweet 911 said Sally 9 wishing he'd change the subject<>33

In the novel9 however$ Holden makes the same observation:

"You're Sweet," she said® But you could tell she wanted me to change the damn subjecte

Also, after Sally has refused to accompany Holden to his wilderness retreat and after Holden has told her that she doesn't understand what he means, Sally answers in the short story:

"Maybe I don'to Maybe you don't either," Sally Said,

But in the novel, Holden, as a first person narrator, can again more effectively convey his increasing despair:

"Maybe I don't! Maybe you don't either," old Sally saido We both hated each other's guts by that time* You could see there wasn't any sense trying to have an intelligent con- versationo I was sorry as hell I'd started ito

In The Catcher in the Rye, after leaving Sally at the ice-skating rink, Holden calls Carl Luce because he desperately wants to have "a slightly intellectual conversa­ tion <," Although Luce is one of those "very intellectual guys," he is, in Holden's words, "a fat-assed phony="

Nevertheless, after going to a "phony" movie, Holden meets

Luce at the Wicker Bar, where he annoys Luce by suggesting that he has a "flit" for him and then asking him about his

33° "Slight Rebellion Off Madison," The New Yorker, XXII (December 2 1 , 1946), 8 3 8 ' ~ I 34o The Catcher in the Rye, po 119° 110

"sex life." When Luce refers to one of his most recent

conquests as the "Whore of New Hampshire," Holden says i

"That isn't nice. If she was decent enough to let you get I sexy with her all the time, you at least shouldn't talk

about her that way." After Luce champions the restorative

effects of a good psychoanalyst (his father happens to be

in the business), he insists that he must leave; but Holden,

although he dislikes him, implores him to stay: "Have one more drink. . . . Please. I'm lonesome as hell. No- kidding." In the short story, however, Holden's conversa­

tion with Luce, in which he tells him he is going "stark, % staring mad" and asks for advice, is reduced to a single

paragraph.

Although Holden's drunken phone call to Sally is

essentially the same in both the short story and the novel, his playacting the part of a wounded victim of "Rocky's mob" is conspicuously absent from the short story. Also,

in both the short story and the novel, he goes to the men's

room after having called Sally. There he tries to converse with the piano player, who, although somewhat kinder than

his counterpart in the novel, also refuses to talk. The

short story ends as Holden, after leaving the bar, stands

on the corner, "his teeth chattering violently," waiting for

£ Madison Avenue bus. In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden,

"feeling so damned depressed and lonesome," decides to walk Ill to Central Park, where he will . o see what the hell the ducks were doing, see if they were around or not."

Without Holden's expulsion from school, without the frenzied effect of Holden's invective, without the numerous and sensitive insights which the first person point of view permits, "Slight Rebellion Off Madison" seems only to out­ line the mid-semester blues of a somewhat sensitive but quite typical teen-ager— a boy not deeply troubled as his later counterpart but merely brash and irrepressible, And his rebellion can only be assayed as "slight." IV, THE DESTROYED ARTIST: SEYMOUR IN EMBRYO

Although the two stories in this chapter were published almost four years aparts they are, of the early

stories, the only two in which Salinger portrays his hero

as an artist-’-the figure which dominates his later fiction

in the character of Seymour Glass« Both Joe Varioni, as a brilliant but unacknowledged novelist, and Raymond Ford^ as

a talented poet, are seduced and ultimately destroyed by the slick inventiveness of competent, middle-brow commer­ cialism. But they are not victims of merely a materialistic

society. Joe Varioni, for example, because he is kind, sensitive, and talented, allows his talent to be prostituted by his brother; his submissiveness leads to his destruction.

Likewise, the poet Raymond Ford, once dominated, by an unspeakably coarse and vulgar mother, is finally able to find refuge in the ”inverted forest" of his poetic imagina­ tion . But, after attempting to engage reality by marrying

Corrine, he is left vulnerable to the insensitive, loveless, and materialistic world of the wastelander Bunny Croft.

Because he is at the same time repulsed, by and attracted to this society in which he cannot exist, he too is destroyed.

While in the army in 19^3, Salinger broke into the highly remunerative Saturday Evening Post with "The Varioni

Brothers," a ftory which--to no avail--he hoped Hollywood

112 113 1 might purchasee (Seven years later, any predilection he may have had for a Hollywood debut was rudely dissipated when the Samuel Goldwyn studios released "My Foolish

Heart," a Susan Hayward-Dana Andrews tear-jerker based on

"Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut.") Although the editors of

Time are not too far wrong when they too facetiously 2 describe "The Varioni Brothers" as a "weepy lament,"

Arthur Mizener is more accurate in calling it Salinger's

"first mature story." 3 For Joe Varioni, the destroyed writer-artist of this story, along with Vincent Caulfield of the early Caulfield stories and Raymond Ford of "The

Inverted Forest," serves as a prototype for Seymour Glass, the poet-genius who dominates Salinger's most recent fiction.

Despite the fact that Gwynn and Blotner are unable to determine who the protagonist is or what the central 4 , conflict might be, clearly (the title, I think, suggests it) this is the story of the Varioni brothers. Interest­ ingly narrated by both Mr. Vincent Westmoreland, a guest columnist for a Chicago newspaper, and Sarah Daley Smith,

1. French, J. D. Salinger, p. 25®

2. [jack Skow] , "Sonny: An Introduction," pp. 1 0 , 14 »

3® "The Love Song of J. D . Salinger," in Studies in J. D. Salinger, ed. Marvin Laser and Norman Fruman (New 'York',' 1963) , pi 205.

4. The Fiction of J. D. Salinger, pp. 11-12. 114 this story outlines how Sonny Varioni (Salinger, inciden- tally, as a youth was called Sonny by his parents ), himself a brilliantly creative technician at the piano, used and thwarted the poetic genius of his brother Joe„

Joe Varioni is a novelist who, although unpublished, is acknowledged by the knowledgeable Professor Vorhees as "a very fine writer" with "geniuso"

Sarah Smith, having taken over as narrator, relates that while she was a college student in one of Joe's

English classes, Joe suddenly gave up the novel which he had been writing on everything from match-covers to used envelopeso Pressed for an explanation, Joe informs Sarah that he is writing lyrics for the "wonderful music" which

Sonny writes and will remain with him "just till he clickse" Sarah, whose uncle is Teddy Barto's lawyer, introduces the brothers to the famous publisher; and their phenomenal success begins, with everyone from poor relatives to Teddy Barto predaciously profitting from it« Although

Joe doesn't wish to leave either his teaching position or his unfinished novel, Sonny prevails upon him to move to

Chicago. Despite Sarah's desperate pleadings, the con­ fidently and unscrupulously domineering Sonny, since "Joe does the best lyrics in the country," insists that Joe needs "success" as much as he does.

5. Skow , p » 11. . i 115 When her father becomes ill, Sarah leaves for

California; but before leaving, she implores Joe to return to his novel. He informs her that he has given Sonny two weeks' notice. After she leaves, however, Professor

Vorhees, at her suggestion, goes to ask Sonny if Joe is really quitting. Sonny informs him that since he has

"trouble hearing the music," and since Joe writes the best lyrics, Joe is indispensable. Then, five years later

(although the incident is related at the beginning of the story) Sonny, who demanded success as a cure-all for his boredom, becomes bored with success and begins gambling.

Feeling he has been cheated by a notorious gambler, he refuses to pay an enormous debt. Shortly thereafter, at a lavish party celebrating five years of collaboration,

Joe, who "only played the piano when he was tight" and who

"only got tight once a year," is mistaken for Sonny and killed by a "trigger man" for the gambler. The bereaved brother then disappears for seventeen years.

Sarah then relates that since Joe's death seventeen years before, she has married Douglas Smith (he had "a wonderful, ungeniuslike thing about" him), now teaches at the same college at which Joe taught, and often remembers

"whole sentences" of his unfinished novel. Sonny Varioni", aged, sick, egoless and apparently destitute (in short, the antithesis of an earlier self), conies to the college in search of sanctuary. Having read the uncollected scraps of 116

Joe's novel, which was completed while Sarah was in

Californiaj Sonny realizes that he hears "music" for the first time in his life; and by piecing the novel together, he hopes "for a kind of salvation*" (This situation interestingly foreshadows three of Salinger’s recent Glass stories in which Buddy GlaSs chronicles and often eulogizes the unacknowledged genius of his dead brother«)

This is the first story in which Salinger portrays his protagonist as a brilliant artist seduced in some way by commercial success. Sonny Varioni, before Joe's death, is the embodiment of the commercial successmonger, catering always to public fancy« Because his brother is sensitive, kind, and submissive and because he, on the contrary, is egoistically "masterful," Sonny easily puppets and mis-r directs Joe’s talent« When Sarah begs Sonny to set Joe free, he answers: "Success is what both of us need. It’ll at least demand our interest. I'll bring in money. Even if Joe does write this novel, it may take the public years 6 to pat him on the ego." Still later, when Professor

Vorhees also implores Sonny to stop burning out his brother’s talent, Sonny answers: "What makes you so sure he wouldn't plug out words for years and then have a bunch of guys tell him he was also-ran?" 7 French summarizes this

6 . "The Varioni Brothers," Saturday Evening Post, CCXVI (July 17, 1943), 76.

7. p. 76. 117 aspect of the story quite adequately: "The story is a thinly disguised morality play about a problem that has constantly bothered artists in a materialistic society: should one settle for commercial success or labor over a great work of art that may go unnoticed?

"The Varioni Brothers" also sheds light on not only

Salinger's personal reclusion but also on his concept of man in society» Pleading with Joe to return to his novel,

Sarah warns him: "You're burning yourself out in that terrible basement. I want you to go away and do your novel." But Joe, although he does finish his first novel, never returns to full-time writing: after five years of collaboration with Sonny, he is the accidental victim of a gangland murder, the statistical impossibility of which is itself grotesque. The "trigger man," about to murder

Sonny, asks the "dizziest blond" at the party the where­ abouts of Sonny Varioni. She "points wildly in the direc­ tion of the piano," and Joe, not Sonny, is killed.

The accidental quality of this incident foreshadows a curious passage in "Uncle ¥iggily in Connecticut" in which Eloise describes how her lost lover Walt (in "Raise

High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" the reader discovers that this is Walt Class) was killed:

"... his regiment was resting someplace. It was between battles or something, this friend

8. J. D. Salinger, pp. 56-57° 118

Of his said that wrote me. Walt and some other boy were putting this little Japanese stove in a package. Some colonel wanted to send it home„ Or they were taking it out of the package to rewrap it--I don’t know exactly. Anyway, it was full of gasoline and junk and it exploded in „ their faces„ The other boy just lost an eye."

Thus? both Joe and Walt seem to be the victims of unspeakably absurd accidents. But there is implicit in each account and explicit in The Catcher in the Rye a statement on the relationship between man (especially the artist) and society. Holden, in describing the reaction of the crowd to Ernie, the piano player, states:

They were exactly the same morons that laugh like hyenas in the movies at stuff that isn’t funnyo. I swear to God, if I were a piano player or an actor or something and all those dopes thought I was terrific, I ’d hate it. I wouldn't even want them to clap for me. People always clap for the wrong things. If I were a piano player, I'd play it in the goddam closet. . . . In a funny way, though, I felt sort of sorry for him when he was finished. I don’t even think he knows any more when he’s playing right or not. It isn't all his fault. I partly blame all those dopes that clap their heads off--they’d foul up anybody if you gave them a chance.10

Along with Salinger's other artist-heroes, Joe Varioni-- because he is sensitive, kind, talented, and finally, too submissive--is all the more vulnerable within an indifferent, irresponsible, insensitive, and ultimately undiscriminating world. Salinger himself, it seems, feels unable to keep

9. J . D. Salinger, "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut," Nine Stories (New York: The New American Library, 1954), pi 28. 10. The Catcher in the Rye, p. ?8. 119 his creativity intact while meeting the demands of society and hass therefore* become a recluse»

There is in Salinger's work a general distrust for the spoken word; the impossibility, or at least the dif­ ficulty, of successful vocal communication Salinger vividly illustrates through his frequent use of the telephone device. This distrust for the spoken word is clearly demonstrated in Salinger's most recent story, "Hapworth l6 ,

1924," when Seymour, at the age of seven, writes to his parents: "We miss you far more than words can tell. There you have one of the few, worthwhile opportunities for the human tongue." 11 In an earlier story "Raise High the Roof

Beam, Carpenters," Seymour, in a diary entry, writes: "The human voice conspires to desecrate everything on earth." 12

Only through letters, diaries, or silence can many of

Salinger's sensitive protagonists communicate successfully.

As Levine aptly puts it: "More lasting than speech, writing symbolizes both the honesty and the creativity of the artist.

Thus in "The Varioni Brothers," when Sarah tells

Professor Vorhees that Joe is no longer working on his novel, the professor ", . . just shook his head. He just

1 1 . p. 77*

1 2 . p. 7 8 .

13« "J. D . Salinger: The Development of the Misfit Hero," p , 1 1 1 . 120 shook his hehd® . « o That was alio" In order to honestly convey his feelings Professor Vorhees had to remain silent.

Salinger uses this same gesture in "Raise High the Roof

Beam, Carpenters" when Seymour describes Lincoln1s

Gettysburg Address s , . if someone had to speak at the anniversary of the event he should simply have come forward and shaken his fist at his audience and then walked off-- 14 that is, if the speaker was an absolutely honest man."

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this story is Salinger's handling of point of view and backtracking«

In fact, the use of a dual point of view and a series of

Fitzgerald-like flashbacks (Salinger is particularly fond of The Great Gatshy) prompts Gwynn and Blotner to complain that it is impossible to tell who or what the story is about <. But their complaint is unfounded, for indeed these structural elements convey the total irony not only of

Sonny's plight but also of the story itself. The first part of the story is narrated by Mr. Westmoreland, who, seventeen years after Joe's death and Sonny's disappearance, asks his "hypothetical genie": "Where is Sonny Varioni?"

His "tragic and Unfinished" story of the Varioni brothers consists only of a brief account of the fateful party and a

Hedda Hopper lament for the missing and dead. Mr.

14 o p » 86 . 121

Westmoreland, in short, speaks to and for the undiscrim­ inating masses which Holden abhors«,

The "inside dope" about Sonny Varioni, the story of how Sonny used and thwarted the poetic genius of his brother, is related by Sarah Daley Smith, who was sopho- morically but geniunely interested in Joe and his novel.

She suspects that Mr. Westmoreland remembers "all his old girls by the Varioni Brothers’ words and music," and there is little doubt that she is correct. Their music, the composition * of which, Sarah relates, actually had been "a pretty cold business," is "warm and alive" in the hearts of

Mr. Westmoreland and "thousands" of others. Finally, at the end of the story--when Sonny, after having read Joe’s novel, realizes that he hears "music" for the first time in his life--neither Sarah nor Professor Vorhees takes

"advantage of the irony at his expense." Rather, the irony is at the expense of Mr. Westmoreland et al.

For almost four years after the publication of

"The Varioni Brothers," Salinger did not portray his protagonist as an artist. Then, in his longest work prior to the publication of The Catcher in the Rye, he returned to the figure of the artist beset in some way by slick commercialism. "The Inverted Forest," a novelette of about

24,000 words, initially appeared in Cosmopolitan, December

1947» A later effort by Cosmopolitan to reprint the story 122 in its Diamond Jubilee Issue (March 1961) precipitated a

Salinger plea that the story not be reprinted. 15 Fortu­ nately for the reader trying to unearth some of the early stories, Cosmopolitan did reprint the story.

It is the story of Raymond Ford, who as a boy was under the domination of a grotesque mother. Invited to

Corrine's eleventh birthday party, Ford is unable to attend because his mother, locked out of her job as waitress at a

Lobster Palace, cruelly shuttles her son out of town.

Nineteen years later, Corrine picks up a volume of poetry by a young poet-genius Raymond Ford, and a short time later she and Ford are married. Shortly after they return from their honeymoon, however, a woman calling herself Bunny

Croft enters Ford's life and within days steals him from

Corrine. Eighteen months later, Corrine finally locates her husband in a squalid apartment in a Midwestern city.

A pathetic and miserable figure, Ford is unable to leave

Bunny, informing Corrine that he has found the "brain" again. Indeed, he has found a woman every bit as offensive as his mother.

Like many of Salinger's early stories, "The

Inverted Forest" has received only slight critical atten­ tion; only five critics give it more space than a biblio­ graphic entry, and these five (several of whom seem more

15° Gruuwald, "The Invisible Man: A Biographical Collage,'? p. 21 . 123 preoccupied with their own overly coy quips than irith legitimate criticism) can agree only on the most fundamental questions which the story raises. Critical discord, how­ ever, is not sufficient justification for scrutiny. The ensuing bulk of explication, therefore, is warranted because the story provides important indications of

Salinger’s maturing concept of theme and technique.

Of the five critics who discuss the story, Gwynn and Blotner are the least perceptive. Unable to determine what has happened to whom, they query "and what ijs signifi­ cant about what fyas happened?""**^ Ihab Hassan, before specifically discussing "The Inverted Forest," makes a useful distinction between what he calls the "Assertive

Vulgarian" and the "Responsive Outsider." The Vulgarian represents all that is crude, mercenary, and servile; and because he has no access to knowledge, feeling, or beauty, he is invulnerable. The Outsider, however, labors under the dead weight of love. Since his life is spontaneous, generous, responsive, and isolated, he remains vulnerable.

Hassaii, finds the style of the story awkward and labored but sees Ford’s final submission as an example of complete

"Oedipal surrender" with "the regression almost savage."

He further adds that "what Thomas Mann presented, in Tonio

Kroger, as the metaphysical attraction of health and

l6. The Fiction of J. D. Salinger, p. l4. 124 normality for the artist is here rendered as the patholog- ical submission of the outsider to the vulgarian«"17

Paul Levine sees Raymond Ford as Salinger’s typical

"misfit hero," in this case specifically "an innocent and talented poet" whose "ascetic childhood left him unequipped to cope with the hard, insensitive world in which he must live," Ford destroyed himself in his "attempt to reconcile" the real and aesthetic worlds» Levine also sees Corrine as being "suspended between two worlds, removed by some tragedy from one [Ford's], while unconsciously recognizing the banality of the other. . . . Corrine's life is a perpetual attempt to identify with an estranged society."

Bunny Croft, Levine continues, is the symbol of the insensitive, "corrupt, materialistic, loveless world of the 1 ^ grown-up where adult and adultery are synonymous."

Warren French makes the most exhaustive study of

"The Inverted Forest" and is the only critic who tries to

justify the structure of the story. Taking his cue from the only lines of Ford's poetry quoted in the story, "Not wasteland, but a great inverted forest/with all foliage underground," French sees the story as "an allegorical statement of the idea that the artist does not have any social obligations." He continues on and suggests that

17« "The Rare Quixotic Gesture," pp. 152-153» 157«

1 8 , "J. D. Salinger: The Development of the Misfit Hero," pp. 108-109. 125 Ford's lines answer To S « Eliot's charge that the

twentieth-century West is a wasteland by asserting that 19 beauty does exist in the imagination. From this point

on9 however9 French loses sight of precisely those events in the story which he accuses other critics of having over­ looked «

From this elaborate but apparently mutually exclu­ sive criticism, two basic questions are raised. When Ford

and Bunny are located after eighteen months of their liaison, how valid is Corrine's initial observation of him? Upon seeing him, "she already knew that everything was wrong with him. The wrongness in the room was so heavy 20 she could hardly breathe. Is French correct in suggest­ ing that "what is 'wrong' from the viewpoint of Corrine’s success-oriented world may be 'right' from the viewpoint of the artist who doesn't want to get anywhere anyway, but wants only to dw'ell in the ' inverted forest1 of his imagina- 21 tion"? Or is Corrine right in assuming that Raymond Ford, the artist, is destroyed? The second question is contin­

gent. upon the answer to the first. If the artist is de­

stroyed (which is the basic premise underlying the present

discussion), how is this destruction accomplished? Answers

19® J. P. Salinger, pp. 6 8 , 71•

20. "The Inverted Forest $" Cosmopolitan, CL (March 1961), 131.

210 J. D. Salinger, p. 7%. 126 to these questions and insights into Salinger1s ultimate meaning can be gained only through a careful analysis of several predominant structural elements employed in the story.

I n .any discussion of story structure perhaps the most fundamental concern is point of view. Wayne C. Booth, in his excellent work The Rhetoric of Fiction, suggests that the traditional considerations of person and degree of omniscience are not as important in their relation to literary effects as are the moral and intellectual qualities 22 of the narrator. This is certainly true and accounts for the fact that the story is narrated by Robert Waner. Since the complexity of his role as narrator defies any neat categorization, it is necessary that point of view in this story be specifically analyzed.

Robert Waner is, to borrow Booth’s useful terminol­ ogy, a self-conscious narrator-agent« That is to say that as a narrator-agent he affects the course of the story; also, as a self-conscious narrator he is aware of himself as a writer. Since a temporal distance exists between the time of narration and the time at which the story occurred,

Waner may receive his information in three ways: as an agent, he possesses first-hand information; as a narrator,

22. Chicago, 1961, p. 1$8. 127 he is narrating information passed on to him by Corrine in both oral and written reports.

Waner does not, as Hassan suggests, see the action 23 both in the first and third person. Rather, Waner as narrator-agent relates the story only in the third person.

The eight shifts from third to first person are accompanied by shifts to the present tense. Waner, thus temporally removed, becomes the self-conscious narrator who, while commenting on the story he is telling, possesses a degree of omniscience which at times seems overly busy and awkward.

This third person narration is, if nothing else, suggestive of Waner's plight: in love with Corrine, he is indeed a kind of third person, a back seat observer. The shifts to the first person, even if apparently arbitrary, serve to heighten the effect of the interested-yet-disinterested observer. At the time of narration, Waner is still hope­ lessly involved with Corrine.

The foregoing discussion has explicated how Robert

Waner narrates the story but has not indicated why he must serve as narrator. To answer this it is necessary to pursue Booth's argument that the moral and intellectual qualities of the narrator are of prime importance in their relation to literary effect. Salinger tells the reader why Waner is narrator when Corrine relates to* Ford the "two

23. "The Rare Quixotic Gesture," p. 157= lines in American poetry which regularly blow off the top

of his Waner's head." The first is from Whitman1s Song

of Myself: "I am the man9 I suffered, X was there.11 The

second is from Raymond Ford’s The Cowardly Morning, of which only a paraphrase is offered by Corrine: "the one

about the man on the island inside the other island." It is precisely Waner’s ability to feel and admire two

apparently diametrically opposed attitudes of man--the

Whitmanesque extreme of empathy by which Whitman became whatever he viewed opposed to Ford’s severe isolation and withdrawal into the "inverted forest" of his imagination-- which givQs him the degree of objectivity needed to relate

the story. (Along this same line, it is not merely Raymond

Ford who serves as a prototype for Seymour Glass but a

curious admixture of both Ford and Waner which yields the universal man.)

This objectivity enables Waner to have insights

1 into Ford's motivation or lack of it which are corroborated 24 by subsequent actions in the story. French is correct,

therefore, in stating that Waner serves as narrator because

"he can both admire him Qford] as a poet (which Bunny

24. Waner's analysis of Ford's reasons for marrying Corrine (p. 121) closely parallels Seymour's attitude toward Muriel as expressed in his diary in "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters." 129 can't) and dislike him as a social creature (which Corrine can' t) .

Salinger also employs several minor structural

devices for which he shows a marked preference; indeed, in his later fiction they are refined and given added symbolic

Significance» His use of the diary device, for example,

effects an intimacy and poignant immediacy which would be

impossible through straight narration or dialogue®

Corrine's narration of part of the story in the form of a private detective's log is also cogent and pertinent® The

chronological and laconic impersonality of the log, precipitated as Corrine says because she cannot talk about

the events which follow, suggests a pathetic and useless

attempt to achieve a self-deluding anonymity® The detective log is dropped with no explanation after Ford has left with

Bunny® All that can be assumed is that nine days after

Ford's flight, when Howie Croft makes his back-slapping

entry, Corrine has gained enough composure to relate the rest of the story orally to Waner® Finally, the numerous phone calls serve essentially the same function in this

story as they do in the entire Salinger canon: while

indicating an inability to commuriicate when a character is

forced to look squarely at another, they also suggest the

irreducible distance between characters of different worlds®

250 J B D® Salinger, p« 74» 130

Despite.the lack of focus and seemingly labored

style, "The Inverted Forest" is a well-construeted story.

As stated'earlier, the story may be successfully explicated

only after carefully analyzing the plot and symbolic

structure. In fact, the highly circular movement of the

phases of the plot may be said to be thematic in itself.

For the purposes of this discussion, however, an analysis

of the movements of the plot must necessarily follow the

- actual explication of the story,

Raymond Ford indeed spent his youth in a "waste­

land." He was under the domination of a grotesque and

alcoholic mother who, while deluding herself with fantastic

lies about her upper-class origins and the causes of her

present plight, beat and embarrassed him mercilessly. From

this Ford withdrew and isolated himself. As a youth he was

"not a good mixer" and could not "even catch a football."

As he later tells Corrine, until he was almost twenty-three

he had nothing in his life , , but . . . discord. And

malnutrition," Indeed, as a child, Corrine last sees Ford

being dragged out of town by his mother; he labors and

falls under a burden of two suitcases which "looked dead

weight."

The second woman in Ford’s life is Mrs. Rizzio

through whom, at twenty-three, he discovers poetry. He

discovers, as the quoted lines from his first volume of

poetry suggest, that the world is "Not wasteland, but a 131 great inverted forest/with, all foliage undergrounds" This is surely the aesthetic world of the imagination^ and the

"foliage" which exists "underground" represents the emo­ tional and non-contrived aspects of Dylan Thomas' world rather than the self-conscious and rationally derived aspects of T, S, Eliot's» The entire scene with Mrs«

Rizzio, however, seems magical (Ford, in fact, refers to his relationship with her as a magic spell which he feared might break) and suggests, as will be discussed later in the section, that Salinger is caught between symbolism and realism. For example, Ford could not reconcile Mrs.

Rizzio's taste in poetry with her desire for him to enter the movies. (Movies here, as in all of Salinger's fiction, represent an evasion of reality through immersion in a fantasy world.)

Reading poetry eighteen or nineteen hours a day for two months, in Mrs. Rizzio's library, Ford practically loses his sight, thus necessitating his wearing two pairs of glasses--one for reading and one for everyday use. His personal isolation is thus increased; and since for seven- and-a-half years he has had nothing in his life but poetry, he is, when he meets Corrine, the pure aesthete, a cold stick figure. As Waner later warns Corrine, ". . . a man just can't reach the kind of poetry Ford's reaching and still keep intact the normal male ability to spot a fine hat-straightener--" This means, Waner immediately adds, 132 that Ford "writes under pressure of dead-weight beauty»"

Here, the verbal pattern "dead-weight," suggesting Ford's childhood burden of two suitcases which "looked dead weight," subtly supports the circular movement of the s tory.

This great personal isolation constitutes his

"equipment for survival»" When Ford sees that Corrine loves him, Waner surmises from his resultant expression that the poet "suspects himself of having, at some time in his life, either lost or forfeited some natural"interior dimension of mysterious importance." French is surely correct in interpreting this "dimension" as the "ability to 26 reciprocate another's affection." But it is much more: the passage suggests a lack of ablactation, as it were, and a lack of and need for a directing force without which he cannot get past his "childhood dogmas." Thus what is important about his statement that he has never smoked or imbibed is not so much that he is afraid of dulling his sense of taste (although this too is important in Salinger's fiction) but that as a child someone told him that smoking and drinking would have this effect.

When Corrine asks him if he has ever been in love, he answers negatively and frowns "as though his craftsman's mind suspected itself of oversimplifying--or of having bad

2 6 . Jo D. Salinger, p. 73° 133 material to work with o'* He has bad material with which to work because he is a child, isolated, whose contacts with

the real world are almost always unsuccessful:

"Everytime I buy a ticket on a train I wonder that X have to pay full price. I feel momentarily cheated— gypped--when I see an ordinary, adult's ticket in my hand. Until I was fifteen my mother used to tell conductors I wais under twelve."27

Ford and Corrine are married about four months after

they had met as adults. His motives for marrying Corrine

are never explained, but Waner assures Corrine that although

Ford does not love her, he will marry her. "He likes you

and he's cold, andhhe won't be able to think of any reason why he shouldn*t--or he'll refuse to think of any reason why he shouldn't." But Ford is a coward whose whole life has been a defense mechanism against the inevitability of his finding a "brain" (a mother figure) and regressing.

With Corrine he is seeking not only protection from the

abhorrence of his early relationship with his mother but

also, since she represents another type of mother, a

directive force over his childishness.

Cprrine's Whitmanesque extreme, however, is the

antithesis of Ford's extreme of isolation. She is simply

the wrong mother figure for Raymond Ford. Alienated in her

youth because of her German parentage and her mother's

27» "The Inverted Forest," pp. 118-1X9= 134 2 3 untimely suicide, Corrine grows up with her face always

Hcaught up in some private insecurity." Unable to identify with an estranged society, she regularly makes "private

trips back to her childhood" to see the small boy, Raymond

Ford, who, alienated himself by his poverty and by his

mother's brutality, had defended her against an anti-

Germanic insult. (The apparent aloofness of this defense

also points up his personal isolation.) Charitable,

honest, and protective (she often watches children cross

the street), Corrine wants to protect Ford as a child since

in her own childhood she had no normal love relationship.

But she obviously looks for more in the marriage. His

effect on her "unused secret equipment," for example, is

such that after Ford's first disenchanted kiss she ration­

alizes "that the evolution of their kisses was going to

take place backwards."

French is surely wrong in suggesting that when

Corrine first insists that he meet Bunny, "Ford learns that

life with his wife will oblige him to sacrifice his work to 29 time-wasting visitors.". During their brief marriage,

Ford remains politely aloof from not only Corrine1s modest

impositions on his private world of the imagination but

2 8 . Corrine's mother was the Montross Orthopedic Appliances heiress. . Salinger later uses the image of orthopedic appliances in "De Daumier-Smith1s Blue Period."

29 • J. D» Salinger, p. 72. 135 also from Corrine herself« In fact, Corrlne finds it impossible to draw Ford closer, ’’physically and otherwise";

Ford, on the other hand--like many of Salinger's charac- ters--entertains no interest in sex, apparently occupying a separate bedroom.

It is precisely the brevity of the marriage and the dramatic change in tone when Bunny first enters which suggest that French's interpretation is incorrect. It is obvious that without Corrine's gentle insistence, Ford, isolated as he is, would never permit a Bunny Croft to infiltrate his defense system. There is thus irony in

Corrine's allowing Bunny into Ford's life: it is not that

Ford learns that life with Corrine will oblige him to trivial indulgences; it is rather that Corrine, in whom

Ford sought protection, allows the monster to enter.

Bunny represents what Hassan aptly labels the "Assertive

Vulgarian." She is mercenary, degenerate, crudely dominant, self-absorbed, and aesthetically insensitive.

She symbolizes the cruel and slick inventiveness of compe­

tent middle-browism which, itself invulnerable, succeeds

in destroying the artist,

It is painfully obvious from the moment Ford

enters after having read Bunny's poems that his demeanor

is one of cold dread. In Bunny, Ford sees no catalyst which will, as French suggests, precipitate his retreat back into an imaginative world. Rather, he is abhorred by 136 the confrontation with a woman— a mother figure--whose appearance was inevitable» In Bunny8 s verses he senses the cruel and inventive directing force to which he had been subject with his mother. He vainly defends himself in a passage which affords one of Salinger's most cogent comments on the nature of art and the artist:

"I can't tell you you're a poet. Because you're not. . . « But you're inventive. . . . A poet doesn't invent his poetry--he finds it. . o . The place . . . where Alph, the sacred river, ran--was found out, not invented. . . . I can’t stand any kind of inventiveness."30

Prom this first encounter with Bunny, Ford's quietness "didn't necessarily imply that he was. carrying around some new X-quantity." For Corrine there is no necessary implication, but for the reader there most certainly is. Two days after Bunny Croft has entered his life, Ford screams during a dream. When Corrine awakens him and frantically attempts to identify herself, he is unable for several seconds to recognize her even after putting on his glasses. Later in the night Ford weeps, but Corrine, despite her attempts, discovers that appar­ ently there is "no way of relieving him of his sorrow or even of reaching it."

30. "The Inverted Forest," p. 124. French (p. 74) keenly perceives that Salinger's concept of art as discovery rather than invention underlies all of his fiction and partly explains his affinity for characters (Lois Taggett, Eloise, Holden Caulfield, and De Daumier-Smith) who learn through mystical revelation rather than through ratiocina­ tion. . 137 Again, Corrine is simply the wrong "mother."

Ford’s attitude of polite aloofness becomes one of tense incommxmicability with Corrine, and it seems more than supposition to discern in Ford’s leaving for work without his hat and returning, only a day later, with a new one an indication of Bunny’s already-wielded dominance. Five days after Bunny’s arrival, Ford leaves New York with her, telling Corrine by telephone, of course, only that he is very sorry. Shortly afterward, Howie Croft, Bunny's crude and boorish husband, visits Corrine and reveals Bunny for the degenerate she is: a woman remarkably like Ford’s own mother.

Eighteen months later Ford and Bunny are located in a tenement-dive in a smoky Midwestern city. The scene is one of squalor and pathetic childishness. Ford sits drunkenly behind a littered bridge table, shuffling the papers around in an obvious attempt at self-delusion and painfully squinting at the cover of a movie magazine. In an almost tragic rationalization, he assures Corrine that he has a lot of work at his desk. Nevertheless, since

Bunny thinks he looks like a movie star without his glasses, he is. not allowed to wear them. Under her un­ speakably cruel domination he must inform Corrine "in a surreptitious voice" that Bunny doesn’t like his work; she finds it "not meaty enough" and criticizes him for his failure to write for money. When Corrine begs Ford to 138 return home with her he answers, suddenly sober and rational:

"Corrlne, you know I can't get away« . = « I'm with the Brain again. . . . The Brain, the Brain. . . . You saw the original. Think back. Think of somebody pounding on the window of a restaurant on a dark street. You know the one I mean."31

Corrine's second entreaty that he return home with her also fails, and she must leave him with Bunny just as she had left him with his mother. Ford has returned to the condition of his childhood where he saw, as Levine aptly 32 puts it, "neither poetry nor the real world." Their absence seems "dead weight."

During a first and cursory reading of this story there is a curious effect produced on the reader: he suspects himself of repeated re-readings of the first pages of the story. This effect is produced by the circular movement of the phases of the plot and is supported by an intricate and subtle symbolic structure. Thematically, of course, the circular movement outlines Ford's inevitable regression to his childhood state,

Corrine and Ford's reunion after an interim of nineteen years represents the completion of the first major cycle. The conditions of this encounter are

31. "The Inverted Forest," p. 132.

32. "J. D. Salinger: The Development of the Misfit Hero," p. 109= 139 remarkably similar to those when as children they had said

good-bye s both occur in or in front of a restaurant $ both

occur under nearly the same meteorological conditions. In faet9 when Ford first speaks it is as though he were

resuming an interrupted discussion of last Saturday night at the Smiths8e1’ This simile is even more convincing when

Salinger8s calendar of events is closely scrutinized: as children* Corrine and Ford had parted on January, 1; as adults* they meet on January 9®

Within this major circular movement there are minor repetitions which contribute to the total cyclical effect of the story® The guest list for the poet Ford’s coming- out party is reminiscent of the guest list for Corrine6s childhood birthday party at which Ford was also to have been the guest of honor® The Ford-Corrine8s dog episodes also are cyclical in nature* connecting the beginning of the story with the middle and end® At their adult reunion \ ' it is her dog Clong-sinee dead) which he fondly recalls because the dog had been the manifestation of Corrine’s childhood gesture of love« After Bunny8 s arrival * however *

Ford resents Malcolm’s display of affection* thus heighten­ ing the devastating effect which she has on him®

Cyclical patterns are also generated within the relationship between Ford and Bunny® After Bunny has attended one of Ford’s lectures* for example* he takes her to the Chinese restaurant* even sitting at the same table i4o that he and Corrine had earlier occupied» This repetition$ while again constituting a circular movement $ thematically suggests Ford's lack of a directing force- Laters when

Corrine learns from Howie Croft that Bunny is his thirty- one year old wife (whose fantastic lies in themselves are reminiscent of those of Ford's mother)* she thinks of jumping from the window- This is another significant repetition for it reminds the reader at once of the suicidal plunge from the deck of an ocean liner of Corrine0 s mother- Corrine11 s motivation for not jumping is more interesting> however, since it foreshadows, in part at least 9 Holden Caulfield's reluctance to jump - "She

[Corrine] didn't want to jump without a guarantee that somebody would cover her up immediately-"

After Ford's flight with Bunny (the path of which forms almost a complete circle)9 Corrine entertains the thought of hiring a private detective to locate her husband» While this suggests Corrine's earlier use of the detective log and the persistent but futile attempts of

Ford's friends and colleagues to find him, it also provides an almost stealthy approach to the last scene. This scene, although reminiscent of a not-too^good movie scenario, culminates the second major circular movement of the plot -

The weather $ the squalor of the apartment, and Bunny's cruelty--all parallel the conditions in Ford's life with l4l his mother and suggest that he has indeed found a ’’brain11 again.

The symbolic structure of the story reinforces the circular movement of the plot. Ford’s first book of poetry is entitled The Cowardly Morning. The title suggests that he is a coward who, although initially seduced by the beauty of Teat’s ’’Lake Isle of Innisfree,’’ discovers his need for a defense mechanism since peace does not come

’’dropping from the veils of the morning«” The only lines from The Cowardly Morning quoted in the story are ’’Not wasteland^ but a great inverted forest/with all foliage underground.” There are two important levels to this image.

The first, as discussed earlier, indicates that the strength of the artist is internal. The second level is one of profound and double-barreled irony. Those deficiencies in modern society which led Eliot to the concept of a waste­ land and which Ford repudiated are directly responsible for his destruction. Thus, with the foliage of Ford’s promise and genius buried underground, both a figurative wasteland of loss of promise and love and a literal waste­ land of squalor are created.

Ford’s second volume of poetry is entitled Man on a Carousel. The image no doubt suggests, as it does in The

Catcher in the Rye, a rejection of the world of the tense, ambitious wastelanders who are, in French’s words9 3A2

"constantly preoccupied with 1 getting somewhere»1 But it has added thematic significance» While it indicates, for example, Ford’s childhood and his essential childish­ ness, it also suggests the cyclical nature of his relation­ ship with Corrine and, finally, the cyclical nature of his life0 The carousel went, around once and stopped where it began.

Despite the above interpretation, French’s treat­ ment of the story as allegory--although perhaps too neat and arbitrary— is nevertheless partly justifiable= The story does have an allegorical level. The seemingly intentional ambiguity of the important motivations ("unused secret equipment"equipment for survival," "natural interior dimension of mysterious importance," "new X- quantity") itself lends to an allegorical statement. The allegory embodies not only the relation of neurosis and art but also the figure of the artist beset by the slick inventiveness of competent, middle-brow commercialism. The realistic thread, on the other hand, is the psychological destruction of a man.

But the critic is not obliged to choose between realism and allegory. If the story has an allegorical intent, there is no reason why it must be completely allegorical. The only demand made on the realistic

33• J . D » Salinger, p. 72. elements in the story is that they contribute to (as in

Moby~Dick) rather than detract from the allegory. Although

Raymond Ford may not be found in every Chinese restaurants he surely exists.

A month after Collier8s published "The Inverted

Forest^" "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" marked Salinger6s second appearance in The New Yorker o With this story %

Salinger began to publish those stories which even he permitted to be reprinted and which, along with The Catcher in the Rye, certainly established his literary and popular reputation. Even many foreigners who have considerable difficulty in speaking and reading English know and appreciate Salinger's later stories. A young woman from

Hungary9 for example, when asked if she had read anything by Salinger, remarked that she had read "the one that is so dirty." Finally remembering the title and thus clearing up what had been but a semantic misunderstanding, she quickly added that "For Esme--with Love and Squalor" was also a

"very beautiful story."

But Salinger did not suddenly burst upon the literary scene5 in fact, his early stories demonstrate that he had great difficulty in delineating and then adequately expressing a theme ® Although these early stories remain buried in old and often difficult to locate magazines and although when located, they are often dismissed as "slight, they clearly reveal Salinger's growing concept of theme and 1 # his constant Experimentation with, and gradual refinement of 9 technique. From his first published story9 "The Young

Folks9" to the last of his early stories "The Inverted

Forest9" the protagonists have always been alone, estranged from the environment in which they live. In "The Young

Folks 9" for example9 both Edna and Jameson sit longingly beyond the periphery of a fake-sophisticated milieu9 the charmed circle of the "phony" which they, as dolts 9 cannot penetrate. In "The Inverted Forest," however9 a brilliant poet is destroyed when he merely attempts to engage realityo

But between these two extremes, Salinger constantly reworked his material, trying to find an adequate embodi­ ment of his maturing theme. Also, he experimented with certain technical devices which could convey the degree to* which a character was alienated» The telephone, for

example, soon became a symbol of ineomraunieability, just

as the letter or diary became the one mode of successful

and genuine communication. Salinger also began to contrast

the "phony" world of the movies with a reality which could be "swell" and "nice" but which more often than not was as"

"phony" as the Hollywood-created world.

As Salinger1s concept of theme developed, characters no longer bore an outer badge of exclusion, some physical

grotesquery which further estranged them from their

environment 5 rather, their aloneness began to work from the 145 inside out« They became sickened at the materialism and inhumanity| the phoniness* insensitivity and lovelessness in the world around them. Then in "Last Day of the Last

Furlough," Salinger finally came to understand his material.

In fact, the Qladwaller-Caulfield stories foreshadow not only The Catcher in the Rye but also some of the underlying suppositions of the. Glass saga. Babe Gladwaller, aware of the "phony" world of adults, hopes that his ten-year-old sister, since she must grow up, can remain a "swell" girl, can remain genuine, sensitive, and loving by withstanding the onslaught of pretense.

Babe, however, in seeking his sister6s unspoiled love, is not attempting to evade either mature responsibil­ ities or mature realizations; nor is he victimized so much by the senseless brutality of war 5 nor is he the terrified, lonely, and alienated victim of a loveless and indifferent society. , Rather, Babe and "Vincent and Holden all suffer from the same malady; and as Vincent said of Holden, each must "o . . listen hectically to the maladjusted little apparatus, he .wears for a heart," each is hyper aware and thus unable to forget anything that is good or bad, and therefore each is clearly a victim of himself. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

A Chronological Checklist of Salinger * s Fiction

Short Stories

"The Young Polks?" Story? XVI (March-April 1940)? 26-30«

"Go See Eddie?" University of Kansas City Review (December 194o)? pp« 121-12%«

"The Hang of It," Collier's? CVIII (July 12? 1941)? 22»

"The Heart of a Broken Story," Esquire? XVI (September 1941)? 3 2 ? 131-133* "The Long Debut of Lois Taggett," Story? XXI (September- October 1942), 28-34, Reprinted in: Burnett, Whit, and H, S, Burnett, eds. Storys The Fiction of the Forties"! New York ? 1949,

"Paula," Purchased but unpublished by Stag? 1942.

"Personal Notes on an Infantryman," Collier9 s ? CX (December 12, 1942)? 9 6 .

"The Varioni Brothers ?" Saturday Evening Post, CCXVI (July 17? 1943)? 12-1 3 ? 76-7 7 . ~

"Both Parties Concerned," Saturday Evening Post, CCXVI (February 26, 1944), 14? 47-^8.

"Soft-Boiled Sergeant," Saturday Evening Post ? CCXVI (April 15? 1944), 18V 82Y 84^8Tr"^ ”

"Last Day of the Last Furlough," Saturday Evening Post? CCXVII (July 13, 1944)? 26-27, 61-6 2 , 64.

"Once A Week Won't Kill You?" Story, XXV (November- December 1944),23-27*

"A Boy in France," Saturday Evening Post, CCXVII (March 31, 1945), 2 1 , 9 2 . Reprinted in: Post Stories? 1942-1945. New York: Random House, 1946.

146 14? Short Stories

"Elaine," Story, XXVI (March-April 1945), 38-47.

"This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise," Esquire s XXIV (October 1945)* 54-569 147-149. Reprinted in: Gingrich, Arnold9 and Lo Rust Hills, eds. The Armchair Esquire. New York: Popular Library, I960.

"The Stranger," Collier * s 9 CXVI (December 1, 1945), 1 8 , 77. ■ "I'm Crazy," Collier's, CXVI (December 22, 1945)9 369 48s 5 1 . Later appeared as portion of The Catcher in the Ejre.

"Slight Rebellion Off Madison." The New Yorker9 XXII (December 2 1 , 1946), 82-8 6 . Later appeared as portion of The Catcher in the

"A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All," Mademoiselle, XXV (May 1947)» 222-223, 292-302»

"The Inverted Forest," Cosmopolitan» CXXIII (December 1947)9 73-80, 85-86T W , 90, 92, 95-96, 98, 100, 102, 104. Reprinted in: Di^nond Jubilee Issue of Cosmopolitan, CL (March 1961), II6 -132. ”

"A Perfect Day for Bananafish," The New Yorker, XXIII (January , 1948), 21-25• ' Reprinted in: 55_ Short Stories from the New Yorker. Wew York, 1949. '

Salinger, J« D . Nine Stories. Boston, 1953* "A Girl I Knew9" Good Housekeeping, CXXVI (February 1948), 36-3 7 ) 1 86, i8«, 191-196. Reprinted in: Foley, Martha, ed. Best American Short Stories of 1949• BosLon, 1949. Short Stories

“Uncle Wiggily in Connecticuts *' The New Yorker 9 XXIV (March 20, 1948), 30-36, Reprinted in: Salinger9 Jo D , Nine Storieso Boston, 1953»

Narren, Robert Penn 9 and Albert Erskine 9 eds. Short Story Masterpieces« New )Tork: Dell iBooks, 1954^

11 Just Before the War with the Eskimos," The New Yorker, XXIV (June 5, 1948), 37-40. Reprinted in: Briekell, Herschel, ed. Prize Stories of 1949» Garden City, itfew York, 1949.

Salinger, J. D . Nine Stories. Boston, 1953•

"Blue Melody," Cosmopolitan, CXXV (September 1948), 50-51, 112-119. "Ocean Full of Bowling Balls." Purchased but unpub­ lished by Woman*s Home Companion, 1948.

"The Laughing Man," The New Yorker, XXV (March 19, 1949), 27-3 2 . Reprinted in: Salinger8 J. D . Nine Stories. Boston, 1953 *

"Down at the Dinghy," Harper * s, CXCVIII (April 1949), 87-91. Reprinted in: Salinger, J. D 6 Nine Stories. Boston, 1953.

"For Esmd^-with Love and Squalor," The New Yorker, XXVI (April 8, 1950), 28-360 Reprinted in: Briekell$ Herschel, ed. Prize , Stories of 1950! The 0 . Henry Awards. Garden City, New York 1^5 0 .

Fifty Great Shwt Stories. New """ Yorlc': bantam Books , Inc., 1952

Salinger, J. D . Nine Stories. Boston, 1953. 149 Short Stories

"Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes *11 The New Yorker 8 XXVII (July 14, 1951)9 20-24. Reprinted in: Burrell, J . A»? and B . A. Cerf9 eds. Anthology of Famous American Stories'. New York: Modern Library, 1953® Salinger^ J« D. Nine Stories. Boston9 1953»

"Teddy9" The New Yorker9 XXVIII (January 31, 1953), 26 **34 6 ''' Reprinted in: Salinger, J. D. Nine Stories. Boston, 1953•

"Pranny,11 The New Yorker, XXX (January 29, 1955), 24—"32 e Reprinted in: Salinger, J« D . Pranny and Zooey. Boston, i9(>i • ~

"Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters," The New Yorker, XXXI (November 19, 1955), 51-58, 60, 62, 65-66, 6 8 , 70 , 72-74, 76, 78-8 0 , 83-84, 86-9 2 , 95-9 8 , 100-105, 107-110 . Reprinted in: Short Stories from The New Yorker, 1950-1960. kew York, r§i5S".------

Salinger, J. D , Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, fioston, I963«

"Zooey," The New Yorker, XXXIII (May 4, 1957), 32-42, 44, 47-48, 5A", 5 4 , 57-59, 6 2 , 64, 67-6 8 , 7 0 , 73-7 4 , 76-78, 83-8 4 , 86-8 8 , 91-9 4 , 97-98 , 100-104, 107- 114, 117-135. Reprinted in: Salinger, J. D. Pranny and Zooey» Boston, 1961.

"Seymour: An Introduction," The New Yorker, XXXV (June 6 , 1959)9 42-119. Reprinted in: Salinger, J. D . Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. Boston, 1^63. r" .. 150 Short Stories

"Hapworth 16, 1924,11 The New Yorker, XLI (June 19 s 1965)» 32-40, 42, 44, 49-50s 52, 55-56, 58, 60-62, 67-68, 70, 72-74, 77-78, 80, 85-86, 88, 90, 92-96, 98, loo, 102-108, 111-113.

Books

The-Catcher in the Rye. Boston! Little, Brown and Company, 1951» _ Reprinted by Modern Library [_n. do~| $ Grosset and Dunlap [n. d 7) , and The New American Library (paperbound, 1953)«

Nine Stories. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1953• . ' ' f'irst American printing of "De Daumier-Smith11 s Blue Period.” Reprinted by Modern Library Qn. d.l , and The New American Library (paperbound, 1954).

Pranny and Zooey. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, x. . Reprinted by Bantam Books, Inc. (paperbound, 1964).

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. Boston: Little, ferown and Company, 0.963]'. Reprinted by Bantam Books, Inc. (paperbound, 1965).

Secondary Sources

Collateral Reading

Booth, Wayne C . The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago, I96I.

Schorer, Mark. "Technique as Discovery,” in Forms of Modern Fiction, ed. William Van O'Connor. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959• pp. 9-29•

Summers« Richard. Craft of The Short Story. New York, 1948. — ------151 Collateral Reading

Suzuki, D , T • Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D« T. Suzuki, ed« William Barrett. Garden City, Isfew York9 1956 o Watts a Alan W. The Way of Zen. New York: The New American Library 9 1959»

Books about Salinger’s Work

French9 Warren. J, P. Salinger, New Haven9 Connecticut: College and University Press, 1963®

Gwynn, Frederick L ., and Joseph L . Blotner. The Fiction of Je Do Salinger. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1958®

Anthologies of Salinger Criticism Belcher, William F ,, and James W . Lee, eds. J » D « Salinger arid the Critics. Belmont, California, 19527 ~ " 7

Grunwald, Henry Anatole, ed. Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait» New York: Pocket iBooks, Inc. , 19537---- — --

Laser, Marvin, and Norman Fruman, eds. Studies in J® D® Salinger. New York, 1963.

NOTE: Although many of the essays in the following two sections appear in more than one of the anthologies of collected Salinger criticism, only that anthology in which an article has been reprinted in either a Completely unabridged or generally more convenient form has been cited»

Biography of Salinger

Blaney, Shirley. "Twin State Telescope," Daily Eagle (Claremont, New Hampshire), November 13, 1953•

Brickell, Herschel, ed. Prize Stories of 19^9« New York, 1949® p. 249. 152 Biography of Salinger

’'Contributors^" Stor^j XXI (September-Oetober 19^2) $, 2« Includes autobiographical note by Salinger»

"Contributors," Story, XXV (November-Deeember 1944), 1 o Includes autobiographical note by Salinger.

Havemann, Ernest <> "The Search for the Mysterious J . D , Salinger: The Recluse in the Rye," Life, LI (November 3, 1961), 129-130, 132, 135,“137-138, 141-142, 144.

Hazsard, Eloise Perry» "Eight Fiction Finds," Saturday Review, XXXV (February 16, 1952), 16-17• Includes autobiographical note by Salinger.

Kunitz, Stanley J ., ed. Twentieth Century Authors, First Supplement: A Biograplii.cal biciionary of Modern Literature » New York, 1955 » pp. 856-860. includes autobiographical note by Salinger.

Hutchens, John K. "J . D. Salinger," New York Herald Tribune Book Review, August 19, 1951, p« 2 .

Biography of Salinger

Maxwell, William. "J . D , Salinger," Book-of-the-Month Club News, Midsummer, 1951, P P « 5-6"." " Includes autobiographical note by Salinger.

"Mysterious J . D . Salinger.....His Woodsy, Secluded Life," Newsweek, LV (May 30, i960), 92-94«

Pillsbury, Frederick. "Mysterious J . D . Salinger; The Untold Chapter of the Famous Writer's Year as a Valley Forge Cadet," Sunday Bulletin Magazine (Philadelphia), October 29, 1961, pp. 23-%.

Skow, Jack . "Sonny: An Introduction," Time, LXXVIII (September 15, 1961), 84-90. Reprinted in Grunwald.

Essays about Salinger's Work

Barr, Donald. "Saints. Pilgrims, and Artists," The Commonweal, LXVII (October 25? 1957) , 88-90. Reprinted in Grunwald. 153 Essays about Salinger *s Work

Costellof Donald P « "The Language of The Catcher in the Rye s’* American Speech 9 XXXIV (bctober 1959)« 172-1dl. Reprinted in Laser and Fruman=

French, Warren« "4h Unnoticed Salinger Story,H College English, XXVI (February 1965), 39^"395»

Grunwald, Henry A e ,fHe Touches Something Deep in Us," Horizon, IV (May 1962), 100-107» Reprinted as "Introduction" in Brunwald.

Hassan, Ihab H» "J « D e Salinger: The Rare Quixotic Gesture„" Western Review, XXI (Summer 1957)« 261- 2 8 0 . Reprinted in Grunwald as "The Rare Quixotic Gesture e"

Hicks9 Granville= "J. D . Salinger: Search for Wisdom," Saturday Review, XLII (July 25, 1959)$ 13, 3 0. Reprinted in Laser and Fruman @

Jacobsen, Josephine <, "Beatific Signals: The Felicity of J e D » Salinger," The Commonweal, LXXI (February 2 6 , i960), 589-591= Reprinted in Grunwald«

Kazin, Alfred.* "J . D , Salinger: Everybody9 s Favorite," Atlantic Monthly, CCVIII (August 1961), 27-31. Deprinted in Belcher and Lee®

Kegel, Charles H® "Incommunicability in Salinger6s The Catcher in the Rye," Western Humanities Review, iXl" (Spring 195)), 188-1907 ~ Reprinted in Belcher and Lee«

Levine, Paul® "J® D ® Salinger: The Development of the Misfit Hero," Twentieth Century Literature, IV (October 1958), 92-99= Reprinted in Belcher and Lee.

Mizener, Arthur. "The Love Song of J. D . Salinger," Harper6 s CCXVIII (February 1959)» 83-9 0 . Deprihted. in Laser and Fruman.

Oldsey, Bernard S. "The Movies in the Rye," College English, XXIII (December 1961), 209-215« Reprinted in Belcher and Lee. 154 Essays about Salinger9s Work

Stevenson^ David L • ”J » D * Salingeri The Mirror of Crisis9m Nation* CLXXXIV (March 9» 1957)9 215-217. Reprinted in Grunwald as "The Mirror of Crisis."

Strauch* Carl F « "Kings in the Back Rows Meaning Through Strueture--A Reading of Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye*" Wisconsin Studies in Contem- porary Literature* II (Winter 1961)* 5-30° jRepr int ed iii Belcher and Lee. .

Wakefield* Dan. "Salinger and the Search for Love *" New World Writing* No. 14 (December 1958)» pp. 68-

Reprinted in Grunwald as "The Search for Love."

Wiegand* William. "J . D . Salinger: Seventy-Eight Bananas *" Chicago Review* XI (Winter 1958)» 3-19 * Reprinted in Grunwald as "Seventy-Eight Bananas."

. "The Knighthood of J . D , Salinger," N'ew feepu'blxc * CXLI (October 19, 1959) 9 19-21. Reprinted in Grunwald.