THE FORTIES
Holden Caulfield’s Goddam War
As army sergeant J. D. Salinger hit
the beach on D-day, drank with Hemingway in newly liberated Paris, and marched
into concentration camps, the hero of The Catcher in the Rye was
with him. In an adaptation from his Salinger biography, the author reveals how
the war changed both Holden Caulfield and his creator.
The author in 1952—a
year after Catcher was published. By Anthony Di Gesu/San Diego Historical
Society/Hulton Archive Collection/Getty Images.
In the autumn of 1950,
at his home on Old Road, off Boston Post Road, in Westport, Connecticut, J. D. Salinger completed The
Catcher in the Rye.
The achievement was a catharsis.
It was
confession, purging, prayer, and enlightenment, in a voice so distinct that it
would alter world culture.
Holden Caulfield, and the pages that held him, had
been the author’s constant companion for most of his life.
Those pages,
the first of them written in Salinger's mid-20s, just before he shipped off to Europe
as an army sergeant, were so precious to Salinger that he carried them on his
person throughout the Second World War.
Pages of The Catcher in the Rye had
stormed the beach at Normandy.
They had paraded down the streets of Paris, been
present at the deaths of countless soldiers in countless places, and been
carried through the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.
In bits and pieces
they had been re-written, put aside, and re-written again, the nature of the
story changing as Salinger himself was changed.
Now, in his home on Old Road, off Boston Post Road, in Westport, Connecticut, Salinger
placed the final line on the final chapter of "The Catcher in the Rye."
It is with Salinger’s
experience of the Second World War in mind that we should understand Holden
Caulfield’s insight at the Central Park carousel, and the conversational implicature behind his parting words
of The Catcher in the Rye:
“Don’t ever tell anybody anything."
"If you do, you start missing everybody.”
All the dead soldiers.
FIGHTER
AND WRITER
June 6, 1944,
was the turning point of J. D. Salinger’s life.
It is difficult to overstate
the impact of D-day and the 11 months of combat that followed.
The war, its
horrors and lessons, would brand itself upon every aspect of Salinger’s personality
and reverberate through his work.
As a writer before entering the army,
Salinger had had stories published in various magazines, including Collier’s and Story, and
he had begun to conjure members of the Caulfield family, including Holden.
On D-day he had six unpublished Caulfield stories in his possession,
stories that would form the spine of The Catcher in the Rye.
The
experience of war gave his writing a depth and maturity it had lacked.
The
legacy of that experience is present even in "The Catcher in the rye," that is not about war at all.
In later life, Salinger frequently mentions Normandy, but he never spoke of
the details—“as if,” Margaret Salinger, of Boston, later recalled, “I understood the
implications, the implicatures, the unspoken.”
As part of the 4th
Counter Intelligence Corps detachment, Salinger was to land on Utah
Beach with the first wave, at 6:30 A.M., but an eyewitness report has him in
fact landing during the second wave, about 10 minutes later.
The timing was
fortunate.
The Channel’s currents had thrown the landing off 2,000 yards to the
south, allowing Salinger to avoid the most heavily concentrated German
defenses.
Within an hour of landing, Salinger was moving inland and heading
west, where he and his detachment would eventually connect with the 12th Infantry
Regiment.
The 12th had not been so
lucky.
Although it landed five hours later, it had encountered obstacles that
Salinger and his group had not.
Just beyond the beach, the Germans had flooded
a vast marshland, up to two miles wide, and had concentrated their firepower on
the only open causeway.
The 12th had been forced to abandon the causeway and
wade through waist-high water while under constant threat from enemy guns.
It
took the 12th Infantry three hours to cross the marsh.
After meeting up with
the regiment, Salinger would spend the next 26 days in combat.
On June 6, the
regiment had consisted of 3,080 men.
By July 1, the number was down to 1,130.
Unlike many soldiers who
had been impatient for the invasion, Salinger was far from naïve about war.
In
short stories he had already written while in the army, such as “Soft-Boiled
Sergeant” and “Last Day of the Last Furlough,” he expressed disgust with the
false idealism applied to combat, and attempted to explain that war was a
bloody, inglorious affair.
But no amount of theoretical insight could have
prepared him for what was to come.
Salinger would count among his most
treasured belongings a small casket containing his five battle stars and the
Presidential Unit Citation for valour.
Salinger fought, but he
also wrote—wrote constantly, from war’s start to war’s finish.
Salinger had begun to
write seriously in 1939, as a student at Columbia, under the guidance of Whit Burnett, who also happened to be the editor of Story magazine,
and who became for Salinger a mentor and near father figure.
By 1941, Salinger
was producing stories in rapid succession, each an experiment to find his own
writing style.
“Slight Rebellion off Madison,” written that year, is the story
where Caulfield makes his debut—Salinger described it as
“a sad little
comedy about a prep school boy on Christmas vacation.”
It was spiritually
autobiographical, he admitted.
Caulfield is the first character in whom Salinger
embeds himself, and their lives would be joined.
Whatever happened to
Salinger would, in a sense, also happen to Caulfield.
Burnett pushed Salinger
repeatedly to place Holden Caulfield into a novel, and he kept prodding him
even after he was drafted, in 1942.
Burnett had reason to be
nervous.
Salinger was a short-story writer who was unaccustomed to longer work.
To overcome his possible difficulties with length, Salinger chose to construct
the novel by writing it in segments—as a series of short stories that might
eventually be strung together.
By March 1944, Salinger had completed six stories in
this manner, most of them somehow featuring Caulfield and other members
of the family.
There would be nine such stories altogether.
Among the Holden
stories from this time was one called “I’m Crazy,” which eventually was
incorporated wholesale into The Catcher in the Rye, becoming
the chapters in which Holden visits Mr. Spencer and leaves Pencey Prep.
Salinger wrote much that
has not survived—there are tantalizing references in his letters—and he also
produced much work that never appeared in print.
A week after D-day, he sent a
three-sentence postcard to Burnett saying that he was O.K., but also
explaining that, under the circumstances, he was “too busy to go on with the
book right now.”
The truth, however, is that Salinger never stopped writing.
Of
all the Salinger stories to remain unpublished, perhaps none is finer than “The
Magic Foxhole,” the first story Salinger wrote while actually fighting on the front
line, and the only work in which he ever depicted active combat.
“The Magic
Foxhole” is angry, verging on the subversive.
The story opens days
after D-day on a slow-moving convoy.
It casts the reader as an anonymous
hitchhiking G.I. picked up by the narrator, a soldier named Garrity.
Addressing
the G.I. only as “Mac,” Garrity recounts the events of a battle fought by his
battalion right after the invasion.
His tale focuses on the company point man,
Lewis Gardner, and the experiences that cause him to lose his mind.
The most
powerful portion of “The Magic Foxhole” is the opening scene, which describes
the landings at Normandy.
Among the dead bodies on the beach is a solitary
living figure—a chaplain crawling around in the sand, frantically searching for
his glasses.
The narrator, as his transport nears the beach, watches the
surreal scene in amazement, until the chaplain, too, is killed.
It was no
accident that Salinger chose a chaplain to be the only living man among the
dead in the heat of war.
It was also no accident that the chaplain should be
desperate for the clarity his glasses would provide.
A man who believed he held
the answer to life’s great questions suddenly discovers that he doesn’t—just
when he needs an answer most.
It is a critical moment in Salinger’s writing.
For the first time, he asks the question: Where is God?
A
NIGHTMARE WORLD
On August 25, 1944, the
Germans surrendered Paris.
The 12th Regiment was ordered to flush out
resistance from one quadrant of the city.
As an intelligence officer, Salinger
was also designated to identify Nazi collaborators among the French.
According
to John Keenan, his C.I.C. partner and best friend throughout the war, they had
captured such a collaborator when a nearby crowd caught wind of the arrest and
descended on them.
After wresting the prisoner away from Salinger and Keenan,
who were unwilling to shoot into the throng, the crowd beat the man to death.
Salinger and Keenan could do nothing but watch.
Salinger was in Paris
for only a few days, but they were the happiest days he would experience during
the war.
His recollection of them is contained in a letter to Burnett.
The
high point was a meeting with Ernest Hemingway, who was a war correspondent
for Collier’s.
There was no question in Salinger’s mind where
Hemingway would be found.
He jumped into his jeep and made for the Ritz.
Hemingway greeted Salinger like an old friend.
He claimed to be familiar with
his writing, and asked if he had any new stories on him.
Salinger managed to
locate a copy of The Saturday Evening Post containing “Last
Day of the Last Furlough,” which had been published that summer.
Hemingway read
it and was impressed.
The two men talked shop over drinks.
Salinger was relieved to
find that Hemingway was not at all pretentious or overly macho, as he had
feared he might be.
Rather, he found him to be gentle and well grounded:
overall, a “really good guy.”
Salinger tended to separate Hemingway’s
professional persona from his personal one.
He told one friend that Hemingway
was essentially kind by nature but had been posturing for so many years that it
now came naturally to him.
Salinger disagreed with the underlying philosophy of
Hemingway’s work.
He said that he hated Hemingway’s “overestimation of sheer
physical courage, commonly called ‘guts,’ as a virtue.
Probably because I’m
short on it myself.”
As time went on,
Salinger derived great personal strength from his relationship with Hemingway,
and knew him by his nickname, “Papa.”
The warmth did not necessarily transfer
to Hemingway’s writing—at least not if one goes by Caulfield’s later
condemnation of A Farewell to Arms.
But during the war,
Salinger was grateful for Hemingway’s friendship.
After the liberation of
Paris, General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s chief of staff declared that “militarily,
the war is over.”
Salinger’s division would have the honour of being the first
to enter Germany.
Once it had crossed into the Third Reich and breached the
Siegfried line, its orders were to sweep away any resistance from the area of
the Hürtgen Forest and take up a position to protect the flank of the First
Army.
When Salinger entered
Hürtgen, he crossed into a nightmare world.
The forest was more heavily
fortified than anyone had guessed.
The Germans employed tree bursts, which
exploded well above the soldiers’ heads, resulting in a shower of shrapnel and
shredded tree limbs.
Then there was the weather—either drenching wet or burning
cold.
Nearly half of the 2,517 casualties suffered by the 12th Infantry in
Hürtgen were due to the elements.
Hürtgen is viewed by historians as among the
greatest Allied debacles of the war.
Salinger did manage to find one moment of solace.
During the
battle for the forest, Hemingway was briefly stationed as a correspondent with
the 22nd Regiment, just a mile from Salinger’s encampment.
One night, during a
lull in the fighting, Salinger turned to a fellow soldier, Werner Kleeman, a
translator he had befriended while training in England.
“Let’s go,” Salinger urged.
“Let’s go see Hemingway.”
The two men made their way through the forest to
Hemingway’s quarters, a small cabin lit by the extraordinary luxury of its own
generator.
The visit lasted two or three hours.
They drank celebratory
champagne from aluminum canteen cups.
Salinger’s choice of companion was perhaps an expression of
gratitude.
Among his commanders in the Hürtgen Forest was an officer whom
Kleeman later described as having been “a heavy drinker” and cruel to his
troops.
The officer had once ordered Salinger to remain in a frozen foxhole
overnight, despite knowing that he was without proper supplies.
Kleeman
secretly delivered two items from Salinger’s belongings that helped him
survive: a blanket and a pair of his mother’s ubiquitous woolen socks.
Hürtgen changed everyone who experienced it.
Most survivors never
spoke of Hürtgen again.
The sufferings that Salinger endured are essential to
understanding "The catcher in the rye".
They gave rise, for instance, to the nightmares
suffered by Sergeant X in “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor.”
From Hürtgen, Salinger sent a letter to his friend Elizabeth
Murray, saying that he had been writing as much as possible.
He claimed to have
completed five stories since January and to be in the process of finishing
another three.
Years later, Salinger’s counter-intelligence colleagues would
remember him as constantly stealing away to write.
One recalled a time when the
unit came under heavy fire.
Everyone began ducking for cover.
Glancing over,
the soldiers caught sight of Salinger typing away under a table.
The pain of loss dominates Salinger’s one of his Caulfield stories, “This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise,” which was probably written around this very
time.
As the story opens, Sergeant Vincent Caulfield is at boot camp in
Georgia, sitting aboard a truck along with 33 other G.I.’s.
It is late evening,
and despite a downpour the men are bound for a dance in town.
But there is a
problem.
Only 30 men are allowed to go to the dance, and the group aboard the
truck therefore contains 4 too many.
The truck is delayed while the men wait
for a lieutenant to arrive and resolve the issue.
As they wait, the
conversation among the men reveals that Vincent Caulfield is in charge of the
group and therefore responsible for deciding whom to exclude.
In a
stream-of-consciousness exploration of loneliness and nostalgia, the narrative
concentrates less on what is happening in the truck than on what is going on in
Vincent’s mind.
Vincent’s younger brother Holden Caulfield has been reported missing in action
in the Pacific, and is presumed dead.
While the men on the truck talk about home, where they come from,
and what they did before the war, Vincent experiences a series of flashbacks.
He sees himself at the 1939 World’s Fair with his sister Phoebe as they visit
the Bell Telephone exhibition.
When they come out, they find Holden Caulfield standing
there.
Holden Caulfield asks Phoebe for her autograph, and Phoebe playfully punches him
in the stomach, “happy to see him, happy he was her brother.” Vincent’s mind
keeps leaping back to Holden.
He sees him at prep school, on the tennis court,
and sitting on the porch at Cape Cod.
How can Holden Caulfield possibly be missing?
When the lieutenant arrives, he is visibly annoyed.
When he asks
about the situation, Vincent feigns ignorance and pretends to count heads.
He
offers a movie to anyone willing to forgo the dance.
Two soldiers skulk off
into the night, but Vincent still has two men too many.
Finally he makes a
decision and orders the last two men on the left to leave the truck.
One soldier
dismounts and slips away.
Vincent waits and finally sees another soldier
emerge.
As the figure comes into the light, the image of a young boy is
revealed.
All eyes are fixed upon him as he stands in the downpour. “I was on
the list,” the boy says, almost in tears.
Vincent does not respond.
In the end
it is the lieutenant who orders the boy back into the truck and arranges for an
extra girl at the party to match the extra man.
The boy’s appearance is the climax of the story.
A figure emerging
from the darkness, he is vulnerable and distressed.
He is the spirit of Holden Caulfield.
Vincent reaches out and turns up the boy’s collar to protect him from the rain.
As the story concludes, Vincent pleads to his missing brother.
“Just go up to
somebody—and tell them you’re Here—not Missing, not dead, not anything but
Here.”
His intelligence duties brought Salinger face-to-face with the
Holocaust.
The Counter Intelligence Corps had compiled and disseminated a
confidential report to its agents titled “The German Concentration Camps.”
C.I.C. officers were instructed that upon entering an area suspected of
containing one of these camps it was their duty to make straightaway for its
location.
On April 22, after a difficult fight for the town of Rothenberg,
the path of Salinger’s division brought it into a triangular region
approximately 20 miles on each side, situated between the Bavarian cities of
Augsburg, Landsberg, and Dachau.
This territory held the vast Dachau
concentration-camp system.
As the 12th Regiment swarmed into the area, it came
upon the camps.
“You could live a lifetime,” he once told Margaret Salnger, “and
never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose.”
Salinger’s wartime experiences eventually brought on a deep
depression.
When the German Army surrendered, on May 8, 1945, the world erupted
in celebration.
Salinger spent the day alone, sitting on his bed, staring at a
.45-caliber pistol clutched in his hands.
What would it feel like, he wondered,
if he were to fire the gun through his left palm?
Salinger recognized the
potential danger of his state of mind.
In July, he checked himself into a
hospital in Nuremberg for treatment.
Most of what we know about Salinger’s hospitalization is derived
from a July 27 letter he wrote to Hemingway from the hospital.
It began by
openly confessing that Salinger had been
“in an almost constant state of
despondency”
and wanted to talk to someone professional before it got out of
hand.
During his stay, the staff had peppered him with questions.
What was his
childhood like?
How was his sex life?
Did he like the army?
Salinger had given
a sarcastic answer to each question—except for the one about the army.
That
last question he had answered with an unambiguous “yes.”
He very much had the
future Holden Caulfield novel in mind when he gave this answer, explaining to
Hemingway that he was afraid of the impact a psychological discharge might have
on how the author of "The Catcher in the Rye" would be perceived.
Some of the irony and vernacular of Holden Caulfield comes through
in this letter.
“There are very few arrests left to be made in our section,” he
writes.
“We’re now picking up children under ten if their attitudes are
snotty.”
Also apparent is Salinger’s need for affirmation.
At times, his tone
is pleading.
Will Hemingway please write to him?
Can Hemingway possibly find
the time to visit him later, in New York?
Is there anything Salinger can do for
him?
“The talks I had with you here,” he told Hemingway, “were the only hopeful
minutes of the whole business.”
When Salinger returned home from the war, he resumed his life as a
writer of short stories, many of which appeared in The New Yorker.
But
he never lost sight of Holden Caulfield.
What Salinger had of "The Catcher in the rye" was a
tangle of stories written as far back as 1941.
The challenge was to weave the
strands together into a unified work of art.
He took up the task early in 1949.
The war changed Holden Caulfield.
He had first appeared in the pre-war story
“Slight Rebellion off Madison,” which would be absorbed into Catcher.
But
the passage of time and events completely transformed the episode—Salinger’s
own experiences melted into the retelling.
In “Slight Rebellion,” Holden Caulfield is
pointedly selfish and confused.
He is presented in a third-person voice, far
removed from the reader.
The same scene in The Catcher in the Rye conveys
an impression of nobility.
Holden Caulfield's words are largely the same, but in the
novel his selfishness has evaporated and he seems to be speaking a larger
truth.
The third-person voice is gone—the reader has direct access to Holden’s
thoughts and words.
When Salinger finished "The Catcher in the Rye," in his home on Old Road, off Boston Post Road, in Westport, Connecticut, he sent the manuscript to Robert Giroux, at Harcourt, Brace.
When Giroux received
the manuscript, he “thought it a remarkable book and considered [himself] lucky
to be its editor.”
He was convinced that "The Catcher in the rye" would do well but later
confessed that “the thought of a best-seller never crossed my mind.”
Assured of
the novel’s distinction and having already sealed the deal with a handshake,
Giroux sent The Catcher in the Rye to Harcourt, Brace vice
president Eugene Reynal.
After Reynal reviewed the manuscript, it became clear
to Giroux that the publishing house would not recognize the oral contract.
Worse still, it was apparent that Reynal did not understand the novel at all.
As Giroux later recalled, “I didn’t realize what big trouble I was in until,
after he’d read it, he said, ‘Is Holden Caulfield supposed to be crazy?’ He
also told me he’d given the typescript to one of our textbook editors to read."
"I said ‘Textbook, what has that to do with it?’
‘It’s about a preppie, isn’t
it?’ The textbook editor’s report was negative, and that settled that.”
“Those bastards,” Salinger said after getting the news.
The manuscript
was sent to Little, Brown, in Boston, which snatched it up immediately.
Salinger would endure one further blow.
At the end of 1950, his
agent delivered The Catcher in the Rye to the offices of The
New Yorker, a gift from Salinger to the magazine that had stood by him
for so long.
He intended for The New Yorker to publish
excerpts from the book.
The New Yorker’s reaction was conveyed
by Gus Lobrano, the fiction editor with whom he had worked closely for many
years.
According to Lobrano, the Catcher manuscript had been
reviewed by himself and at least one other editor.
Neither of them liked it.
Its characters were considered to be unbelievable and Caulfield,
in particular, too precocious.
In their opinion, “The notion that in one family
there is such an extraordinary child. . . is not quite tenable.”
The
New Yorker declined to print a single word of the book.
The Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951.
The ublic impact was
greater than Salinger could have hoped for—or perhaps could deal with.
Time magazine
praised the novel’s depth and compared the author to Ring Lardner.
The
New York Times called Catcher “unusually brilliant.”
Despite its initial reservations, The New Yorker found it
“brilliant, funny,” and “meaningful.”
The less favorable reviews generally
found fault with the novel’s language and idiom.
A number of critics were
offended by Holden’s repeated use of “goddam” and especially the phrase “fuck
you”—shocking for any novel in 1951.
Catcher soon emerged onto the New
York Times best-seller list and would remain there for seven months.
What readers encountered within the covers of The Catcher
in the Rye was often life-changing.
From the novel’s opening line,
Salinger draws the reader into the peculiar, unrestrained reality of Caulfield, whose meandering thoughts, emotions, and memories populate the most
completely stream-of-consciousness experience yet offered by literature.
For Salinger himself, writing The Catcher in the Rye was
an act of liberation.
The bruising of Salinger’s faith by the terrible events
of war is reflected in Caulfield's loss of faith, caused by the death of his
brother Allie.
The memory of fallen friends haunted Salinger for years, just as Caulfield is haunted by the ghost of his brother.
The struggle of Caulfield echoes the spiritual journey of the author.
In both author and
character, the tragedy is the same: a shattered innocence.
Caulfield's reaction is
shown through his scorn of phoniness and compromise.
Salinger’s reaction
was personal despondency, through which his eyes were opened to the darker
forces of human nature.
Both eventually came to terms with the burdens they carried, and
their epiphanies were the same.
Caulfield comes to realize he can enter adulthood
without becoming false and sacrificing his values.
Salinger came to accept that
knowledge of evil did not ensure damnation.
The experience of war gave a voice
to Salinger, and therefore to Caulfield.
He is no longer speaking only
for himself—he is reaching out to all of us.
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