1

We traveled back from Valley Forge to New York feeling triumphant. Look at what had been amassed, so far: Salinger’s school records, some telling items of juvenilia, frank testimony from contemporaries, some eyewitness location stuff from us, and so on. Material any biographer would have reason to be proud of, you’d have thought. And, sure enough, my companion now had a smug, workmanlike look about him—as if, no matter what the theoretical problems attaching to this case might be, he had journeyed with efficiency across the uncomplaining fields of Fact. He’d done his job. He had his Chapter 1.

But what, I wanted to ask him, had we actually achieved? So Salinger was bad at arithmetic: All writers are bad at arithmetic. He was sardonic, moody, a bit of an outsider; again, what writer isn’t all these things, when young? We had some fresh data, to be sure, but how close had we really come to conjuring anything distinctive? Did we think we now knew Salinger any better than before? And when we made connections between the “man of mystery” we’re in pursuit of and the juvenile’s love of playacting, were we not simply bending the material to suit our plot? We still didn’t have any close-ups, any illuminating mini-narratives. Would we have liked that boy if we had known him then? We didn’t know.

And what about the life/work line of scrutiny? We had been able to dig up a few “real-life models,” and there was some interest in seeing young Salinger foreshadowing young Caulfield. Or was it that this was what we wanted to find? We wanted there to be, from the start, some near-intolerable strain between the “anxious to be loved” side of Salinger and the other, darker side, the need to be untouchably superior. This was our reading of him as he had become, but was it really there, in embryo, at Valley Forge?

And it was not as if anything very comic or remarkable had happened to us in the process of pursuing this “research.” We had written to Valley Forge, been invited there, and been given the run of the school’s files. We had written to about forty of Salinger’s contemporaries and had had some twenty-five replies. We had even been saluted on arrival by a tiny soldier and been called “sir” by a general. It had been too easy. “I suppose you ache to interpret him,” scoffed my companion. “Well, at least he’s started writing now. We’ll have some texts to chew on.”

We spent the next few weeks in New York and other public libraries putting together a file of Salinger’s early, uncollected stories: no easy task, since in several cases these had been ripped out of the magazines they’d first appeared in. This was eerie, as if someone had got there ahead of us. We recalled, though, that in 1974, Salinger had “broken his silence” with a telephone call to the New York Times complaining about a pirated edition of these early tales. “I know I am known as a strange, aloof kind of person,” he’d confided. “I pay for this attitude” but “some stories, my property, have been stolen … suppose you had a coat you liked and somebody went into your closet and stole it? That’s how I feel.” He had wanted the stories to “die a perfectly natural death,” he said.1 Twenty-five thousand copies of the edition were distributed before its phantom publisher disappeared from view, sought by the FBI. Perhaps he had been the vandal.

It was difficult to accept Salinger’s analogy between a story that had appeared in a mass-circulation magazine and a coat that was hanging in his closet but, having tracked down some of this material, we could appreciate his resistance to republication. This rigorous, high-minded author had once tailored his prose to please the market. It was here, perhaps, that biography might be of help, real help, might even explain why a writer wrote the way he did. “Rationalization has dawned,” said my companion. “Let’s get back to work.”

2

We know from Salinger’s contemporaries at Valley Forge that by the time he left school at age seventeen, he had already decided on the shape of things to come. He was prepared to go along with his parents’ now-revived expectations for a time—indeed, in June 1936 he applied for admission to New York University. His Valley Forge grades were adequate for college entry, and he was accepted for the fall semester. But secretly—“by flashlight,” as it were—he had made up his mind: He was going to be a writer—a verbal performer, a composer (probably) of plays and stories, a professional.

The term “professional” crops up with regularity throughout the next few years; for Salinger it seems to have been a thoroughly specific designation. Being a pro meant making a living by the sale of words; it meant constant productivity, a tough, all-out commitment, and even a willingness to write below one’s best in order to support the overall “career.” The amateur or the part-timer could afford to indulge himself by writing only when the spirit moved; it was the pro’s job to move the spirit, and, failing that, to be able to function in its absence. Time and again in his early years, Salinger’s image of himself is of a working scribe who travels light but is never more than a yard or two from his typewriter. The image derives, no doubt, from Hemingway, as do several of Salinger’s early affectations, but without any man-of-action overtones. The action, for Salinger, was on the page.

To function as a professional it was necessary to know the market and in the mid-1930s the market for short stories was healthier than many other sectors of the American economy. In 1934 the anthologist E. J. O’Brien, famous for his annual Best Short Stories, was in no doubt that the American short story was now at its peak of vitality and international prestige. “Five years ago,” he told his British audience, “the English short story was the most memorable. The American short story had not yet stirred in its sleep. Now it is the English short story which strikes us as sterile and inbred. … It is high time that the young English story writer braced himself to the salt and bitter reality of life.”2

This new American vitality had not escaped the notice of commercial publishers, and in particular the publishers of the rising new mass-circulation magazines. A magazine like Esquire, for instance, had won itself both an audience and some prestige by running Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and Fitzgerald’s “The Crack Up” in its early issues. There was a general willingness to promote the story writer as a new species of American star. Even the shamelessly commercial “slicks” (so called because of the slick, advertisement-ready paper they were printed on) were alert to the promotional possibilities of major literary names. Papers like Collier’s, Liberty, and the Saturday Evening Post would pay around two thousand dollars for a shortish yarn, and even the more classy outlets like The New Yorker and Esquire were able to offer relatively handsome rates. As Brendan Gill has written: “Hard for writers nowadays to realize how many magazines were vying for short stories in the thirties and forties; hard too to realize how much they paid!”

The New Yorker and Esquire were, for Salinger in 1936, the quintessence of high sophistication. In the political 1930s, The New Yorker’s stance was relaxed, quizzical, dauntingly metropolitan; the cutaway and the monocle were necessary weapons in the cause of good humor and sound common sense. The notion of proletarian literature could be bruited elsewhere. Esquire, founded in October 1933, was even more explicit in its detachment from the political arena (and it also offered a novel, in color, dash of the salacious):

The well-off young American’s fundamental right, according to Esquire, was to “mis-spend his life if and as he see [sic] fit.” With superb timing, its first monthly edition (the first issue had been a pilot) appeared on the day on which Prohibition was repealed: December 5, 1933. More roguishly male than The New Yorker, it had the same languid air of know-how, of boulevard self-assurance, of—try as we may—not being able to keep an entirely straight face for the duration of an averagely verbose and solemn call to arms. The New Yorker could hardly have put the problem more urbanely than in its issue of November 25, 1935:

It’s no fun to be a political anemic. We believe in technocratic doctrine—feel that it is sound and that steps should be taken. We deplore a system which tends to elevate a few persons and degrade many. Yet so fickle is the human animal, we find ourselves deriving an unwonted pleasure from signs of better times; that’s how we know we are useless to reform movements. A reformer of any stamina hates recovery—he is happiest during a depression, knowing that only when great numbers of people are miserable is there any possibility of Change. We know it too; but when we walk out in the cool of the afternoon and see shopkeepers sprucing up and stores looking busy and people sitting in cafes and having a good time, believe us it takes all our strength not to feel good about it, for we have very little capacity for sustained dismality. We’re not defending our temperament, merely pointing out a paradox; that Utopia’s best friends are its worst enemies.4

This grown-up manner, its calculated agreeableness, its lofty but well-tempered detachment from the fray, its—some would say—complacency was to enchant the youthful Salinger, so much so that traces of it have stayed with him all his life and can be heard from time to time in the cadences of Seymour Glass. At seventeen, it seems, Salinger was ready to take it up as an ideal. He would tell his friends at Valley Forge that his ambition was to succeed Robert Benchley as The New Yorker’s drama critic (a typically “stylish” Benchley piece would run as follows: “I left All Editions at the end of the first act because I was sick of it and didn’t want to see any more”); failing that, Salinger would probably go to Hollywood and write sophisticated screenplays.

At this point, Salinger’s conception of a writing career was focused on these two key citadels: New York and Hollywood. It was a conception that had more to do with the world of mass entertainment (movies, plays, big-circulation weeklies, even radio) than with the world of Letters as this would have been perceived by, say, the editors of Partisan Review or by most university English departments. Partly by accident, partly by inclination, Salinger’s literary route was from the outset established as metropolitan, not academic. And this separation has mattered quite a lot. To grasp how much, we need only wonder what Salinger’s writing life would have been like if he had gone to Harvard or Yale. So maybe the arithmetic report does matter after all. Certainly, his career might have been very different if his first stories had been aimed not at Collier’s but at Partisan Review.

It was in the 1930s that the split between these two worlds became overt—at any rate, from the point of view of the “serious” creative writer. This was the era of the “literary intellectual.” From now on, it would not be enough for a writer merely to write poetry or fiction; not enough, that is, in the eyes of literary intellectuals. Henceforward popular success would be likely to taint a work with the stigma of commercialism, and writers would be obliged to take account of the “functions” and “responsibilities” of what they wrote. They would be expected to give interviews, make contributions to symposia, attend political assemblies, and, in general, show signs of living in society as intelligently anxious grown-ups. A novelist sans ideas or sans texts from which acceptable ideas might be construed would stand every chance of being regarded as lightweight. And if he was to get popular as well, that would be that. The so-defined—Steinbeck, O’Hara, Saroyan are names that come to mind—often got very bitter on this score. And so too, much later on, did Salinger.

In 1936, though, this could not have been anticipated. Nothing in Salinger’s background or temperament, so far as we can tell, would have equipped him to regard a magazine like The New Yorker as frivolous or irresponsible (which is how Partisan Review saw it). His short spell at New York University evidently did nothing to solemnize his outlook: conceivably, he might have found himself caught up in student left-wing circles or he might have become captivated by After Strange Gods or the first issue of New Directions—he might, that is to say, have begun shaping up as a New York intellectual. But no; he left after a single year, leaving virtually no trace of ever having been there.

3

So far as Sol Salinger was concerned, this abrupt default must have seemed to mark the end of Jerome’s formal education. The obvious, if not the only, next step would be for him to join the family business. As we have seen, this is what usually happened to a cheeseman’s son. But there was tension between Sol and Jerry. Herbert Kauffman, a Valley Forge classmate who lodged for a while in the Salinger apartment, remembers dinner-table arguments in which Jerome would lash out sarcastically at his father—and unfairly, as Herb saw it. “Sol Salinger wasn’t at all ‘sensitive’ in the way Jerome D. Salinger believed himself to be. Sol just didn’t want his son to be a writer.” Nor did he want his son to be an actor, which for a brief stretch in 1937 seems to have been Jerry’s next-best ambition. Kauffman recalls that he and Jerry used to do the rounds of New York theaters, each hoping for a break.

But nothing broke, and for a few weeks the pair of them consoled themselves by taking work as “entertainers” on a cruise liner, the MS Kungsholm. On a tour of the Caribbean, these young blades organized deck tennis and made themselves available as dancing partners for any unattached ladies who might need their services. Another friend of Jerry’s, called Holden, was on this same cruise and, according to Kauffman, the name Holden Caulfield comes from a joining of his name to that of a movie actress called Joan Caulfield, on whom young Salinger later had a huge crush. (Much later, since in 1937 Miss Caulfield was fifteen; she did not star in films until after the war.) After his Kungsholm adventure, Salinger seems to have become resigned to abandoning his career in show business. That being so, he was left with little choice but to go along with whatever next step his father might insist on. It seems to have been decided that he would, after all, be apprenticed to the trade.

One of the stories we had come across in the New York Public Library was called “A Girl I Knew.” It had appeared in Good Housekeeping in the late 1940s.5 We read this story with particular attention, not because it was especially good (it wasn’t), but because of what we took to be its documentary, real-life feel. The circumstances of the story fit neatly with everything we knew or thought we knew about the boy Salinger’s predicament in 1937. To my companion, the piece was sufficiently studded with specific dates and places for him to hail it as “splendidly revealing.” This seemed to me excessive. “You can’t treat fiction as a source. Not unless you have some clear authority to do so.” “But we have plenty of unclear authority. We know he had left college and was at a loose end; we know his father wanted him to go into the family firm; we know he went to Austria, to learn the trade. We also know that later on in the army, Salinger’s job was exactly the same as …” “Very well. Let’s say it is admissible; but let’s also admit that we might be, that we are on shaky ground.”

The father in the story, out of patience with his son’s repeated academic failures, decides to send his boy abroad “to learn a couple of languages the firm could use.” And his boy, who tells the tale, does sound familiar:

Instead, the boy goes along with Daddy’s scheme, setting off on the SS Rex for Naples in July 1936. His destination is Vienna.

It was probably in the late fall of 1937 that Salinger made his European trip, and it is really no great impertinence to suppose that Sol Salinger’s plans for his son were similar to those of the father in “A Girl I Knew.” In Vienna, Jerome’s mission was twofold: He was to improve the two languages he had studied at Valley Forge (French and German), and he was to apprentice himself to “the ham business.” The language study came first. In the story, the boy is under orders from his father to take three hours of Linguaphone lessons daily, in addition to any colloquial material he might pick up. Salinger may well have done the same, although we do know that he was also required to work in an office, writing English advertising copy for an Austrian business associate of Sol’s. Since we are treating most other things in “A Girl I Knew” as autobiographical, it’s possible that like the hero of his tale Salinger lodged with an Austrian family in the city’s Jewish quarter: not the safest place to be in 1937.

Altogether, Salinger, we know, was in Europe for five months, mostly in Vienna, but with visits to Paris and London. It was in the winter of 1937 that he made the trip to Bydgoszcz, where there was probably a family connection. It was here that he was supposed to learn the mysteries of the ham trade. In Bydgoszcz he “slaughtered pigs and wagoned through the snow with the big slaughter-master, who was determined to entertain me by firing his shot-gun at sparrows, lightbulbs, fellow-employees …”7 It could have been during this visit that his father finally agreed that Jerome was not cut out for a career in import-export. Certainly, nothing further is heard on the matter after his brief trip to Poland. Nothing is heard, that is to say, by us, who have, in any case, heard little.

Throughout his European jaunt, Salinger was writing stories, sending them off to magazines back home and learning “as well as this can ever be learned, how not to mind when the manuscripts came back.”8 He was also writing plays and at this stage, it would seem, the playwriting ambition was as strong as if not stronger than the ambition to write stories. In “A Girl I Knew,” the hero is working on a script whose substance would seem to confirm Salinger’s Valley Forge class prediction that he would end up as a melodramatist. The boy’s play is called He Was No Fool and features a cool, handsome, casually athletic young man—“very much my own type”—who is summoned from Oxford University to help Scotland Yard out of a tight spot.

“A Girl I Knew” is the only one of Salinger’s surviving stories that draws directly on his European visit. It’s a love story of the star-crossed type: The American boy falls in love with a Jewish girl (“she was probably the first appreciable thing of beauty I had seen that struck me as being wholly legitimate”), but she is already engaged. There are sentimental exchanges but no real blossoming. The boy goes back to America (to take another crack at college), and he later hears that the girl has died in a Nazi concentration camp. During the war the boy works for army intelligence and questions prisoners of war about the girl; later, he visits her old home in Vienna to seek news of her, but no trace can be found.

Salinger, it seems certain, was in Vienna during the first two months of 1938 and very likely saw, firsthand, Nazi street mobs on the rampage; they were by then moving around in the thousands. Austria fell to Hitler on March 12, 1938, and on that same day Nazi gangs raided Vienna’s Jewish quarter. The probability is that by the end of February, Salinger had already moved on to Paris, but he could hardly have failed to take with him some troubling impressions of a city under threat. Apart from the rather facile concentration camp plot twist in “A Girl I Knew,” there is nothing in the rest of Salinger’s work that draws on the experience.

4

On Salinger’s return from Europe in the early spring of 1938, the problem of his prospects was deemed to be unsolved. His business apprenticeship had clearly failed, and he had had no professional successes as a writer. In “A Girl I Knew,” the hero’s predicament is identical: The idea of a business career is shelved, and he is given one last chance to try for the semblance of a college education—“the familiar moment came for me to advance one of my fragile promises to really apply myself this time.”

If Salinger gave an undertaking of this sort, he didn’t mean it. But he did go back to college. In the fall of 1938, he enrolled as a nineteen-year-old freshman at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. And now, almost fifty years later, here were his deeply unauthorized biographers stepping off the bus from Philadelphia (Collegeville is about two hours from the city) in search of any scraps he might have left there.

The first thing to strike the visitor to Ursinus is that the place is miles from anywhere. There is no local town to speak of, and the bus service to more distant points is intermittent. It’s certainly a place you might send your son away to. The next thing you notice is that the college itself actually looks like a college—a turreted, gray-stoned copy of some, perhaps specific, European model. And it is tucked away, most snugly, in its own extensive, leafy grounds. There is a retreatlike atmosphere, an air—almost—of asylum. That is to say, if you didn’t like it there, you might not find it all that easy to escape. Which leads to the third element that has to be remarked: All the students seemed antique, otherworldly, in their clean-cut, well-adjusted pleasantness of bearing. The idea of not liking Ursinus, of not liking anything, seemed far from their thoughts as they bustled smilingly about their proper business—not saluting this time, but now and again tossing us a cheery “Hi!”

I was all for leaving right away, but no—the job, the job. We searched through the 1938–39 files of the Ursinus Weekly, we got a list of Salinger’s contemporaries and wrote to them, we quizzed the older-looking members of the college staff. The picture that emerged was consistent with the one we had already formed: of a boy humoring his parents, playing for time, and, since Ursinus was evidently where he had to be, making the most of whatever it was that marked him off from his co-students. The mystery is: why Ursinus? There was nothing Jewish about it, nothing military. It’s a small liberal arts college, founded in 1869 by members of the German Reformed Church, and its aim was education “under the benign influence of Christianity.” It drew on a middle-class student body of Pennsylvania Dutch background; most Ursinus students came from nearby suburban areas. The college’s academic strengths were in prelaw, medicine, and chemistry; according to one of its alumni, Ursinus “placed little stress on literary, artistic, or highly intellectual pursuits.”9 Perhaps this was the ingredient that caught Sol’s eye. Or maybe Ursinus was simply the only place that would take this aging freshman. It was near Valley Forge; some local strings might have been pulled.

In any event, it was unlikely that Jerome would fit in there—and he didn’t. His fellow students tend to remember him “for what he did not do, rather than for what he did.”

He stood out in one respect: He was not working for a degree (as was everyone else I knew), did not care whether he received credit for the courses he took; and was considered a loner.

  

It was a good basic liberal arts college; its smallness contributed to closeness of students and professors. However, not always. The “not always” included Jerry Salinger. I do remember him and I remember him because it is my impression that he was not close to anyone—students or professors. Indeed, my recollection is he was pretty much a loner.

The word “loner” cropped up several times:

Although we talked on several occasions, I cannot remember why Jerry Salinger came to such a school. It seemed evident to me that he was bored and unhappy. I assumed he felt Ursinus had little to offer him. I can only conclude that he was marking time until he could move on. He was very much a loner. I don’t think he gave himself to others, nor did he consider that others had much of value to offer him.

In the freshman photograph, Salinger is at the end of the second row, his black hair brilliantined into a dashing quiff, his white tie and dark shirt marking him as just a touch more slick and urban than his fellows. “As I recall his physical appearance, Jerry Salinger was tall, slender, with dark hair and eyes. He had an olive complexion. His hands were long-fingered and sensitive. The nails were bitten short and were tobacco-stained. He smiled infrequently but seemed almost mischievous when he did.”

The girls at Ursinus mostly remember him this way. He was a New Yorker, he was older than the other boys, and he had been to Europe. One of them recalls:

The ‘girls’ were impressed by Jerry’s good looks—tall, dark, and handsome, and we were in awe of his New York City background and worldly ways. Of course, there were other handsome men on campus—I married one; but Jerry was different—a loner, a critic, and definitely not one of the crowd. The boys, incidentally, were not impressed by or in awe of Jerry Salinger. My husband was not too kind just now when I asked him how he felt about Ursinus’s claim to literary fame.

  

When this handsome, suave, and sophisticated New Yorker in the black Chesterfield coat (complete with velvet collar) hit the campus in 1938, we had never seen anything quite like it. He gave the impression of having “been around” more than the rest of us. We were enchanted by his biting and acerbic manner. …

Most of the girls were mad about him at once—including me—and the boys held him slightly in awe with a trace of envy thrown in. Jerry Salinger was a decidedly different phenomenon at Ursinus. His avowed purpose in life was to become a famous writer, and he declared openly that he would one day produce the Great American Novel. Jerry and I became special friends, mostly, I am sure, because I was the only one who believed he would do it. He felt that his English professors at Ursinus were more interested in how he dotted his i’s and crossed his t’s than they were in developing his literary style.

When we knew Jerry, he was Holden Caulfield, although when The Catcher in the Rye burst upon the literary world, he expressed surprise when I recognized him as Holden. I guess he never knew his adolescence was showing.

The woman talking here is Frances Thierolf. Frances or Franny is one of Salinger’s favorite girl’s names in his fiction, both early and late. When Frances Thierolf married, her name changed to Glassmoyer, and Salinger wrote to her saying that Glassmoyer “was the funniest name he had ever heard, and gallantly offered to join us on our honeymoon. He promised to write a book about me, and while I claim not the slightest resemblance to Franny Glass, the name did seem something of a coincidence.”11

Salinger’s one surviving teacher at Ursinus, Dr. Calvin Yost, remembers “nothing about Salinger as a person or as a student.” Dr. Yost had to check with the dean’s office to determine that he did indeed have a Jerome Salinger in his newswriting and journalistic practice class and that he gave the boy a B. One other classroom glimpse comes from a fellow student:

Ursinus College had a popular English teacher named Charles Mattern. He has since died, but I remember him telling me at a class reunion that he was often asked if he remembered J. D. Salinger, who by that time had become very well known. He had had him as a student but did not remember him personally but he had saved all the compositions his students had written. Learning of Salinger’s fame, Mattern had searched out Jerry’s papers. He said he routinely gave him C’s and found no great worth in them “then or now.”

Luckily, Salinger did leave his own mark on Ursinus, although not everyone seems to have noticed it at the time. For nine weeks he wrote a column in the college paper, the Ursinus Weekly‚ and he served as the paper’s drama critic, reviewing three productions during his short stay. The title of his column made it quite clear that this boy (the column was signed JDS) was only passing through. It was called “The Skipped Diploma: Musings of a Social Soph.” and it began as follows, with an item headed simply “Story”:

This cool, world-weary note is struck time and again. One week JDS portrays himself as applying for a job as a driver and odd-job man—does it matter, he asks in his mock letter, that he recently lost his driver’s license, needs sixteen hours’ sleep a day, and has no practical experience beyond having once unblocked Aunt Phoebe’s sink? “It is my family’s unanimous opinion,” he declares, “that I am precisely the young man to fulfill the requirements desired.”

On academic matters JDS is similarly scornful. In “A Campus Dictionary,” he defines “written exam” as “an unpleasant event which causes callous to form on the first joint of the middle finger” and “eight o’clock class” is “continued slumber without the formality of pajamas.” There are several other jibes at the curriculum and at those “kiddies” on campus who are serious about this kind of thing.

In another column, JDS finds himself on the Philadelphia–New York train; a “ruddy-faced gentleman” sits down beside him and starts talking. The dialogue could be an early sketch for Holden Caulfield’s chat with Mrs. Morrow on the same train, and around the same time of year (this column is dated December 12, 1938):

It turns out that Larry is not only a fine football player; he is also an assistant scout master, helps old ladies across the street, and is “the indifferent object of Miss, Mrs. and Grandmother America’s violent affections.” When Mr. X suggests to “us” that we and Larry might like to get together sometime, he is told: “The truth is, unfortunately, that for generations our family has been suffering from beri-beri.” Mr. X (retreating slightly): “Oh.”

It is indeed feeble stuff, but at Ursinus it no doubt came across as stylish and a little daring. “Ursinus, even today,” a student writes, “has not lost the flavor of what it was and is—a stimulus to the student life, with high academic standards and an approach that holds fast both the idealist and the realistic interrelated life.” Another says, “My days at Ursinus remain my fondest and happiest of memories. Proper manners and etiquette were part of everyone’s behavior. It was the custom to dress for dinner every evening. We were in college to pursue excellence. We also felt it was a privilege to attend college; therefore we had to make the best possible use of it and had the obligation to pass on to others as much as possible.” Yet another calls his Ursinus days “idyllic.” In more than twenty letters from contemporaries of Salinger, there is not one whisper of complaint; indeed, some forty-five years on, the idealism, the gratitude are still vivid and emphatic. From Salinger’s point of view, he was surrounded by types like Larry X.

In each of Salinger’s “Skipped Diploma” columns, there are four or five crisp paragraphs: In addition to the digs at academic life, there are gossipy items on recent plays and films. The tone is always bright and knowing, with a hint of “I’ve seen it all” thrown in:

Having bounced on the velvet seat of its pants all the way from Europe, Oscar Wilde is now in New York, with Mr. Robert Morley purring very convincingly in the title role.

  

Weaned on Broadway, John Garfield (now appearing in Four Daughters) smokes cigarettes out of the side of his mouth, puts his feet on pianos, and grips Sweet Young Things by their shoulders, much more convincingly, we think, than does even Don Ameche.

The air of benign superiority, the very royal “we,” is borrowed from The New Yorker; the magazine ran a show-biz column signed “Lipstick” that JDS seems to have studied with some care. “You will find us, this Thanksgiving, munching our drumstick by footlight”; “Frances Farmer surprised us with an excellent portrayal of the ‘wayward gal.’ Frances, by the way, has everything Hedy Lamarr forgot to get”; “This play we recommend oh-so-highly.”

In his movie reviews (three or four sentences apiece), JDS is noticeably hard on young male romantic leads. He has a running gag about the Latin heartthrob Don Ameche, and is caustic about Tyrone Power—he “knits his eyebrows rather effectively, thereby proving his existence.” Our columnist loves Mickey Rooney, the Marx Brothers, and the Lunts (although there is a seed of suspicion here that bears fruit in The Catcher in the Rye: “If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don’t watch it, you start showing off”); he deplores Charles Boyer, Shirley Temple (“I throw tomatoes at all small children resembling Shirley Temple”), and the film partnership of Bing Mac-Murray and Fred Crosby.

There are also several sneers at “Eleanor You-know-who” and her husband’s “already well-excavated New Deal party” and one chirpily condescending epitaph for Hemingway—Ernest, it seems, has “underworked and overdrooled” since The Sun Also Rises, The Killers, and A Farewell to Arms. And, one week, we are given a clue on the matter of Salinger’s own reading at this time:

Even by the standards of undergraduate arrogance, the whole performance in these columns is notably self-assured—another act of Salingeresque mimicry, although at Ursinus he was playing to an almost empty hall.

Again, as at Valley Forge, there are two voices. Writing in the newspaper as JDS, Salinger is laconic and airily delinquent. Writing as Jerome Salinger, the Ursinus Weekly’s drama critic, he is leaden and agreeable, stretching his paragraphs to make sure a good word is said about almost everyone concerned, especially the girls. “As Mrs. Conway, Dorothy Peoples, ’39, played a very difficult part with the most intelligent understanding. As Kay, Joan Maxwell, ’42, was extremely convincing, … Jean Patterson, ’43, was most attractive and carried her part quite adequately, and … Marion Byron, ’43, undoubtedly has theater in her blood. There was a breathless quality in her voice which, if regulated, may some day lead her to the professional footlights.”15 “As the Gracie Allen-like Adelaide, Roberta Byron was without reproach, upholding her leading role throughout the play, and looking most attractive.”16

Of Salinger’s ripe praise, Roberta Byron writes: “… it must have been with tongue in cheek. It was an absolutely dreadful play with no redeeming features. … I am sure my performance could only have been reviewed with personal sympathy on his part.”17 As Holden Caulfield might have said: “The terrific liar strikes again.”

Chapter 3 – Notes

1. New York Times, June 2 and 7, 1941.

2. E. J. O’Brien, ed., The Best Short Stories, 1934 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934), p. 11.

3. Arnold Gingrich, ed., The Esquire Treasury (London: Heinemann, 1954), p. xv.

4. “Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker, May 25, 1935, p. 12.

5. JDS, “A Girl I Knew,” Good Housekeeping, 126 (February 1948), pp. 37, 191–96.

6. Ibid., p. 37.

7. JDS, “Autobiographical Note,” Story. In Esquire, September 1941, p. 24, the story goes as follows: “He visited pre-Anschluss Vienna when he was eighteen, winning high honors in beer hoisting. In Poland, he worked in a ham factory and slaughterhouse …”

8. William Maxwell, “J. D. Salinger,” Book-of-the-Month Club News, July 1951, pp. 5–6.

9. Handbook, Ursinus College, 1985.

10. All quotations from Salinger’s co-students at Ursinus are from letters written to IH, 1984–85. Grateful acknowledgment to Helene E. Berger, Roberta Byron Bodley, J. D. Davis, Frances T. Glassmoyer, Annabel G. Heyen, John F. Rauhauser, Geraldine Y. Voss, and Paul L. Wise.

11. Frances T. Glassmoyer to IH, February 12, 1985.

12. JDS, “The Skipped Diploma,” Ursinus Weekly, October 10, 1938, p. 2.

13. Ibid., December 12, 1938, p. 2.

14. Ibid., November 7, 1938, p. 2.

15. JDS, “Strong Cast Scores in Priestley’s Somber Post-War Drama,” Ursinus Weekly, December 12, 1938.

16. JDS, “Seniors Present Comedy, Ball as Final Social Contributions,” Ursinus Weekly, December 12, 1938.

17. Roberta Byron Bodley to IH, February 7, 1985.