Salinger Read online

  In the end, the relationship between the father and the son was complicated, partly because of the kind of person Sol was. “Sol’s personality was very complex,” Jerome Schuman would later write. “I believe he covered over an inferiority complex with an aura of supreme self-confidence. He was highly intelligent, extremely well organized, and had a good sense of humor. He was a man who achieved and accomplished a lot.” However, of all the areas of his life in which he attained so much, there was one in which he did not achieve even a qualified success: the way he got along with his son. “The relationship of Sol Salinger and his son was one where the father exhibited great pride in the accomplishments of the son, but the relationship could not be described as a warm family relationship.”

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  In 1932, Sol Salinger set up an interview for his son at the McBurney School, an exclusive private school located on West Sixty-fourth Street. Records suggest that at that interview Sonny was anything but impressive. Awkward and ambivalent, he created the impression of being what he was—a distracted, unfocused, smart-alecky teenager who had no idea of what he wanted to do with his life. When the interviewer asked him what subjects he was interested in, Sonny offered two: drama and tropical fish. This was hardly the kind of answer that would make an interviewer open up his academically rigorous school’s doors to a potential star student. Still, Sol must have made an effort to lobby for his son, or the interviewer must have seen in Sonny something that was not readily apparent on the surface, for, despite Sonny’s generally flippant attitude at the meeting, McBurney created a place for him starting in the fall of 1932.

  At McBurney, Salinger participated in several extracurricular activities. He reported for the school newspaper, managed the fencing team, and performed in two school plays, each time taking a female part. In Mary’s Ankle, he portrayed Mrs. Burns; in Jonesy, the title character’s mother. Despite his apparent interest in school activities, Sonny did not engage in his academic pursuits with any zeal or intensity. As a result, his scholastic performance was modest at best; about the only activity, scholastic or otherwise, in which he excelled was dramatics. School records reveal that while his performance in the classroom was well below school standards, his work in the school plays showed he definitely had potential as an actor. Perhaps Sonny’s failure to be engaged by his academics grew out of what one friend later described as his desire “to do unconventional things.” “For hours,” the friend reported, “no one in the family knew where he was or what he was doing. He just showed up for meals. He was a nice boy, but he was the kind of kid who, if you wanted to have a card game, wouldn’t join in.” In short, Sonny liked being alone—he seemed to crave it—and could spend more time than was normal being by himself.

  There was only one problem with Sonny’s nascent desire to act. Sol made it known in no uncertain terms that he was opposed to his son going into the field; he was even opposed to Sonny performing onstage in prep school. As many fathers do, Sol wanted Sonny to go into the family business—in his case the meat-and-cheese import-export business. So far, however, Sonny’s main interests had been writing and the theatre. By the end of the spring term of 1934, Sonny had performed so badly in his classes that McBurney administrators asked him not to return in the fall. In his first year there, Sonny earned these grades: algebra, 66 (15 in a class of 18); biology, 77 (5 out of 14); English, 80 (7 out of 12); and Latin, 66 (10 out of 12). In his second year, he had not done any better: English and journalism, 72; geometry, 68; German, 70; and Latin, F. With these grades, Sonny was simply not McBurney material.

  Sol engineered one last-ditch effort to try to find a way for his son to remain at McBurney by arranging for him to take classes during the summer of 1934 at the Manhasset School. That, too, was a disaster, when Sonny performed as badly there as he had at McBurney. So McBurney made its decision final. Upon Sonny’s departure, a school official wrote the following note on his transcript: “Character: Rather hard-hit by [adolescence] his last year with us. Ability: plenty. Industry: did not know the word.”

  What Sonny needed, Sol decided, was to be toughened up a bit. With this in mind, Sol surveyed the schools in and around New York City until he found the Valley Forge Military Academy. Located on a picturesque campus in rural Pennsylvania, the school had a reputation for whipping aimless young men into shape. Here is how one student later described the school: “As for what life was like at Valley Forge, the discipline was tough. New cadets were hazed. The emphasis was on the military and sports rather than on academics. Valley Forge felt more proudly of a graduate who went to West Point than to Harvard.”

  Maybe Valley Forge could accomplish what Sol had not been able to and turn Sonny into a young man full of drive and ambition. Hopeful, Sol placed telephone calls to the school until he had arranged a spur-of-the-moment interview for Sonny. On that interview, Sonny was accompanied by his mother. It must have gone well, for on extremely short notice—school records suggest that the notice was perhaps as brief as two days—Sonny was accepted into and enrolled at Valley Forge, where in 1934 the fall semester started on September 22. “I feel confident that Jerome will conduct himself properly and I am sure you will find his school spirit excellent,” Sol Salinger wrote to Major Waldemar Ivan Rutan, Valley Forge’s chaplain, just after Sonny’s enrollment. No doubt Sol expressed this same sentiment to Sonny.

  Sonny got the point: He had better shape up and develop some noticeable school spirit, or else. In very fundamental ways, during the two academic years he stayed at Valley Forge, he did change as a student and a person. One example of this change was evident even at the time. At Valley Forge, Sonny decided his name sounded too boyish, he had outgrown his. Still, he did not like the names Jerome and David, and he certainly didn’t want to be called J. D., not as a nickname anyway. So he made up his mind. As his new nickname, and maybe even for his professional byline as well, he wanted to use Jerry. He told his family and friends that would be his name: Jerry—Jerry Salinger.

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  It was pitch-black as the two boys crept across the Valley Forge campus, heading for the estate of an heir to the Campbell Soup fortune that was located next to the school. This was the fall of Jerry’s senior year, and for that year he had been assigned as his roommate a boy named Richard Gonder, whom he liked a great deal. Intelligent and adventuresome, Richard was just the kind of boy who would go along with Jerry on the various outings he suggested. Sometimes, early in the morning, Jerry and Richard would sneak into town to have breakfast and a hot chocolate at a local diner before they rushed back to campus in time for reveille. There were also the times they would sit around their dorm room late at night and talk on and on about Merle Oberon—for their money, the sexiest star in Hollywood. Jerry liked to describe her as being “devastating,” “a real doll.” Neither of them had a girlfriend, mostly because they were teenage boys attending an all-boys military academy, but, like so many of the other cadets, they sure could talk about starlets like Merle Oberon. Visions of Merle may or may not have been on the minds of the boys as they sneaked across the campus that night. What was on their minds was tonight’s goal. If no one was at home at the estate next door, the two planned on going swimming in the pool located on the property, something they had done in the past from time to time without ever getting caught.

  If they did get caught, they would have to face Colonel Milton S. Baker, the school’s founder who still served as its headmaster. An industrious entrepreneur with a natural talent for self-promotion, he presided over the academy using a strict but compassionate administrative style. For his part, Baker was also a character in his own right. “He was very pro-British,” one cadet recalled. “He wore a greatcoat like the ones worn by British officers. When he changed the cadet uniform in the fall of 1936, he used British Army officers’ ‘stars’ for cadet officer insignia on the shoulder straps. Once Baker spoke in chapel and denounced Edward VIII for giving up the throne for Mrs. Simpson. Baker’s concern was that Edward was shirking his duty, whi
ch, of course, he was. Some years later, Baker was awarded the OBE [Order of the British Empire] which must have been the proudest moment of his life.” Another cadet, Franklin Hill, remembers Baker: “He was impressive. He posed a good image to everyone. He was someone to be looked up to. Most students liked him but he wasn’t someone you’d walk up to and say, ‘Hi, Colonel. How are you?’ He was a good leader.”

  Things had begun to go well for Jerry at Valley Forge, where, besides being a member of First Class and Company B, he joined the Glee Club, the Aviation Club, the French Club, and the Non-Commissioned Officers Club. For this year, he had even been appointed literary editor of Crossed Sabres, the school’s yearbook. In addition to these activities, he was also a devoted member of the Mask and Spur Dramatic Club.

  As it happened, nobody spotted the boys as they left the school campus and entered the adjoining estate. When they realized no one was at home, they sneaked over to the swimming pool, stripped down to their underwear, and dove into the pool’s cold water. It shows just how ordinary the boys’ lives were at this point—two teenage boys, swimming playfully in the waters of a pool that belonged to neither of them, hoping all the while that the owner did not happen upon them as they swam.

  In the handful of times they secretly swam in the pool during Jerry’s senior year, the boys were never caught. In fact, at Valley Forge, Jerry’s luck seemed to have changed completely. Maybe he did only need some discipline to help him mature into a more responsible and productive young man. During his senior year, he even did comparatively well in his academic classes. His final grades for that year were English, 88; French, 88; German, 76; history, 79; and dramatics, 88—certainly a much better showing than the performance he had turned in at McBurney. He seemed brighter, in general, in this environment. At Valley Forge his IQ was tested at 115, which was significantly higher than the 104 he had scored at McBurney.

  As an outgrowth of his drama course, Jerry appeared in R. C. Sheriff’s Journey’s End, playing the part of Young Raleigh. However, at Valley Forge, Jerry began to experiment with another creative activity. “At night,” William Maxwell later reported, “in bed, under the covers, with the aid of a flashlight, [Salinger] began writing stories.” Over the coming months, Salinger’s interest in writing became so strong he could no longer confine his writing to late-night episodes lit by flashlight. Instead, he started working on stories whenever and wherever he could.

  Sol Salinger must have been proud of his son on that beautiful June day in 1936 when he sat at the school’s graduation and watched Colonel Baker hand his son a diploma from Valley Forge. Sol also must have felt some sense of pride when he flipped through Jerry’s yearbook. Next to his son’s picture, an attractive black-and-white shot in which he looked youthful and handsome, this caption appeared: “Jerome David Salinger, Corporal B Company, January 1, 1919, New York, New York. Activities: Private, ’34; Intramural Athletics; Mask and Spur, ’34 and ’35; Glee Club, ’34 and ’35; Plebe Club, ’35; Aviation Club; French Club; Non-Commissioned Officers Club; Literary Editor, 1936 Crossed Sabres.” Then, in a section called Class Prophecy, the editors predicted Salinger’s future: “Jerry Salinger, writing four-act melodramas for the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra.” Finally, the yearbook contained an untitled poem about Valley Forge written by Salinger—a three-stanza, songlike piece meant to commemorate Salinger’s last day at the academy by reflecting back on the previous two years. The poem is flagrantly sentimental but full of the kind of reflections that suggest Salinger had genuinely enjoyed his experience at the school.

  Without a doubt, Salinger made a lasting impression on his senior-year roommate. “Jerry’s conversation was frequently laced with sarcasm about others and the silly routines we had to obey and follow at school,” Richard Gonder says. “The school in those days was run on a strictly military basis—up at six, endless formations, marching from one activity to another, meals and classes at set hours, and taps at ten. Jerry did everything he could do not to earn a cadet promotion, which he considered childish and absurd. His favorite expression for someone he did not care for was, ‘John, you really are a prince of a guy.’ What he meant by this, of course, was ‘John, you really are an SOB.’ Jerry and I hated the cool military aspects of the school. Everything was done in a row and at fifteen you don’t want to do things in a row, but Jerry’s father felt he needed to go to a military academy, so that’s where he was. Jerry was the delight of the English teacher, but he got only passing marks in his other subjects. He had a great sense of humor and was more sophisticated than the rest of us. He would read the letters he sent home to his mother, whom he was very close to, and we were all astonished. He was very slight in build because he hadn’t shot up yet, and he was worldly as far as his mind was concerned. He was a rather nice-looking guy. I liked him immensely. I enjoyed his wit and humor. He was so sure of himself as far as his writing went. He knew he was good.”

  The Young Folks

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  Coming from a relatively obscure military academy where he had turned in a no-better-than-mediocre academic performance, Jerry did not have available to him an unlimited range of colleges to which he could apply. In fact, as the spring semester passed, Salinger’s plans became more uncertain. Those plans were finalized in June 1936 when Jerry applied to and was accepted by New York University’s Washington Square College. In the fall he took a standard freshman schedule, but he maintained the level of academic performance he had established for himself prior to Valley Forge. To say that his attendance at NYU was not productive would be an understatement; it verged on being a waste of time. Unfulfilled and unmotivated, he concluded there was little reason for him to continue at the college, so, by the late summer or early fall of 1937, he decided to take his father up on his suggestion, at least for the immediate future. He would learn the import-export trade. In order to study that business firsthand, Sol wanted Jerry to go to Europe, specifically to Austria and Poland.

  He traveled to Europe in the fall of 1937. While he seems to have gone to both Paris and London, he spent most of his time at the beginning of his trip in Vienna, where he improved his French and German, two languages he had studied in prep school. He may have been able to work on his language skills, but as for learning his father’s business, he delved into it little, if at all. William Maxwell later wrote about Salinger’s grand tour: “He . . . learned some German and a good deal about people, if not the exporting business.” Soon, though, Jerry had no choice but to do what he had come to Europe to do. “I was supposed to apprentice myself to the Polish ham business,” Salinger wrote Ernest Hemingway (whom he would one day meet) about his European experience. “They finally dragged me off to Bydgoszcz for a couple of months, where I slaughtered pigs, wagoned through the snow with the pig slaughtermaster.” This was an event so disturbing to Salinger that years later he still complained about it to friends like Maxwell. “Eventually he got to Poland,” Maxwell wrote, “and for a brief while went out with a man at four o’clock in the morning and bought and sold pigs. Though he hated it, there is no experience, agreeable or otherwise, that isn’t valuable to a writer of fiction.” Just how that experience was valuable to Salinger is not clear; how it was valuable to him as a person is. Because he detested the episode as much as he did, he knew once and for all he could not ever—ever—go into his father’s line of work.

  Regardless of how Salinger employed his European experience as source material, he did use the months he spent in Vienna and Poland to write story after story. In fact, Salinger was turning out fiction at a steady pace, and he continued to write even after he started to send off his stories to magazines for possible publication. He “learned, as well as this can ever be learned,” Maxwell wrote, “how not to mind when the manuscripts come back.”

  At the end of his months in Europe, Jerry returned to New York, where he moved back into his room in his parents’ apartment on Park Avenue. From his conversations with friends, a few letters, and some elements of his stories, i
t seems that this episode in Vienna had been a happy time for him. His memories included a girl he had met there. As he would say years later in a letter to Hemingway, one memory he would always hold with him was the afternoon he and this young girl went ice skating; he would never forget kneeling down to help her on with her skates—such a simple but poignant image. At eighteen, he was about the same age she was. What is telling about his life, however, is that as Salinger grew older, even when he was well into his middle age, the ideal object of his affection would always be about the same age as the young girl in Vienna. In many ways, this simple fact would turn out to be one of the defining qualities of Salinger’s life and work.

  When Jerry returned to America, he brought with him more than just memories of a young girl in Vienna. He also had an immediate awareness of the events in Europe that would soon prove to be historic. The political situation in key countries in Europe had been unstable. In Spain, following the abdication of King Alfonso XIII in 1931, the country was in political turmoil, which only became worse in 1936 when General Francisco Franco mounted a Fascist coup. The resulting Spanish Civil War raged until Franco’s forces destroyed those of the government in 1939. Benito Mussolini and his Fascist regime had been in control of Italy since the latter part of 1922 when, in the wake of the Fascists’ March on Rome, Mussolini was named premier. However, the country that was in the most intense period of transition was Germany, primarily because of the political ascent of Adolf Hitler. After becoming chancellor in January 1930, Hitler solidified his support until he was able to establish in September 1935 the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws, which essentially started an undeclared war on the Jews. It was obvious Hitler planned on waging war on more than the Jews after he annexed Austria in March 1938 with little or no resistance from the Austrian people. That aggressive policy would continue in 1939 when in August Germany and the Soviet Union signed a pact agreeing to a partition of Poland. Once Germany began that annexation in September, the ensuing resistance by the Polish people sparked the beginning of what became World War II.