Dream Catcher: A Memoir (14 page)

20
. Ibid.

21
. Colonel Gerdon F. Johnson,
History of the Twelfth Infantry Regiment in World War II,
p. 309.

22
. “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” title of JDS story in
Nine Stories
.

Wild Nights—Wild Nights!

Were I with thee

Wild Nights should be

Our luxury!

Futile—the Winds—

To a Heart in port—

Done with the Compass—

Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden—

Ah, the Sea!

Might I but moor—Tonight—

In Thee!

—Emily Dickinson
¹

T
HE WAYS IN WHICH MY
father sought to reattach himself and characters to their moorings, before I was born, the ways he found to save them and himself from hell—“the suffering of being unable to love”—is of central interest to me, as his daughter and as a person who also has experienced her own mind “suddenly lurch and
teeter like insecure luggage on the overhead rack.” When and how my father and his characters reached out in a moment of personal crisis and re-established connection, or instead, did the reverse and bolted the door, became something I now looked at closely. How my father dealt with the real-life traumas of war, of anti-Semitism, of family; the vicissitudes of suffering, and his attempts at resolution throughout his life and work, began to reveal some familiar patterns.

I found out that in real life, Sergeant Salinger did not receive a redemptive letter or a hand out of hell from a young girl. Instead, he, like Sergeant X, met a young woman who, like the woman in the story, was a “low-level official in the Nazi party, but high enough by Army Regulations standards to fall into an automatic-arrest category.” Sergeant Salinger, himself, had arrested her. She and Jerry were married by summer’s end.

Given my father’s sense of duty and honor, as well as his deeply suspicious nature—he was indeed well cast in his role as interrogator—Sylvia, his first wife, must have been, as my mother said, an extraordinary woman. My aunt described Sylvia to me as a tall, thin woman with dark hair, pale skin, and blood-red lips and nails. She had a sharp, incisive way of speaking and was some sort of a doctor. My aunt said, “She was
very
German,” and gave me a dark look, chin tucked in, eyebrows raised as if she were peering over the top of bifocals and directly into my eyes for emphasis. My father told my mother that Sylvia, in contrast to Claire, was a real woman who knew her own mind and had accomplished something at a young age. He also vilified her as a terrible, dark woman of passion, an evil woman who bewitched him. My mother said he told her that Sylvia hated Jews as much as he hated Nazis, and she let him feel it. Their relationship, he said, was extremely intense, both physically and emotionally. As happened with many wartime marriages, their passion did not survive transplanting to America, where they moved in with his parents. Sylvia went back to Europe for good several months later. Aunt Doris said, “Mother didn’t like her.”

I knew my father had a war bride whom he jokingly referred to as “Saliva,” instead of Sylvia, but otherwise he was pretty untalkative about his homecoming, scattering a few details such as the hell of his hay fever at the time, as he held a handkerchief to his maddeningly
itchy nose and eyes during allergy season each summer. “It was like this only worse over there,” he’d tell me, blowing his nose and digging at his reddened eyes. More of the feelings, rather than the details, emerge in his story “The Stranger” (
Collier’s,
December 1, 1945) in which he tells us about Babe’s homecoming. Babe is suffering acutely from hay fever and battle fatigue. He is home physically, but can’t make the transition back to civilian life in his mind and emotions.

You don’t need to be the Regis Professor of Poetry for the poetry of this story to hit you squarely between the eyes. He uses language, here, like Basho’s frog
²
—a few words, and an image unfurls in the mind and the five senses, like the little clamshells we had when we were kids and you’d drop them, plop, into a glass of water, and the shell would open and a colored paper flower, hidden inside, would unfold and rise blooming, filling the glass.

Babe’s friend Vincent Caulfield has been killed in action. Babe, unlike Vincent, has made it home alive, and he decides to visit Vincent’s girl, bring her a poem Vincent wrote for her, and to tell her how he died. His sister Mattie, who is still ten years old, as she was in the story “Last Day of the Last Furlough,” set several years before when Babe left for war, accompanies him. He stands at Vincent’s girl’s door thinking that he shouldn’t have come at all.

The maid answers the door and goes to get Vincent’s girl. While they wait for her in the living room, Babe looks through a pile of records beside the phonograph.

His mind began to hear the old Bakewell Howard’s rough, fine horn playing. Then he began to hear the music of the unrecoverable years . . . when all the dead boys in the 12th Regiment had been living and cutting in on other dead boys on lost dance
floors: the years when no one who could dance worth a damn had ever heard of Cherbourg or Saint-Lô or Hürtgen Forest or Luxembourg.

Isn’t that just brilliant? She comes in the room and Babe introduces himself. They all go into her bedroom where the light is better. Vincent’s girl and Mattie sit on her bed, Babe in a chair facing them.

Babe crossed his long legs as most tall men do, laying the ankle on the knee. “I’m out. I got out,” he said. He looked at the clock in his sock, one of the most unfamiliar things in the new, combat-bootless world, then up at Vincent’s girl. Was she real? “I got out last week,” he said.

He starts to tell her about Vincent’s death, feeling the same urge that Philly Burns did in trying to explain to his wife, Juanita, that guys don’t really die all handsome and Hollywood, the way they do in the movies: it’s a lie, it wasn’t like that, and the lie isn’t fair to the men who suffered. Babe was there when Vincent was blown to pieces by mortar fire. When Vincent’s girl asks Babe what a mortar is, he’s torn between wanting to tell civilians the truth and keeping quiet about the whole damn thing. He gives up and hands her the poem Vincent wrote about her. He starts to apologize, but she tells him she’s glad he came anyway. Babe heads for the door quickly because he, too, is crying. He calms down in the elevator with Mattie, but outside on the street things are worse again:

The three long blocks between Lexington and Fifth were dull and noonish, as only that stretch can be in late August. A fat, apartment-house doorman, cupping a cigarette in his hand, was walking a wire-haired along the curb between Park and Madison.

Babe figured that during the whole time of the Bulge, the guy had walked that dog on this street every day. He couldn’t believe it. He could believe it, but it was still impossible. He felt Mattie put her hand in his. . . .

“Babe,” she said.

“What?”

“Are you glad to be home?”

“Yes, baby.”

“Ow! You’re hurting my hand.”

He relaxes his grip. The story ends, once again, with a hand stretched toward him helping him out of his private hell. He watches his little sister Mattie. “With her feet together she made the little jump from the curb to the street surface, then back again. Why was it such a beautiful thing to see?”
³

Why indeed? Just as the rage expressed by my father—both in his fiction and in real life—at WASP “Society,” country clubs, Ivy League schools, debutantes, and the like, becomes less a personal, private Salinger idiosyncrasy when looked at in the context of his life as a Jew or half-Jew growing up in New York in the twenties and thirties, so, too, I think, his wartime experiences and stories of Staff Sergeant Babe Gladwaller and Staff Sergeant X provide a context for
The Catcher in the Rye.
I’m not saying that the reader needs to know the background of the story to appreciate the book, I’m saying something much smaller, that
I
needed to understand the context and the connections to begin to make sense of the frightening, life-or-death emotional intensity evoked in both my dad and his character Holden by things that seem like minor aesthetic issues. I needed to understand how logic and proportion could go so awry sometimes in my relationship with him.

After reading the war stories, what had once seemed like foreign territory in
The Catcher
became, in many ways, a familiar story. While the traumas of war and death and dislocation are displaced in
The Catcher
—Nazis are replaced by “phonies” as the enemy—their ability to destroy lives and to wreak emotional havoc upon the survivors diminishes not a whit when storm troopers’ black uniforms are exchanged for professors’ tweeds.
⁴
The battlefield is gone, but when Holden calls out to his dead brother, Allie (who died at ten from leukemia), “Save me, Allie, save me!” as he feels himself “sinking down, down, down” into an abyss, terrified he won’t live to reach the curb at the far side of the street, he is in as desperate a fight for his life as was the boy in France. The ways in which Holden seeks to re-establish connection, to find a port in the storm, are familiar as well. When he decides to run away, like the “Little Indian” story of Sonny and like Lionel in “Down at the Dinghy,” he waits to say good-bye to his ten-year-old sister, Phoebe; and she, like Mattie for Babe, Esmé for X, and perhaps Sylvia for my father, gives him something to love, a way to reattach and go home again—“a beautiful thing to see.”

D
URING THE TIME MY FATHER
was finishing
The Catcher in the Rye
and working on “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” a story about an artist on the verge of a breakdown, he was, like his character, in a dark place, with his faculties only loosely intact. He was living in the apartment my mother described as dark and underwater-feeling, with black sheets and black furniture that, she said, seemed to match his depression. My mother said that, at the time, Jerry sank into “black holes where he could hardly move, hardly talk.”
⁵

Leila Hadley said that when she read “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” she was sure he had based the hero on himself. To say that my father based the hero on himself is a bit too straightforward, too linear and logical for the way this story is a reflection or refraction of my father’s life in the mirror world of his fiction; but I know what Ms. Hadley means. When I read this story, it rang so true, so much like my father, that it had the uncanny feeling of being real, a story about an uncle of mine or something, rather than a piece of fiction.

This story, “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” is a veritable template upon which a lifetime of my father’s and his characters’ likes and dislikes, their struggles to connect and their increasingly dreamlike, disconnected, abracadabra, otherworldly solutions to suffering are etched, indelibly, with an artist’s alchemy whereby stone takes life, and life turns to stone. It is in this story that I saw “as through a glass darkly” the makings of our inverted forest.

The young man in “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” is an artist who has just returned to New York after living in Paris for most of his life thus far. He is not adjusting well to being back and, like Babe, feels like “The Stranger.” The young man’s mother, with whom he was very close, has died, and he is sharing a hotel room with his stepfather, who is also bereft and floundering. He spends the fall doing a series of eighteen oil paintings, seventeen of which are self-portraits. When he comes across an ad in the paper for an art instructor at a Montreal correspondence school of the “Draw Binky” type, on impulse he applies and is accepted. As with Sergeant X, we never learn
his name, only his pseudonym—de Daumier-Smith—which he takes on when he applies for the art school job, claiming to be a nephew of Daumier. He is accepted, assigned three students, and given their application packets.