Dream Catcher: A Memoir (7 page)

Re-seated, Mrs. Glass sighed, as she always sighed, in any situation, when cups of chicken broth were declined. But she had, so to speak, been cruising in a patrol boat down and up her children’s alimentary canals for so many years that the sigh was
in a sense a real signal of defeat . . . she had the particular facial expression that her eldest daughter, Boo Boo, had once described as meaning one of only two things: that she had just talked with one of her sons on the telephone or that she had just had a report, on the best authority, that the bowels of every single human being in the world were scheduled to move with perfect hygienic regularity for a period of one full week.

(
Zooey,
pp. 184–85)
²³

In my father’s fiction, there is never any doubt of the love the Glass children feel for their mother, Bessie. Nor did I ever doubt for a moment that in real life my father loved his mother; he was quite clear about that even though she sometimes drove him crazy. He would often tell me, in a tone of voice he reserved for those whom he respected, that Granny, though uneducated, “was no dope,” his way of acknowledging someone’s intelligence. He’d tell me stories of her good sense or her good taste; often, I might add, told by way of contrast to his father, whom he considered a great big dope, and never, to my knowledge, spoke of him with any respect. The report is unanimous from my aunt to my mother, to Grandpa’s business partners and my father’s classmates interviewed for various books and myriad articles: his mother “obviously adored her only son.” “They were
very
close.” As my aunt told me, “It was always Sonny and Mother, Mother and Sonny. Daddy always got the short end of the stick.” Perhaps there is such a thing as too close, “too close for comfort” as the saying goes, and hence the sense of intrusion, and the “delight” he remembers of “getting out from under their wing” and going away to school.

The one thing I know for certain about his going to military school is that it was not something that was forced on him against his will. He was not
sent
there. First of all, Granny wouldn’t force her son to do anything of the sort; it’s dangerous at military school—all those sabers and guns. Second of all, she wouldn’t have let Grandpa force him to go either.
There was no doubt, my aunt said, about who “wore the pants” in their house.

Once he decided he wanted to go, the mechanics of the move are less of a mystery. Hamilton, in his biography, notes that it was Mrs. Salinger and not her husband who took Doris and Sonny to look at the school, and it was she who met with the school representative when he came for a home visit. He cites this as evidence of tension between father and son. Certainly there was tension; however, I think the fact that she alone met with the school officials presents evidence as to the social climate rather than the familial one. It seems far more likely that she dealt with school officials for the same reason that I, alone, dealt with real estate agents and landlords when searching for an apartment in Boston during the mid-seventies when I was, briefly, married to an African American. I’d tell them that my husband was, unfortunately, out of town on business until the end of the month, and I’d sign the necessary papers. While I share my grandmother’s propensity to control things, let’s just say I doubt Granny felt it would be a great asset to her son’s chances of getting into Valley Forge for him to wear a great big sign on his backside that said, “Kick me, I’m Jewish.”

The stories he told me about his life at Valley Forge were about “characters” and “types” and little adventures. They were stories, in hindsight, devoid of affect. I heard about the time he, like Holden, lost the fencing team’s gear on the subway, and the time he and his friend Bill Dix sneaked out of the dorm to have breakfast in town. The pain and suffering I would later read in the story of Holden’s experience in boarding school were not mentioned in the stories my father told me (although, as I said, he told a friend at the time he was working on
The Catcher in the Rye
that he was writing an autobiographical story).

In the version my father told me of his world at seventeen, he knew he wanted to be—knew he
would
be—a writer. His mother was the “good guy” in the story, supporting her son in his wishes, whatever they might be. His mother knew her boy to be a genius; as Doris said, from his birth, Sonny was thought “perfect” and “could do no wrong.” History proved his mother right about his talent; however, at the time he was to finish high school, her belief was a matter of faith, rather than reason. My father often told me growing up that his father pressured him to learn the business of J. S. Hoffman and Co., importing Polish
meats and other high-end foods. This was always said with resentment, as well as with varying degrees of derision, further proof that Grandpa was a dope. I believed this unquestioningly.

When I became an adult, however, and began to delve into our family history on my own, I found out that Grandpa wasn’t quite the big dope my father always said he was. There was a plethora of good reasons for his concern. I certainly understand that when you’re a teenager who wants to devote himself to writing, and your father doesn’t understand and hassles you to spend a little time learning the family business, you think your father is a big dope. And it is really galling that you have to live at home because you can’t support yourself yet, and that makes him an even bigger dope and a “policeman,” as my father described to me his feelings, as a boy, about his own father, especially when it came to money. But most of us gain some perspective. I’m sure my grandfather asked him some really “dopey” questions such as how a young man, half-Jewish, during the depths of the Depression and heights of anti-Semitism,
²⁴
with no college degree, no training, no trade, would support himself, let alone a family.

Economically, this was a particularly bad time to be what my aunt called “neither fish nor fowl.” Contrary to the myth of America’s history of continual progress toward greater opportunities for its citizens, for Jews the clock was running backward in the twenties and thirties. In the 1920s, although Jews made up 26 percent of the population of New York City and were also by far the best-educated group in the community, 90 percent of white-collar openings went to non-Jews.
²⁵
As opportunities for employment narrowed for Jews in the Gentile world, Jewish professionals opened Jewish offices, with largely Jewish staff, serving primarily Jewish clientele. Large loans for businesses were obtained through Jewish sources, such as the Jewish “Bank of the United States” and the
Hebrew Loan Society. For the vast majority of Jewish immigrant working classes, however, the main source of assistance were societies called
landsmanshaftn
(hometown societies). These grassroots associations were organized according to immigrants’ European towns of origin, and provided a wide variety of religious, social, and cultural activities along with a range of relief services, financial assistance, and sick benefits. In their heyday, more than three thousand such hometown societies existed (the vast majority still recorded their committee minutes in Yiddish throughout the 1930s).
Landsmanshaftn
offered their members a source of community on American soil and an economic lifeline—the difference between hunger and food on the table, rags and clothing, homelessness and shelter—during hard times.
²⁶

My grandfather had ample reason to be concerned that his son go to a good college and train to be a professional (e.g., a doctor, lawyer, accountant) with real career opportunities or go straight into the family business.
²⁷
I knew how my father felt about the family business; he’d occasionally tell me stories about it. His reaction to the entire subject of higher education was something else again—no half-joking stories here—and the whole notion of “getting into a good college” has always been a minefield. He would, indeed, as he once said, “break out with a strange and hideous rash” at the mere mention of anything Ivy League. Truth be told, I thought he was a big bore on the subject, which struck
me, as a child and as a teenager, as a weird thing to get all het up about—like raving about state capitals or something—especially since it wasn’t so much about colleges in general as it was focused on the “good” ones or “prestigious” ones, most especially the Ivy League. He spoke of Ursinus, for example (a small college he attended for a year or so), with affection. I dismissed his “thing” about the Ivies as one of Daddy’s idiosyncratic hot spots, just one more in a man with quite his share of them. Common sense made me avoid the subject around him the same way you don’t wave a red flag at a bull.

When I finally read my father’s stories, there it was again: those villainous Ivy Leaguers, bastions of phonydom, one-dimensional, successful, cocksure, anti-landsmen;
goyim
like Lane Coutell, boyfriend of Franny Glass, or Tupper, her contemptible English professor, both of whom undermined her sense of place in the world and, ultimately, threatened her sanity. I was fascinated to find out that there were some real roots to this reaction of his. History doesn’t necessarily excuse, but it certainly provides a context and explanation. It turns out that when my father was growing up and coming of an age to consider college, some of the most outspoken, eloquent, egregious examples of people who, as my aunt said, “talked that way” about Jews were positively bedecked with Ivy. Dean Frederick Paul Keppel
²⁸
of Columbia University, for example, wrote of his concern that too many Jewish immigrants make Columbia “socially uninviting to students who come from homes of refinement.” Dartmouth president Ernest Hopkins
²⁹
said, “Any college which is going to base its admissions wholly on scholastic standing will find itself with an infinitesimal proportion of anything else than Jews eventually.”
³⁰
It was Harvard, however, whose Jewish population had grown from 6 percent of the student body in 1908 to 22 percent in 1922, that took the lead in proposing a solution to the “Jewish problem.” A. Lawrence Lowell,
³¹
President of Harvard, announced the establishment of numerical
quotas to lower the numbers of Jews at the university. Once Harvard took the lead, many of the nation’s most prestigious colleges and universities followed and established their own limits of no more than 3 to 16 percent Jews admitted to the entering class.
³²

Sarah Lawrence College, in Bronxville, New York—a town that kept Jews out until after the New York State Commission for Human Rights intervened in 1962—asked on its application, “Has your daughter been brought up to strict Sunday observance?” Columbia asked the applicant’s religious affiliation, if he or his parents had ever been known by another name, parents’ place of birth, mother’s full maiden name, and father’s occupation.

How one takes for granted today the precious words “without regard for race, creed, color, or national origin.” In my father’s day, it was equally taken for granted that these things were to be major factors in deciding an applicant’s suitability for housing, jobs, colleges, clubs, loans, and so on. Even when a Jew made it over the quota hurdle and gained admission to these colleges, he or she was confronted with a row of additional hurdles and barriers stretching to the vanishing point. Max Lerner (Yale, BA, 1923) said he and other Jewish classmates were basically “kept out of everything.”
³³
A contemporary wrote that at social gatherings such as the prom or the class-day tea, “the presence of Jews and their relatives ruins the tone which must be maintained if social standing is not to collapse.”

Myriad examples of anti-Jewish sentiments abound in statistics, articles, speeches, and conversations of the day. Yet what I found to be the most revealing and affecting when I read them were not the statistics nor the diatribes, but rather, the way people talked when they tried to say something
nice
about a Jew. We have on record, for example, professors’ letters of recommendation for historians Oscar Handlin, Bert Lowenberg, and Daniel Boorstin, then students, for jobs in higher education. They contain phrases like “has none of the offensive traits which people associate with his race,” “by temperament and spirit . . . measures up to the
whitest gentile I know,” and “He is a Jew, though not the kind to which one takes exception.” A professor at the University of Chicago wrote of his student, “He is one of the few men of Jewish descent who does not get on your nerves and really behaves like a gentile to a satisfactory degree.”
³⁴

English departments, for which my father reserves his most caustic vitriol, in both his real life and in his fiction, considered themselves to be bastions of Anglo-Saxon culture and, as such, were the least welcoming to Jews. When, for example, Max Lerner informed a college instructor with whom he was on
good
terms that he’d like to teach English at a university, the instructor replied, “Max, you can’t do this. You can’t teach literature. You have no chance of getting a position at any good college. You’re a Jew.” In 1939, when my father was taking a writing course in the evenings at Columbia, Lionel Trilling became the first Jew appointed to a tenure-tract position in English there. His wife, Diana Trilling, later wrote, “It is highly questionable whether the offer would have been made” had her husband borne the surname of his maternal grandfather, Cohen. When Trilling became assistant professor, a colleague stopped by to chat and expressed the department’s hope that the new appointee would not use this opportunity “as a wedge to open the English department to more Jews.”
³⁵

Such was the atmosphere when my father was graduated from military school. Ian Hamilton writes blithely of that time in my father’s life as if there were no constraints, only matters of choice and taste:

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 had 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 [a bad grade in high school] 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.
(Hamilton,
Salinger
, p. 37)