Dream Catcher: A Memoir (8 page)

Jerome David Salinger, Regis Professor of Literature at Sarah Lawrence. We need only wonder. He could have changed his name, but there was still the little problem with the nose and that darkness. In 1936, my father began his freshman year at NYU. That spring, regardless of his father’s objections and of the economic realities of the day, he dropped out of college and took a job on a cruise ship. In the fall, however, Grandpa’s wishes prevailed and my father went to Vienna, ostensibly to learn the family business, and to polish up his high school German and French by doing some translating for one of Hoffman’s partners. I heard little, growing up, about the family business other than as a joke his dopey father got him into. The Jewish family he stayed with in Vienna, however, was another story. He
loved
this family.
³⁶
And from all accounts the feeling was mutual. He often told me the mother used to call him Jerrila and explained that this was a Yiddish way of expressing affection. I’d have been called Peggila, he told me. I wish I had met them, but they all were killed in concentration camps before I was born.

A
USTRIA FELL TO
H
ITLER ON
March 12, 1938. My father was probably out of Vienna by February, but there is no way he could have been unaware of the Nazi gangs that raided the Jewish quarter where he lived that winter. He only told me about the loving family, not the horror.

I don’t know how he was occupied that summer, but in the fall of ’38 he attended Ursinus College, in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. The college was founded in 1869 by the German Reformed Church and served the
Christian, middle-class Pennsylvania Dutch from nearby suburban areas. Go figure. My father had only good things to say about Ursinus and its lack of pretension. I never thought to ask why he left after one semester.

In the spring of 1939, he enrolled in a Friday-evening writing class at Columbia taught by Whit Burnett, the editor of
Story
magazine. Burnett supported the young writer’s aspirations and gave him his first break. His story “The Young Folks,” a piece about some debutante “types” home from college for the holidays, attending a house party, appeared in the March-April 1940 issue of
Story.
Making a living as a short-story writer in those days was a long shot, but by no means an impossible dream. Even during the Depression, entertainment sold, and magazines were paying what Brendan Gill called a “king’s ransom” for stories. He said, “It’s 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.”
Collier’s, Liberty,
and
The Saturday Evening Post
were paying around $2,000 (about $26,500 in today’s dollars) for a short story.

In the summer of 1940, my father was out of town and spent time on the Cape and in Canada. He wrote to a friend, Elizabeth Murray, the sister of a boy he had gone to school with, that he had started work on an autobiographical novel. The following summer he sold a one-page story called “The Hang of It” about an army brat coming of age and following in his father’s footsteps, which appeared in the July 12 issue of
Collier’s. Esquire
followed with “The Heart of a Broken Story.”
The New Yorker
bought his short story introducing Holden Caulfield, “A Slight Incident off Madison,” then changed their minds about publishing it, holding the story until 1945.

The next story to appear in print was a shot aimed directly at the heart of New York WASP “Society” with its exclusive, exclusionary clubs, charity balls, colleges, and social life. “The Long Debut of Lois Taggett” appeared in the September-October 1942 issue of
Story
magazine, Whit Burnett’s domain. It follows almost as a sequel to “The Young Folks” in tone and character, but it is many shades darker. A New York debutante-type phony is put through purgatory, a hazing as it were, by the author of the story, who at story’s end allows Lois, cleansed and purged, to join the elite club of non-phonies, Salinger’s
landsmanshaftn.
It seems a reversal, or inverse reflection of the true facts
of anti-Semitic culture of the day, where Jewish academics, such as Boorstin and Lerner, were deemed acceptable only if “purged” of their Jewishness. It begins:

Lois Taggett was graduated from Miss Hascomb’s School . . . and the following autumn her parents thought it was time for her to come out, charge out, into what they called Society. So they gave her a five-figure, la-de-da Hotel Pierre affair, and save for a few horrible colds and Fred-hasn’t-been-well-lately’s, most of the preferred trade attended. . . . That winter Lois did her best to swish around Manhattan with the most photogenic of the young men who drank scotch-and-sodas in the God-and–Walter Winchell section of the Stork Club. . . . In the spring, Lois’ Uncle Roger agreed to give her a job as a receptionist in one of his offices. It was the first big year for debutantes to Do Something.

Lois Taggett breaks one of my father’s personal “ten commandments,” which I grew up hearing about in many an emotional hellfire-and-brimstone lecture from him: Thou shalt not “dabble” in the arts. I cringed as I read about Lois’s amateur foray into a course or two at Columbia. My father, in real life, could be brought to the point of almost foaming incoherency when confronted with anyone, but most especially an Ivy League “type,” usually a woman, amusing herself by taking a course in literature or art. It is sacrilege, defiling, to approach this sacred domain with other than a monk’s dedication.
³⁷

Quite unexpectedly, Lois falls in love with a man outside her own circle, “tall handsome Bill Tedderton, a press agent.” They marry, she for love, he for her money.

The Taggetts didn’t do very much about it. It wasn’t fashionable any longer to make a row if your daughter preferred the iceman to that nice Astorbilt boy. Everybody knew, of course, that press agents [or writers] were icemen. Same thing.

Several months into the marriage, Bill Tedderton discovers to his astonishment that he has fallen in love with Lois. After a short interlude of marital bliss, he finds himself burning her with a cigarette, loving her deeply; and a few weeks later, never loving her more, smashing his golf club down on her foot.
³⁸
He pleads passionately with her to take him back, he’ll see a psychiatrist, he didn’t know what he was doing. Lois divorces him.

She eventually marries a dull, unattractive guy with all the right society credentials. Once again, a year or so later, danger arises in the form of emotional attachment, when she finds herself head over heels in love with her baby. We are treated to a scene of baby and mommy bliss, broken suddenly by the voice of the narrator, who, like the voice of God’s judgment, pronounces: “Then finally she made it.” Her long debut has come to an end, she has come out of it and is no longer a phony. “Everybody seemed to know about it,” the narrator tells us. “Women in general began to look more closely at Lois’ face than at her clothes. . . . It happened about six months after young Thomas Taggett Curfman tossed peculiarly in his sleep and a fuzzy woolen blanket snuffed out his little life.”

T
HE PRICE OF ENTRY
into this writer’s chosen elect, the elite
landsmanshaftn
of non-phonies, involves neither money nor background nor education: he requires the sacrifice of her firstborn son. Something about this story gave me the creeps as I read it, as though a cold hand had somehow reached across the boundary of fiction into our life as a family. It was with a vague sense of foreboding that I continued to search out our family stories. I was beginning to feel like one combing the woods for missing persons, dreading lifeless, forensic success as much as the failure of continued unknowing.

1
. In her old age, she suffers from macular degeneration.

2
. My father’s nickname, Sonny, was given to him at birth by his parents. Ian Hamilton, in his book
In Search of J. D. Salinger,
claimed that it was at the McBurney School, which my father attended in ninth grade, that “he was nicknamed ‘Sonny’ by his chums, perhaps with a hint of sarcasm.” Please,
chums?
On the West Side of Manhattan, perhaps? Several of my dad’s army buddies in the foxholes and bloody battlefields of World War II were referred to, by the same scholar, as his
colleagues.
“Let me confer with my colleague, Rocco,” Jerry said. “Oh, Rocco, would you be so kind as to pass me the ammo?” “Right-o, Sonny old chum,” Rocco expostulated laconically. . . . I can’t stand it.

3
. My aunt would later send my son an Indian costume, complete with suede leggings and feathered warbonnet, for his fourth birthday.

4
. In the early twenties, when Lionel and Sonny were young, many of the notices by maids seeking employment in the newspapers specified Gentile households only. “Colored woman wants week work; neat; with references; no Jewish people” (Leonard Dinnerstein,
Anti-Semitism in America,
Oxford University Press, 1944, p. 205). One maid interviewed said, “If the Jews killed the Lord and Master, what won’t they do with a poor nigger like me” (Dinnerstein, p. 198).

5
. There is something rather lovely about taking the name of the prophetess Miriam, who sings the triumphant song in Exodus 15:21: “Sing to the LORD, for he has triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea.” The
Oxford Annotated Bible
dates this song fragment to the time of an eyewitness to the event in which Pharaoh’s army drowned in the Red Sea while pursuing the Jewish people escaping to freedom from slavery under Pharaoh. Scholars agree it is one of the oldest surviving fragments of Scripture. The name Miriam is thought to mean “revolution.”

6
. For comprehensive yet wonderfully readable documentation see chapter 4: “Racism and Anti-Semitism in Progressive America, 1900–1919” in Dinnerstein,
Anti-Semitism in America.
See also the memoir of an Irish American woman who married a Jew from Chicago: “The Experience of a Jew’s Wife,”
The American Magazine
78 (December 1914): pp. 49–86.

7
. Holden talks about his “grandfather from Detroit, that keeps calling out the numbers of the streets when you ride on the goddam bus with him” (
Catcher,
p. 154)—
shanda fur die goyim,
to do something embarrassing to Jews in a place where non-Jews can observe it.

8
. According to Orthodox law, you are not Jewish unless your mother is; the inheritance is matrilineal. One way of trying to find out without asking bluntly “Are you Jewish?” is to ask what your mother’s maiden name is.

9
. Sort of like excommunication, or the WASP favorite, disowning or disinheriting, but more to the bone,
sitting shiva
is to perform the ritual seven days of mourning following a funeral: it is a declaration that the person is dead.

10
. Also documented in a letter to Elizabeth Murray (Salinger letters archives, Library of Congress).

11
. From 1890 to 1914, a total of 16.5 million people immigrated to America.

12
. Dinnerstein,
Anti-Semitism,
p. 59.

13
. “Why Europe Leaves Home” by Kenneth L. Roberts appeared first as a series of articles in
The Saturday Evening Post
before it was published as a book in 1922.

14
. Dinnerstein,
Anti-Semitism,
p. 126.

15
. Beth S. Wenger,
New York Jews and the Great Depression
(Yale University Press, 1996), especially her chapter “The Spiritual Depression,” about the assault on Jewish self-image during these years.

16
. “I Was a Jew,”
The Forum
103 (March 1940): p. 10. See also “I Married a Jew,”
The Atlantic Monthly
163 (January 1939): pp. 38–46; “I Married a Gentile,”
The Atlantic Monthly
163 (March 1939): pp. 321–26. Also, Dinnerstein,
Anti-Semitism,
p. 293.

17
. Helen Reid, the wife of the owner of the
New York Herald Tribune,
for example, expressed her fears of Jewish migration and its effect not just on property values, but on the values held by her sons: “I hate the thought of [my] Whitelaw and Brownie growing up with nothing but Jewish neighbors around” (Dinnerstein,
Anti-Semitism,
p. 93).