Dream Catcher: A Memoir (10 page)

My father’s kind of hero was not the handsome, fearless guy so often seen in the movies of the day, an image that he, through his characters,
disparages at length in his war stories. One of the men he admired most in the army was a nameless sergeant who did the right thing simply because it was the right thing to do. Private Salinger had applied to Officer Candidate School and was awaiting his orders to transfer to a language and intelligence corps. One Friday, late in the day, his orders came through. He was told to report for duty at some mechanical repair corps. He knew a mistake had been made (our whole family cringed anytime Daddy so much as touched a tool—we knew it meant something was going to break, usually him—several ribs, a finger, and so on), and he went to the desk sergeant in charge of such things. It was late in the afternoon and the man, as Daddy describes him—I can see him as if I had been there—had his hair all slicked back (Daddy passes his hand over the side of his head slicking back his hair as he tells the story), shoes polished, all ready to go out for a night on the town. This was the army, a war was on in Europe soon to be joined by us, and this clerk had a date to meet in town. Private Salinger showed him his papers and said there was some mistake, and the man quietly took off his overcoat, sat down, and spent the next hour or more diligently getting to the bottom of it, for no recognition, no personal benefit, just because it was the right thing to do. By the time he detected the error and corrected it, he had missed his train into town. My father will never forget him.

The stories my father wrote for the magazines during the war have the same ring to them. As in real life where new recruits were learning life-or-death tips for survival, the characters in his stories, too, reflect this change from civilian concerns to those of a soldier. Gone from his writing is the overt preoccupation with civilian society’s saints and sinners, the in-crowd and the out, the phonies and the elite. These concerns appear in an indirect way, or, may I say, a more subtle, effective way. Perhaps this is his daughter speaking, as one sensitive to being lectured by a parent; but even his characters express an awareness of this didactical tendency. Zooey acknowledged of his whole family, “We don’t talk, we hold forth. We don’t converse, we expound. At least
I
do. The minute I’m in a room with somebody who has the usual number of ears, I either turn into a goddam
seer
or a human hatpin.”
¹
I had heard my father say this about himself long before I ever read
Zooey,
but, as each acknowledges,
it’s not something he can control. My father’s remorse, the morning after, for an evening of this kind of behavior rings much as a confirmed alcoholic’s regret for his behavior. A mixture of sadness, embarrassment, apologies made, but without the hope or promise of turning over a new leaf. There is a real sense in his Glass stories, as in his real life, of its being something beyond his control, a flaw that is part of his being. Not that his judgment or lecture is flawed, mind you, the embarrassment is due to the fact that he can’t keep his mouth shut about it.

In his early army stories, however, there is much more story than lecture, and, as I said, a new subtlety, or gentleness really, with which his usual concerns are brought forth. Most striking of all, to me, is that in those army stories, the characters actually have real friends. There is “Babe” Gladwaller, who, in “Last Day of the Last Furlough,”
²
tells his friend and fellow soldier Vincent Caulfield, “I never knew about friendship until the Army,” or Philly Burns, in “Death of a Dogface,”
³
who tells his wife Juanita, “I met more good guys in the Army than I ever knowed when I was a civilian.” In my father’s books, however, one finds instead of friendship, relations between guru and seeker, as in “Teddy” and the later stories about Seymour, or between the living and the dead, as in
The Catcher in the Rye
where Phoebe challenges her brother, Holden, to name anyone he likes who’s living, or when Franny similarly charges Zooey with the same question, and both are forced to admit that outside the immediate family they can’t name a single living person—though the list of dead people they’d give their right arm to meet is full up. My father has, himself, on many occasions told me the same thing, that the only people he really respects are all dead.

The other thing that amazed me, as a person who had grown up hearing from my father a relentlessly pessimistic view of the possibilities of happiness in marriage—any marriage—as well as the worse-than-dismal state of his relationship with my mother, is the brief appearance,
in just two stories, “Wake Me When it Thunders”
⁴
and “Death of a Dogface,” of a husband and wife who see eye to eye, imperfectly, humanly, but they like what they see. What I didn’t realize on first reading them is that, in each of these stories, the husband and his wife are both intelligent but uneducated. The dialect, flawless as usual, makes clear their social status without any sense of making fun of it. That, too, is very like my father; he never lacked respect for local farmers who had something to teach him even though their language might be full of
ain’t
s and the like. He was merciless, however, on those who tried to make their language sound “tonier” by using, or rather misusing, words that have a sophisticated sound to the unsophisticated ear. “Always use the simplest word possible to say what you’re trying to say” was his adage. Only use a less simple word if you
really
need to in order to describe accurately what you’re talking about.

Flawed couples, human couples, in these two stories manage to work toward mutual understanding, love, and respect. Philly Burns, for example, is back from the war and explains to Juanita, his wife, who loves going to Hollywood war movies, why he can’t stand them. He tells her the story of his real-life experience of war, and how the movies are a lie. In Hollywood stories, he says:

You see a lot of real handsome guys always getting shot pretty neat, right where it don’t spoil their looks none, and they always got plenty of time, before they croak, to give their love to some doll back home, with who in the beginning of the pitcher, they had a real serious misunderstanding about what dress she should ought to wear to the college dance. . . . Then you see the dead guy’s hometown, and around a million people, including the mayor and the dead guy’s folks and his doll, and maybe the President, all around the guy’s box, making speeches and wearing medals and looking spiffier in mourning duds than most folks do all dolled up for a party.

Philly tells his wife a real story about a real hero, his sergeant, who happened to be a particularly ugly guy (hence the original title, “Death of a Dogface”), not Hollywood material at all, whose men respected him above all others. When he died, he had his jaw blasted off and he received four other terrible, ugly holes in various places, trying to save some new recruits during the bombing of Pearl Harbor. As the story ends, Philly tells us:

He died all by himself, and he didn’t have no messages to give to no girl or nobody, and there wasn’t nobody throwing a big classy funeral for him here in the States, and no hot-shot bugler blowed taps for him.

The only funeral Burke got was when Juanita cried for him when I read her Frankie’s letter and when I told her again what I knowed. Juanita, she ain’t no ordinary dame. Don’t never marry no ordinary dame, bud. Get one that’ll cry for a Burke.

This kind of respect and meeting of the minds between husband and wife never again appears in my father’s stories. As he turns to the middle-class characters of his novels, it seems that education somehow works as an impediment to being landsmen; the elite world of prep schools and Ivy League colleges creates islands of isolated strangers who can’t connect, lonely men who can’t find a landsman, certainly not in a lover or spouse.

Reading the stories my father wrote when he was a soldier had, for me, the bittersweet poignancy of a Requiem Mass. Something very human bloomed briefly and died,
⁵
and although his work and life passed on to other realms such as those of the prescient,
Herrlichkeit
Teddy and Seymour, whom we meet walking open-eyed to their deaths, the change to his preoccupation with
Übermenschen
both in his fiction and in his life left behind no human lap to sit on, no precious walks and talks, soldier to soldier, no warm arms to hold me, no familiar Daddy smell—a mingling of applewood smoke from the fireplace in his study, old woolen sweaters, and his Balkan Sobranie pipe tobacco—to comfort
me. When I read his novels, the soldier, the father I knew and loved and admired—no that’s not right—
worshiped
as a child was missing. It was such a pleasure to discover his old stories, those he said he chose to let “die a natural death” in these old magazines. I read them with affection and recognition: that’s the Daddy I like to remember.

E
ARLY IN
1943, Salinger was posted to a cadet classification squadron at a base near Nashville, Tennessee. He wrote to Colonel Baker again to ask his help with Officer Candidate School, telling him that he’d been accepted but still hadn’t been called up. That fall, he was assigned a job in public relations at Patterson Field in Fairfield, Ohio. His orders finally came through, and in October of ’43, he was transferred to Fort Holabird, Maryland, to train as a special agent in counter-intelligence, where he would put to good use his own intelligence and the German and French he’d learned at Valley Forge, and please, God, for the Allies’ sake, no tools.

A story my father told me many times is about what happened when he went home to say good-bye just before shipping out for England, where he and eight hundred other special agents would receive specific D-Day training and their assignments to fighting units. He didn’t want anyone to accompany him to the ship for an emotional good-bye. He just wanted a quiet leave-taking at home and forbade his mother from coming down to the ship to see him off. Later, as he was marching with his battalion on the way to the ship, he suddenly glimpsed her. She was following along, hiding behind lampposts so he wouldn’t see her.

While in England, he sold two stories to the magazines about a GI’s last visit home and leave-taking before shipping out. Here, my father gets a chance to “fix” things and rewrite history the way he would have wanted it to happen. And, of course, in one of the great joys of fiction writing, he also gets to control his mother: no more hiding behind lampposts.

The first story of leave-taking is called “Once a Week Won’t Kill You.”
⁶
We are now in typical Salinger territory: husbands and wives who have no meeting of the minds whatsoever, and the search for a landsman within the man’s boyhood family. The story opens with the man packing to ship out for the war in the morning. Despite his pretty,
blond wife’s babbling presence, he is essentially alone. The real connection and important leave-taking is between the man and his aunt, who is his closest relative since his parents died when he was a young boy. She is terrific, one wants to read more about her, but it’s a short story. They have a marvelous conversation, then he has to tell her that he has to go to war. He’s nervous about how she’ll take the news.

“ ‘I knew you’d have to,’ said his aunt, without panic, without bitter-sentimental reference to ‘the last one.’ She was wonderful, he thought. She was the sanest woman in the world.” The conversation takes a slightly disturbing turn, and as he leaves to go, he makes his wife promise once again to take his aunt to the movies. “Once a week won’t kill you,” he tells her.

The second story about leave-taking, “Last Day of the Last Furlough,” is much longer, and with a different cast of characters, but in one central way it is the same: the mother, like the aunt, takes the news on the chin. In this story we see the last appearance in his fiction of friendship and brotherhood, a
landsmanshaftn
of equals beyond the glass confines of one’s own family. I wish that this had survived and flourished in my father’s own life; our life as a family would have been so much richer. This was not to be. Instead, his search for landsmen led him increasingly to relations in two dimensions: with his fictional Glass family, or with living “pen pals” he met in letters, which lasted until meeting in person when the three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood presence of them would, with the inevitability of watching a classic tragedy unfold, invariably sow the seeds of the relationship’s undoing.

In “Last Day of the Last Furlough,” John F. “Babe” Gladwaller Jr., same rank and serial number (ASN 32325200) as Jerome “Sonny” Salinger, is about to be sent overseas. Babe’s army buddy Vincent Caulfield is visiting. Vincent has just received notice that his kid brother, Holden, the one “who got kicked out of all those schools,” is missing in action. Vincent tells Babe’s ten-year-old sister, Mattie, that he, too, has a sister just her age. Vincent kids around with Mattie in a really nice, funny scene—just the way my father kids around. Later, in Babe’s room, Vincent says: