J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [11]
On March 9, 1938, Salinger boarded the Ile de France at Southampton to return to the United States. Secure once again in his parents’ Park Avenue apartment, far from the tensions of Europe, he was happy to be home. Maxwell’s later observation, though, contained more than an element of truth. Salinger’s life might not have been affected by Europe the way that his father had hoped, he may not have returned any less aimless than when he left, but after living among those whose lives were so vastly different from his own, lives that were a constant struggle or in constant peril, he learned to appreciate people with whom he would previously have had little in common. In future years, when Salinger would fight in Germany during the Second World War, this rearrangement of attitudes was especially evident. While living in Europe during 1937–1938, Salinger came to embrace German culture, the German language, and the German people, and he learned to distinguish between Germans worthy of admiration and the Nazis among them.
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That autumn, Salinger enrolled at Ursinus College, situated in rural Pennsylvania not far from Valley Forge Military Academy. Apart from its familiar location, the college was an unlikely destination for Salinger. Ursinus was sponsored by the German Reformed Church, and many of Salinger’s schoolmates were from a Pennsylvania Dutch background. Students at Ursinus had to wear name tags and exchange greetings when approaching each other on campus. A small, isolated place, Ursinus was a world away from Salinger’s complex upbringing on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
The effect of a privileged Jewish boy from New York being in this small college enclave must have been extraordinary. While many of Salinger’s Ursinus classmates later claimed to barely remember him, others recalled him with sullen resentment. These were usually Salinger’s male classmates. Those who had the fondest memories of Jerry were invariably women (which might explain the glowering attitude of Ursinus’s male students). By the time Salinger began classes at Ursinus, he was almost twenty and had developed into a handsome young man with a mischievous smile. Six feet two and with a slim build, he stood out in a crowd. His fingers were long, if nicotine-stained and nail-bitten. His complexion was olive-toned and his hair almost black. His most memorable attribute, though, appears to have been his eyes, which were deep, penetrating, and dark. All this added up to an almost exotic look for Ursinus in 1938, and the women loved it. Forty-seven years later, one Ursinus alumna recalled:
Jerry was not an easily forgettable character. He was a handsome, suave and sophisticated New Yorker in a black Chesterfield coat … we had never seen anything quite like it. We were enchanted by his biting and acerbic humor.… Most of the girls were mad about him at once.21
Besides beguiling the women, Salinger pursued his other interests with a newfound enthusiasm. Of the eight courses in which he was enrolled, four were related to language and writing: English literature, French, and two different English composition courses. Joining the college newspaper, The Ursinus Weekly, he soon had his own column. Initially called “Musings of a Social Soph: The Skipped Diploma,” it was not long before the name was changed to “J.D.S.’s The Skipped Diploma.” These articles consisted of Jerry’s comments on a variety of campus topics ranging from glib blurbs about college life to long and invariably sarcastic theater reviews. Already, he was routinely criticizing novels for being “phony.”
On one occasion, he took a swipe at the author Margaret Mitchell: “For Hollywood’s sake, it would be well for the authoress of ‘Gone With the Wind’ to rewrite same, giving Miss Scarlett O’Hara either one slightly crossed eye, one bucked tooth, or one size-nine shoe.”22 In another “Book Dept.” review, he was similarly dismissive of his later