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By Root 1475 0

For the first time, Salinger appeared to have suffered homesickness, lamenting that he would rather be north “about a thousand miles.” Bainbridge, however, would provide Salinger with an opportunity similar to the one he had found at Valley Forge. Its mundane routine gave him time to write, and he was prolific there. The length of time that he spent in Georgia provided stability and the leisure to scrutinize others in depth, perhaps for the first time. This, too, would show itself in his writing. He even found romance in the sleepy town across the river.

Salinger had been promoted to an instructor in the Officers, First Sergeants, and Instructors of the Signal Corps. Bainbridge was home to the U.S. Army Air Corps Basic Flying School, where he was to teach. Although he had pursued the appointment after being turned down by the Officer Candidate School, Salinger was mildly surprised when it actually came. He was not mechanically inclined but still found himself teaching others the workings of an airplane.

While he spent his days instructing recruits and training pilots, he found his nights free and returned to writing. Although he had written little since being drafted, his army experience caused him to reconsider his work. Changes in environment and new friendships with soldiers from diverse backgrounds provided fresh creative insights. He had been anxious to publish “The Long Debut of Lois Taggett” since its completion the previous year, but when it finally appeared in the September–October issue of Story, he claimed that he now found it “boring.”15

Burnett was relieved by Salinger’s return to writing, but he still feared losing his prime prospect to military life and pressured him to produce more. He also approached Dorothy Olding on a number of occasions, requesting that she “sound him out about a book.” “I am very much interested in Salinger’s turning his hand to a novel,” Burnett wrote, “if he is not too busy.”16

Although both Burnett and Olding were keen to see Salinger continue working on the Holden Caulfield book, Salinger was unable to offer them the reassurance they sought. In late 1942, he informed both that though he had again taken up writing, his army duties prevented him from resuming the novel; that would require much more time than he had available. If the opportunity presented itself in the future, he promised, he would consider continuing the book.17 In fact, once Salinger had settled at Bainbridge, he began to write vigorously. When he replied to Burnett and Olding regarding the novel, he was working on at least four separate short stories.

In September, when he was still experiencing regret and homesickness after arriving at Bainbridge, Salinger’s thoughts turned to Oona O’Neill. He wrote to Oona, perhaps on his first night in Georgia, telling her that he now realized how much he loved and missed her. This was the first of many letters that he would send her from Bainbridge. Small novellas in their own right (some were fifteen pages long) and written almost daily, Salinger’s love letters were crammed with both romance and irony. Oona was flattered and intrigued by the letters and showed them off to her friends, especially Carol Marcus and Gloria Vanderbilt. Their feelings about both Salinger and his correspondence appear to have been split. This “Jerry” boy of Oona’s, they deduced, seemed to have two personalities: sentimental and cheeky.

Truman Capote related Oona’s friends’ reactions to Salinger’s letters in his unfinished novel Answered Prayers. According to Capote’s gossipy account, Carol Marcus considered them “sort of love-letter essays, very tender, tenderer than God. Which is a bit too tender.” None of this would have bothered Salinger, who thought Marcus and Vanderbilt strange and dull.

Carol Marcus’s engagement to William Saroyan—an author Salinger admired—was almost ruined by Salinger’s letters (and by her own audacity). Saroyan had recently been drafted into the service, putting Carol into the unenviable position of having to write to a famous author in order to maintain their relationship.