J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [32]
“What’s the matter, Mr. Burke? Don’t you like Charlie Chaplin none?” …
Burke says, “He’s all right. Only I don’t like no funny-looking little guys always getting chased by big guys. Never getting no girl, like. For keeps, like.”29
However, far from “never getting no girl,” on June 16, 1943, Charlie Chaplin married Oona O’Neill. They remained together until Chaplin died in 1977 and had eight children.*
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While in the service, Salinger developed the ability to counter misfortune by redirecting his energies. When rejected by love, he sought another romance or threw himself into writing. When frustrated by writing, he immersed himself in army duties. Denied military promotion, he became even more determined. The drive of his ambition left him no time to adequately deal with painful events. The same strength that allowed him to transfer his energies prevented him from properly managing his own insecurities, hurt, or feelings of loss. For this reason, Salinger’s words, whether spoken or written, often denied, or at least evaded, many of the feelings engendered by events. During the uneasy year of 1943, Salinger’s letters were rife with such evasion. His correspondence displayed a tendency to acknowledge major issues almost by subterfuge, subtly injecting a topic into the page and quickly exiting the subject. As a result, many of his 1943 letters to Whit Burnett and Herb Kauffman, while not willfully deceptive, are misleading and give an incomplete rendition of the year’s events and his true state of mind. This same tendency carried over from his personal correspondence into his professional work. He speaks of it in his 1959 story “Seymour—an Introduction” when he warns, “the thing to listen for, every time, with a public confessor, is what he’s not confessing to.”30
The year 1943 contained three major examples of the elusive nature of Salinger’s “confession.” First, there was his refusal to recognize the events regarding Oona. The few times he did address the issue, he denied romantic feelings that he had professed with passion only months before.31 The second was his awkward apology for “The Varioni Brothers,” a story he was secretly fond of that contained an inner message far more personal than he ever acknowledged. The third was perhaps the best example of the hit-and-run nature of Salinger’s writings: the Georgia Peach.
That spring, ignoring his failed romance with Oona O’Neill, Salinger wrote repeatedly of his continued desire to marry, citing a renewed courtship with an old girlfriend from New York who attended Finch Junior College. Nothing more is known of the Finch girl, and Salinger’s reluctance to use the telephone appears to have ended the relationship. However, that June, just as Oona was being married to Chaplin, Salinger told Whit Burnett that his continued bachelorhood was the result of distraction rather than Oona’s desertion, insisting that his work and persistent roving eye prevented him from settling down. As an example, he painted a scenario of walking into the post exchange on base at Bainbridge and immediately falling for the girl working there.32 He presented the scene hypothetically to disguise the truth. Reading Salinger’s rendition, it was unlikely that the editor could have realized that the event had in fact occurred. Here, as in many of his stories, it was the quietest of Salinger’s passages, the one easily overlooked, that contained the true message.
Laurene Powell was seventeen when she first met Private Salinger in the autumn of 1942. She worked at the post exchange of the Bainbridge Army Air Forces Base and was a striking, intelligent young woman. Her family still recalls her being an authentic “Georgia Peach,” an old-fashioned southern belle. Born and bred in Bainbridge, Laurene undoubtedly found the