J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [35]
At Nashville, Salinger became depressed. His frustration over his assignment and rank swiftly led to a general bitterness with army life. He hated being a mere noncommissioned officer and found that his mundane responsibilities were sapping his energy.37 Most of all, he was lonely.
At Bainbridge, which he missed, he’d had a handful of close friends. In Nashville, he had no one. He claimed to like the soldiers at Nashville but felt removed from them. Increasingly weary and cynical, he began to feel removed even from himself. He wanted to go home.38
In July, Salinger was again transferred, this time to Patterson Field in Fairfield, Ohio, where he was designated staff sergeant and put in charge of a ditch-digging operation. Needless to say, the appointment did little to lighten his gloom. When not dragging himself through paperwork, he spent his days barking orders at recruits and trying to instill if not fear, at least compliance. This forced him to assume a false menace and to conceal his literary bent from his soldiers: they would have been less likely to obey such a person.
After drilling recruits during the day, Salinger spent his nights quietly writing. At Nashville, he attempted a bizarre fiction entitled “Paris” about a Frenchman who kidnaps Adolf Hitler by sealing him into a trunk, a plotline no publisher would touch.39 But excited over the appearance of “The Varioni Brothers” in The Saturday Evening Post on July 17, he immediately sent them two more stories, both rejected and now lost. One was entitled “Rex Passard on the Planet Mars,” which Salinger sent to Story after its rejection by the Post, to similar effect. The other, “Bitsy,” was among Salinger’s favorites. He described it as being about a girl who reached for people’s hands under tables, but Salinger’s story descriptions were often incomplete and sometimes misleading. After the Post rejected “Bitsy,” it too was sent off to Story, which declined it because of its depiction of an alcoholic.
As the year developed, the scope of Salinger’s literary interests began to broaden. Seeking solitude when on leave, he often traveled to nearby Dayton, cloistering himself in the Hotel Gibbons, where, in a shift toward literature more complex than that of his fellow authors Ring Lardner and Sherwood Anderson, he turned to the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy.
Foremost in Salinger’s mind, though, was his own novel. After constructing a number of stories about Holden Caulfield, he wavered between either tying them together in one complete work or presenting them as a collection of separate short stories. By the summer of 1943, Salinger seems to have made a decision. “I know the boy I’m writing about so well,” he declared to Burnett. “He deserves to be a novel.” Burnett was more than pleased by the decision.
Salinger’s renewed commitment to serious writing after the earlier stories of 1943 is best demonstrated by “Elaine,” which he probably began in the early summer. Salinger attempted to write the story commercially enough for publication in the Post but soon found himself agonizing over each line and constantly redrawing its details. Once he had completed “Elaine,” he rightly recognized it as his finest work to date and became possessive of it. The story represents a further stage in Salinger’s exploration of innocence and was undoubtedly influenced by his new nighttime friends, the great Russian authors.
“Elaine” is the story of a beautiful girl slightly slow on the uptake who is set adrift in a world anxious to consume her. Good-natured, sweet, and trusting, Elaine Cooney is so intellectually challenged that she requires more than nine years to complete eighth grade. After her graduation, she is sent out into the adult world, where her only anchors are her mother and grandmother, guardians too distracted by their own escape into the fantasy of movies to notice Elaine’s shortcomings or the impending dangers