J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [43]
He claimed to have made a number of conscious resolutions to be calmer and kinder in future, not only to others but also to his characters. When he felt vulnerable, his instinct had always been to turn to sarcasm and aloofness. In his present situation, crowded together with nervous soldiers uncertain of the future, that instinct worked against him and he learned the benefits of displays of tolerance and camaraderie. Still, there is no reason to believe that Salinger’s self-assessment was not sincere. On a daily basis, Salinger came into contact with British soldiers and civilians whose lives had been ravaged by war. Only the coldest of men would not have undergone an examination of his life and attitudes.
Psychological changes in reaction to war are the basis of a story that Salinger wrote in England and titled “The Children’s Echelon.”13 No matter how much he worked the story, he remained unsure of its quality. Many of his attempts while in England were failures, both aesthetically and in publishing terms, and this story was possibly his least successful. It was inspired by Ring Lardner’s “I Can’t Breathe,” which had been written as a series of diary entries. Salinger initially disliked the format. So, when he began his own version, he wrote it in the third person. Dissatisfied, he returned to the story and rewrote it, this time in a style dangerously similar to Lardner’s. When completed, the work ran to twenty-six pages and 6,000 words, by far the longest story he had written.
The diary installments follow the life of Bernice Herndon, an immature eighteen-year-old desperate to appear grown up to the outside world. With the war escalating in the background, she calculatingly changes her opinion about everything she mentions: her friends, her family, and the war itself. But the changes are superficial. Believing herself immune to the fate of her friends, whose husbands die in combat as the story progresses, Bernice secretly marries an unattractive army private named Royce Dittenhauer, largely to make herself feel mature.
The veiled stagnancy of Bernice’s outlook is displayed in the story’s most interesting scene. Strolling through Central Park and commenting on how “lovely” everything is, Bernice settles down at the carousel to watch the “darling” children. There, her eye is caught by a little boy riding the carousel and wearing a blue suit and beanie. This section is so evocative of the later one in The Catcher in the Rye that, at first glance, they appear to be replicas. Yet although the settings are the same, Bernice Herndon is the very opposite of Holden Caulfield. Unlike Holden, whose accepting anticipation of children tumbling from the carousel in his own scene signifies genuine change, Bernice almost screams out loud when the boy nearly falls off his horse.14
When “The Children’s Echelon” appeared before Burnett for approval, it met with the most scathing critique ever suffered by a Salinger work. Burnett himself summarized the story as being about a “dumb girl in love with the same kind of guy,” adding that it was “somewhat trivial, but not bad.” Someone else at Story added that no one would believe that a girl could possibly be that dumb. The magazine’s final pronouncement was scorching, declaring that “In these times it would be a waste of paper to print the story.”15
The story survives only through its submission by 1946 to a collection of Salinger works which was itself never published. “The Children’s Echelon” does not end there. In 1947, Salinger drew upon it liberally to write “A Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All,”