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very few arrests left to be made in our section,” he writes. “We’re now picking up children under ten if their attitudes are snotty.” He also claimed that his mother had walked him to school until he was twenty-four, due to the danger of the New York streets. There are also moments of sadness as Salinger conveys his hope of traveling to Vienna to find the family he lived with in 1937. Also apparent is a need for affirmation. At times, his tone is nearly pleading. Will Hemingway please write to him? Can Hemingway possibly find the time to visit him in New York? Is there anything Salinger can do for him? In his fragile state Salinger was reaching out to a friend, one whom he perceived to share both his wartime experiences and his literary commitment. “The talks I had with you here,” he told Hemingway, “were the only hopeful minutes of the whole business.”50

Salinger seems to have suspected that Hemingway was troubled and in need of support. He twice asked if Hemingway was really working on a novel, as if doubting the information. As for himself, Salinger reported having written “a couple more stories,” a number of poems, and part of a play about Holden Caulfield. A curious section of the letter is Salinger’s news about the Young Folks anthology. He told Hemingway that the venture had “collapsed” yet again, and though he claimed not to be bitter about the situation, he then proceeded to describe just how bitter he was.

Perhaps Salinger’s most judicious words were reserved for the topic of F. Scott Fitzgerald. As usual, Salinger defended Fitzgerald against the critics, stating that the beauty of Fitzgerald’s writings was most applicable to his personal shortcomings. According to Salinger, however, Fitzgerald was about to ruin his novel The Last Tycoon when he died, and it was perhaps best that he had never finished it—possibly the harshest criticism of Fitzgerald that Salinger ever delivered.

At the time Salinger entered the hospital, he had already attempted some form of self-therapy by employing the old “abracadabra that had always worked before.” In late spring or early summer, he wrote the eighth and last of his Caulfield stories, a work that was published as “The Stranger,” in which his alter ego, Babe Gladwaller, returns home after the war, suffering from very much the same symptoms that Salinger was experiencing.

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“The Stranger” is easy to date. On July 27, Salinger told Hemingway that he had completed at least two more stories that he jokingly called “incestuous.” There can be little doubt that the reference relates to “The Stranger.” Hemingway had read Salinger’s first story about Babe and Mattie, and it requires no gift of insight to imagine him poking fun at the degree of closeness between brother and sister.

Narrated in the third person, “The Stranger” contains a memorial to the dead of the 12th Infantry Regiment, who are represented by Vincent Caulfield. It has a redemptive ending comparable in delicacy to that of “A Boy in France,” whose message runs parallel to most Caulfield stories by offering hope through the appreciation of beauty through innocence. The story is also a strong forerunner of “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor.” Both demonstrate rejuvenation through the power of human connection and offer a similar hope to similar characters under similar circumstances.

It is a sad element of “The Stranger” that Salinger cast it back home in New York. There was probably no other place where he would have rather been when he wrote it. Yet Babe Gladwaller, who is once again the story’s main character, is unable to adjust to civilian life after his wartime experiences. This is the same Babe Gladwaller who was broken and battered in France. Since then he has suffered the anguish of the Hürtgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge. It was at Hürtgen that Babe’s friend Vincent Caulfield was killed. And this is the premise of the story. Babe has gone to the apartment of Vincent’s former girlfriend, Helen Beebers, to give her a poem written by Vincent and to share the circumstances of Vincent’s death. The act