J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [77]
*The senseless manner of Vincent’s death was doubtless the basis of the death of Walt Glass in Salinger’s 1948 story “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut.”
6. Purgatory
After leaving the hospital Salinger sought normality and comfort. If forced to remain in Germany after the war, he was determined to carve out a life that resembled as closely as possible the one he imagined building had he returned home.
Shortly after VE Day, Salinger applied to Counter Intelligence for transfer to Vienna.1 It was his dream to return to Austria and find the family he had lived with seven years earlier in the hope of reestablishing the bond he had shared with the daughter. As unrealistic as the scenario was, Salinger expressed his intention clearly, ignoring the reality that the war had changed life irrevocably. Counter Intelligence refused Salinger’s request, assigning him to the Nuremberg area instead. However, it appears that he traveled to Vienna regardless and sought out his cherished Austrian family.
The details of what Salinger encountered in Vienna are unclear, but he soon returned to Germany. It is likely that the circumstances of his story “A Girl I Knew” mirror actual events. If so, Salinger arrived in Vienna only to learn that every family member had perished in the concentration camps, including the girl with whom he had had his first romance. The enormity of this tragic ending is why “A Girl I Knew” likely recounts fact. Salinger’s intense feelings for this family make it inconceivable that he imposed such a fate upon them through fabrication.
Certainly, Salinger returned from Austria shaken. The deaths of these people, whom he idealized, confirmed that every aspect of his former life had been shattered by the war. If any event proved the impossibility of Babe’s final wish in “Last Day of the Last Furlough” to return “home” to a place identical to the one he had left, it was Salinger’s own return to Vienna. In reaction, he seized the first chance for happiness that became available, even though it ran contrary to his better judgment.
That September, Salinger shocked his family and friends with the announcement that he was getting married. He told them he had met a Frenchwoman named Sylvia and she had spellbound him. Salinger described her as being “very sensitive” and “very fine.” This vague description satisfied no one. After writing stories such as “The Children’s Echelon,” with stern pronouncements against the irresponsibility of wartime marriages, his decision struck home with a thud. Salinger’s mother was especially incredulous. She had expected her son home by now. Instead, he was remaining overseas and marrying a foreign woman he barely knew.
By December 1945, Salinger had constructed a new life in Germany. He and Sylvia had married on October 18, in the village of Pappenheim, and had since moved into a pleasant house about 25 miles south of Nuremberg in the town of Gunzenhausen. He had bought himself a new car, a two-seater Škoda. To complete the idyll, the couple was joined by a dog, a black schnauzer that Salinger named Benny. Christmas Day found the new family happy and content, feasting on a giant holiday turkey. He and Sylvia enjoyed taking rides in the new car with Benny riding along “on the running board, pointing out Nazis to arrest.”2 In short, Salinger had built in Germany the happy life being experienced by countless soldiers who had returned home to the United States. It was a life that resembled a postwar, semi-Germanic Norman Rockwell illustration to excess, and it was an illusion. Within a year, the house would be gone, the Škoda sold, and the marriage over.
Salinger kept details about Sylvia a mystery, especially to his family. With his friends, most of whom learned of the marriage through his mother, Salinger was even less forthcoming. They recalled Sylvia as being a psychologist or perhaps an osteopath. Others were even less sure. Salinger himself said that she had been a mail carrier, but that comment was plainly sarcastic.
Sylvia was born Sylvia Louise Welter