J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [90]
It was also the last gasp for the slicks and the power they had held over him since 1941. With his budding relationship with The New Yorker, he sensed himself on the verge of a professional breakthrough. Consequently, his tolerance for the slicks and their tendency to alter his stories hit an all-time low. Yet this same confidence afforded him moments of magnanimity, such as when, on April 10, he gave his permission to Dorothy Olding for Burnett to republish his 1942 story “The Long Debut of Lois Taggett.”9
In May, “A Young Girl with No Waist at All” came out in Mademoiselle. It contained a biographical attachment in which Salinger’s aloofness or even outright derision as far as the slicks were concerned is all too evident. In fact, he declined to submit the profile, but the magazine worked around this and printed a short blurb that incorporated his refusal:
In 1947, Salinger rented this small house in Stamford, Connecticut. It was here that he wrote several of the Nine Stories and became one of the elite writers of The New Yorker. (Sherck)
J. D. Salinger does not believe in contributors’ columns. He did say, however, that he started to write at eight and never stopped, that he was with the Fourth Division and that he almost always writes of very young people—as in his story [on] page 222.
In the meantime, Salinger was writing his last two stories ever to appear in the slicks. He named them “Wien, Wien” and “Needle on a Scratchy Phonograph Record,” although they were later published as “A Girl I Knew” and “Blue Melody.” At first glance the stories are very different, but when placed side by side, they reveal fundamental similarities. Both are pessimistic and convey a sense of despondency common to Salinger’s writings after the war; both center on characters symbolic of youthful innocence, and each depicts murder through indifference.
“A Girl I Knew” closely recounts the events of Salinger’s search for his Austrian family in 1945. It is narrated by a young man named John, whose father has sent him off to Vienna to study the family business after receiving failing grades at school. Once in Vienna, John establishes himself in a boardinghouse located in an inexpensive part of the city—a veiled reference to Vienna’s Jewish quarter. During his five-month stay there, he becomes infatuated with Leah, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the family living in the apartment beneath him. When John observes her gazing from her balcony, he is transformed by her purity and fullness of beauty.
John returns home to New York. Years go by, and the war intervenes. After serving in Army Counter Intelligence, he returns to Vienna in the hope of finding Leah. After searching without success, he discovers from friends of her family that she and her parents have been killed by the Nazis at Buchenwald.
Attempting to gain a final sense of Leah, John travels to the old apartment house that the two of them shared years before. Once there, he finds that the building has been converted into living quarters for American officers. Entering the lobby, he encounters a staff sergeant sitting at a desk, cleaning his nails. John implores the sergeant to allow him to go upstairs and visit his former apartment. When the exasperated sergeant asks John why going up to the apartment is so important to him, John briefly explains about Leah and her fate. “She and her family were burned to death in an incinerator, I’m told,” John tells him. The sergeant’s response is cold and indifferent: “Yeah? What was she, a Jew or something?” In the end John is allowed up to the apartment—not because of the sergeant’s sympathy but due to his lack of interest. As John gazes down upon the empty balcony below, he is aware that nothing of the past remains in this place except the four walls