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By the time they have finished the story, readers are filled with revulsion for the sergeant. Although not directly guilty of the death of Leah and her family, he is held responsible nonetheless because of his attitude and the realization that without such indifference the Holocaust would never have taken place. The character of Leah therefore represents more than a romantic interest. On the one hand, she symbolizes the fragile and beautiful things of life that have been crushed by the Second World War. On the other hand, her treatment even after her death touches on a broader moral issue: the very nature of humankind and our ability to commit or condone atrocities through indifference.

Although “Blue Melody” is set in the Deep South, it resonates with the same accusations as “A Girl I Knew.” A story of jazz and segregation, “Blue Melody” follows the career of a gifted blues singer named Lida Louise as seen through the eyes of two children, Rudford and Peggy—this story’s symbols of innocence. When Lida Louise suffers a burst appendix at an outdoor party, no hospital will treat her because of her race and she is left to die in the backseat of a car.

The story is Salinger’s tribute to the blues singer Bessie Smith. When Smith bled to death in 1937 of injuries suffered in an automobile accident, it was reported that she had been denied admittance to the nearest hospital because she was black.

In “Blue Melody” Salinger makes a statement even more stinging than the story told about Smith. Lida Louise is turned away from several hospitals even though it is clear that she is dying. When refusing to admit her—in essence passing a death sentence—the hospitals’ staffs hide behind the same excuse: “I’m sorry but the rules … do not permit Negro patients.” They are just following orders. Salinger claims that the story is not “a slam” against the American South or “a slam against anybody or anything. It’s just a simple little story of Mom’s apple pie, ice-cold beer, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the Lux Theater of the Air—the things we fought for, in short. You can’t miss it, really.”11

“Can’t miss it,” indeed. Salinger was plainly calling attention to the persistence of dehumanizing values within the society around him. He was asking whether these were the values for which Americans had fought and died. In doing so, he demanded an examination of those values before allowing his countrymen to condemn the cruelties of others and smugly turn their backs on their own brutality. In “Blue Melody” Salinger completed what he had begun in “A Girl I Knew”: he brought the Holocaust home.

• • •

As if expressing the professional transition that Salinger was experiencing, The Inverted Forest was published in a special issue of Cosmopolitan in December 1947, a month before the release of “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Salinger appears to have already been embarrassed by the earlier story. He knew “Bananafish” to be a far superior work, and the novella’s release, so close to its publication, elicited inevitable comparisons. After meeting with editors such as Maxwell and Lobrano at The New Yorker over the course of 1947, Salinger had learned a great deal about tightening up his stories, and “The Inverted Forest” now seemed foreign and immature to him. But Cosmopolitan proclaimed “The Inverted Forest” to be a novel and released it with great fanfare. The magazine prefaced the story by advising readers:

To say that this short novel is unusual magazine fare is, we think, a wild understatement. We’re not going to tell you what it’s about. We merely predict you will find it the most original story you’ve read in a long time—and the most fascinating.12

“The Inverted Forest” was not a success. After struggling through it, readers of Cosmopolitan may indeed have found it unusual, but few thought it fascinating. Most were incensed at the magazine for having led them into a veritable maze. According to A. E. Hotchner, who was briefly employed