J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [95]
8. Reaffirmation
When Salinger was a child and very much his parents’ little Sonny, he had a habit of running away from home when confronted by conflict. One day when he was about three or four, his sister, Doris, was asked to watch him while their parents went out. An argument occurred between them, and Sonny rushed off to escape the quarrel. He packed a suitcase full of toy soldiers and stormed out of the apartment. When his mother arrived home, she found her son sitting in the lobby. “He was dressed from head to toe in his Indian costume, long feather headdress and all,” Doris recalled. “He said, ‘Mother, I’m running away, but I stayed to say good-bye to you.’ ”1
Salinger’s stories grew to bask in the sheer delight of childhood. His writings evidence the opinion that children are closer to God than adults, allowing them to love more perfectly, oblivious to the divisions created and used by adults to separate themselves from one another. Since children enjoy such an elevated position in Salinger’s writings, the spiritual purity of his adult characters can be measured by their closeness to the children around them. Perhaps the clearest example of this reflection appears in The Catcher in the Rye when Holden observes a woman and her son in a movie theater. Although the woman cries throughout the film’s maudlin plot, she refuses to take the boy to the bathroom, causing Holden to judge her as being “Kindhearted as a goddam wolf.”2 Holden’s pronouncement echoes Salinger’s own philosophy, a belief that solidified in 1948.
That July, Salinger traveled on vacation to Wisconsin, where he spent the summer at a lodge on the shore of Lake Geneva. Sitting in his lakeside suite, a crowded but comfortable room decorated in a log cabin theme, he began to take notes on reading materials he had brought with him: a chilling endorsement of ethnic cleansing contained in the Nazi treatise New Bases of Racial Research and a May 1 article from The New Yorker entitled “The Children of Lidice.”
It was the New Yorker article that captivated Salinger’s attention, a shocking description of the savage slaughter of children during the war and the enslavement of those who had managed to survive because they looked German. “We know,” Salinger recorded from the text, “that more than six thousand Jewish, Polish, Norwegian, French, and Czech children were killed by gas at Chelmno and burned in the crematorium.”3
The quotation was a terrifying selection, chosen from an article that spoke not only to Salinger’s own experiences but also to his persistent longing to deny the fate suffered by his Austrian family. It represented a burden of memory that seemed to grow more enormous with time and one that Salinger recognized must be subdued.
The conclusion of “Just Before the War with the Eskimos” had hinted at a new direction in his writing, away from the dark themes that had possessed his stories since 1946; but it had been a faint divergence, still hesitant, and part of his psyche remained ensnared by his experiences of war and the Holocaust.
The quotation that Salinger drew upon was not the article’s final lines. The closing paragraph of the sad tale of the children of Lidice directly followed the words that Salinger had written down, and it was the power of those words—and not the despair of Salinger’s selection—that would finally take hold and guide his pen: “I haven’t given up hope,” the article proclaimed. “None of us have given up hope.”4
At Lake Geneva, something deep within Salinger shifted, persuading him to abandon the dark recess into which his writings had descended.
Perhaps something in the New Yorker piece had encouraged him, or perhaps the shimmering view of the lake from his window. Salinger put away his notes on Nazi atrocities and began a new story, a short but significant piece entitled “Down at the Dinghy,” a tale that would address the question of anti-Semitism but would complete the transformation of his work and deliver its players to salvation through love rather than damnation