A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

From Jay McInerney’s review of Kenneth Slawenski’s new Salinger biography:

For this reader, the great achievement of Slawenski’s biography is its evocation of the horror of Salinger’s wartime experience. Despite Salinger’s reticence, Sla­wenski admirably retraces his movements and recreates the savage battles, the grueling marches and frozen bivouacs of Salinger’s war. It’s hard to think of an American writer who had more combat experience. He landed on Utah Beach on D-Day. Slawenski reports that of the 3,080 members of Salinger’s regiment who landed with him on June 6, 1944, only 1,130 survived three weeks later. Then, when the 12th Infantry Regiment tried to take the swampy, labyrinthine Hürtgen Forest, in what proved to be a huge military blunder, the statistics were even more horrific. After reinforcement, “of the original 3,080 regimental soldiers who went into Hürtgen, only 563 were left.” Salinger escaped the deadly quagmire of Hürtgen just in time to fight in the Battle of the Bulge, and shortly thereafter, in 1945, participated in the liberation of Dachau. “You could live a lifetime,” he later told his daughter, “and never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose.”

It’s remarkable how little evidence of such experiences is to be found in Salinger’s published writings (Slawenski suggests Salinger suffered from what would now be recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as clinical depression). As we continue to be flooded by non-stop paens to “the good (sic) war,” it’s worth considering how on June 6, 1944, there was perhaps a 90% chance that the man who had yet to write The Catcher in the Rye and Nine Stories was going to perish on some forsaken beach or forest, as anonymously as any of the war’s 60 million other victims.