friends on the frontlines
on J.D. Salinger, Ernest Hemingway, World War II, the Ritz, Catcher in the Rye, Paris
J.D. Salinger drove his jeep through the cheering crowds of the Paris streets. The year was 1944 and the city had just been liberated from German rule. As a sergeant in the Counter Intelligence Corps for the U.S. Army, Salinger was assigned to locate and detain any lingering Nazi collaborators. But he was focused on a different mission, one that some have suggested altered the history of American literature. That mission, considering the stakes, was pretty simple — rendezvous at the Hotel Ritz and make contact with the world’s most famous living novelist.
Salinger entered the Ritz and there was Ernest Hemingway, behind the bar, already bragging that he alone was responsible for saving the hotel. Hemingway was working as a war correspondent for Collier’s and had attached himself to the 22nd Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division before breaking off with a small group of French partisans. Armed with a carbine, he’d stormed the Ritz and taken residence there, playing host to writers and photographers as if he owned the place, even going so far as passing out keys to the Ritz’s best rooms.
You could imagine the meeting of the two going poorly. In sensibility — Salinger, the noble defender of sensitivity and youth, and Hemingway, the evangelist for punch-drunk adventure and grace under pressure — but also in stature — no writer was more famous than Hemingway then and Salinger had only several published short stories to his name.
But by all accounts, the odd pair hit it off. Hemingway greeted Salinger with warmth and generosity, stating that he recognized him from his photograph in Esquire and had read Salinger’s stories, even liked them. Then, he asked the young seargant if he had any more stories to share and Salinger produced a copy of The Saturday Evening Post, which contained his recent story “Last Day of the Last Furlough” (good story, by the way).
Salinger was delighted how they liked the same authors, how this private Hemingway was so different from his public persona, how Hemingway seemed to downplay his towering reputation at every opportunity. In a letter to a friend, Salinger emphasized what a “good guy” Hemingway is, in possession of such humility. (This carried extra weight, for the record, since Salinger secretly admired Fitzgerald more than Hemingway.) Hemingway even offered to write a few letters to New York editors on Salinger’s behalf, though the young writer declined.
Hemingway wasn’t just playing nice to attract another literary disciple. The myth goes that after reading Salinger’s story from the Saturday Post, he remarked, “Jesus, he has a hell of a talent,” took out his Luger and shot the head off a chicken. Perhaps apocryphal, but Hemingway did adopt a mentorship role to Salinger, telling famous literary types about this young “kid” he’d met who “wrote well,” and encouraging Salinger to continue his work. “First you have a marvelous ear and you write tenderly and lovingly without getting wet,” Hemingway wrote in a letter to Salinger, “how happy it makes me to read the stories and what a god damned fine writer I think you are.”
The two reconnected later in 1944 when the Allies were fighting German forces in the Hürtgen Forest. According to Salinger’s Army buddy Werner Kleeman, one night Salinger turned to him and said, “Let’s go and look up Hemingway.” They trekked a mile to a small brick farmhouse set aside for press and public relations and found Hemingway with a visor on his forehead, scribbling on a yellow note pad. Together the trio drank champagne from aluminum cups, trading stories, forgetting the world at war for a while.
It was to Hemingway that Salinger wrote when he checked into a military hospital in Nurember after the warr for “combat stress,” a precursor to PTSD. Sometimes, Salinger gets this negative rep for all the underlying subtext to the war in his writing — Catcher in the Rye, after all, is really a bold rejection of performing the futile and “phony” roles society demands of us after witnessing first-hand the horrors and crimes of nations at war — but it’s worth remembering all he experienced. His first day of combat was storming Utah Beach during the D-Day Invasion. He participated in the liberation of Paris, the Battle of the Bulge, and the Battle of Hürtgen Forest (the longest single battle the U.S. Army has ever fought). Later, he entered the Kaufering IV concentration camp and told his daughter years later, “You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live.”
(Salinger wrote most directly about these experiences in “For Esme — With Love and Squalor,” which to my mind is one of the best short stories ever written.)
Salinger addressed the letter “Dear Poppa,” perhaps expressing that their friendship was beyond casual, and confessed he was “in an almost constant state of despondency.” The wit and irony Salinger later expressed through Holden Caulfield makes its way in the letter, when summarizing his activity in eliminating any remaining Nazi sympathizers: “There are very few arrests left to be made in our section,” he writes. “We’re now picking up children under ten if their attitudes are snotty.” He later asks Hemingway if they could meet in New York upon his return. “The talks I had with you here,” he told Hemingway, “were the only hopeful minutes of the whole business.”
No record exists of Hemingway’s response to the letter. But Valerie Hemingway, who worked as Ernest’s secretary and became his posthumous daughter-in-law, later wrote that, “the contemporary American authors [Hemingway] most admired were J.D. Salinger, Carson McCullers and Truman Capote.” And in the library of Hemingway’s Key West home is a copy of Catcher in the Rye, with rumors the book is signed by Salinger himself.