“For Esmé—With Love and Squalor”
copyright 1950 by J. D. Salinger
Just recently, by air mail, I received an invitation to a wedding that will
take place in England on April 18th. It happens to be a wedding I’d give
a lot to be able to get to, and when the invitation first arrived, I thought
it might just be possible for me to make the trip abroad, by plane, expenses
be hanged. However, I’ve since discussed the matter rather extensively
with my wife, a breathtakingly levelheaded girl, and we’ve
decided against it—for one thing, I’d completely forgotten that my
mother-in-law is looking forward to spending the last two weeks in April
with us. I really don’t get to see Mother Grencher terribly often, and
she’s not getting any younger. She’s fifty-eight. (As she’d be the first to
admit.)
All the same, though, wherever I happen to be I don’t think I’m the
type that doesn’t even lift a finger to prevent a wedding from flatting.
Accordingly, I’ve gone ahead and jotted down a few revealing notes on
the bride as I knew her almost six years ago. If my notes should cause
the groom, whom I haven’t met, an uneasy moment or two, so much the
better. Nobody’s aiming to please, here. More, really, to edify, to instruct.
In April of 1944, I was among some sixty American enlisted men
who took a rather specialized pre-Invasion training course, directed by
British Intelligence, in Devon, England. And as I look back, it seems to
me that we were fairly unique, the sixty of us, in that there wasn’t one
good mixer in the bunch. We were all essentially letter-writing types,
and when we spoke to each other out of the line of duty, it was usually to
ask somebody if he had any ink he wasn’t using. When we weren’t writing
letters or attending classes, each of us went pretty much his own
way. Mine usually led me, on clear days, in scenic circles around the
countryside. Rainy days, I generally sat in a dry place and read a book,
often just an axe length away from a ping-pong table.
The training course lasted three weeks, ending on a Saturday, a very rainy one. At seven that last night, our whole group was scheduled to
entrain for London, where, as rumor had it, we were to be assigned to
infantry and airborne divisions mustered for the D Day landings. By
three in the afternoon, I’d packed all my belongings into my barrack
bag, including a canvas gas-mask container full of books I’d brought
over from the Other Side. (The gas mask itself I’d slipped through a
porthole of the Mauretania some weeks earlier, fully aware that if the
enemy ever did use gas I’d never get the damn thing on in time.) I remember
standing at an end window of our Quonset hut for a very long
time, looking out at the slanting, dreary rain, my trigger finger itching
imperceptibly, if at all. I could hear behind my back the uncomradely
scratching of many fountain pens on many sheets of V-mail paper.
Abruptly, with nothing special in mind, I came away from the window
and put on my raincoat, cashmere muffler, galoshes, woolen gloves, and
overseas cap (the last of which, I’m still told, I wore at an angle all my
own—slightly down over both ears). Then, after synchronizing my wristwatch
with the clock in the latrine, I walked down the long, wet cobblestone
hill into town. I ignored the flashes of lightning all around me.
They either had your number on them or they didn’t.
In the center of town, which was probably the wettest part of town,
I stopped in front of a church to read the bulletin board, mostly because
the featured numerals, white on black, had caught my attention but partly
because, after three years in the Army, I’d become addicted to reading
bulletin boards. At three-fifteen, the board stated, there would be
children’s-choir practice. I looked at my wristwatch, then back at the
board. A sheet of paper was tacked up, listing the names of the children
expected to attend practice. I stood in the rain and read all the names,
then entered the church.
A dozen or so adults were among the pews, several of them bearing
pairs of small-size rubbers, soles up, in their laps. I passed along and sat
down in the front row. On the rostrum, seated in three compact rows of
auditorium chairs, were about twenty children, mostly girls, ranging in
age from about seven to thirteen. At the moment, their choir coach, an
enormous woman in tweeds, was advising them to open their mouths
wider when they sang. Had anyone, she asked, ever heard of a little
dickeybird that dared to sing his charming song without first opening his
little beak wide, wide, wide? Apparently nobody ever had. She was given
a steady, opaque look. She went on to say that she wanted all her children
to absorb the meaning of the words she sang, not just mouth them,
like silly-billy parrots. She then blew a note on her pitch pipe, and the
children, like so many underage weight-lifters, raised their hymnbooks.
They sang without instrumental accompaniment—or, more accurately
in their case, without any interference. Their voices were melodious
and unsentimental, almost to the point where a somewhat more
denominational man than myself might, without straining, have experienced
levitation. A couple of the very youngest children dragged the
tempo a trifle, but in a way that only the composer’s mother could have
found fault with. I had never heard the hymn, but I kept hoping it was
one with a dozen or more verses. Listening, I scanned all the children’s
faces but watched one in particular, that of the child nearest me, on the
end seat in the front row. She was about thirteen, with straight ash-blond
hair of ear-lobe length, an exquisite forehead, and blasé eyes that, I
thought, might very possibly have counted the house. Her voice was
distinctly separate from the other children’s voices, and not just because
she was seated near me. It had the best upper register, the sweetest-sounding,
the surest, and it automatically led the way. The young lady, however,
seemed slightly bored with her own singing ability, or perhaps just
with the time and place; twice, between verses, I saw her yawn. It was a
ladylike yawn, a close-mouthed yawn, but you couldn’t miss it; her nostril
wings gave her away.
The instant the hymn ended, the choir coach began to give her lengthy
opinion of people who can’t keep their feet still and their lips sealed
tight during the minister’s sermon. I gathered that the singing part of
the rehearsal was over, and before the coach’s dissonant speaking voice
could entirely break the spell the children’s singing had cast, I got up
and left the church.
It was raining even harder. I walked down the street and looked
through the window of the Red Cross recreation room, but soldiers were
8 · J. D. Salinger For Esmé – With Love and Squalor · 9
standing two and three deep at the coffee counter, and, even through the
glass, I could hear ping-pong balls bouncing in another room. I crossed
the street and entered a civilian tearoom, which was empty except for a
middle-aged waitress, who looked as if she would have preferred a customer
with a dry raincoat. I used a coat tree as delicately as possible, and
then sat down at a table and ordered tea and cinnamon toast. It was the
first time all day I’d spoken to anyone. I then looked through all my
pockets, including my raincoat, and finally found a couple of stale letters
to reread, one from my wife, telling me how the service at Schrafft’s
Eighty-eighth Street had fallen off, and one from my mother-in-law, asking
me to please send her some cashmere yarn first chance I got away
from “camp.”
While I was still on my first cup of tea, the young lady I had been
watching and listening to in the choir came into the tearoom. Her hair
was soaking wet, and the rims of both ears were showing. She was with
a very small boy, unmistakably her brother, whose cap she removed by
lifting it off his head with two fingers, as if it were a laboratory specimen.
Bringing up the rear was an efficient-looking woman in a limp felt
hat—presumably their governess. The choir member, taking off her coat
as she walked across the floor, made the table selection—a good one,
from my point of view, as it was just eight or ten feet directly in front of
me. She and the governess sat down. The small boy, who was about five,
wasn’t ready to sit down yet. He slid out of and discarded his reefer;
then, with the deadpan expression of a born heller, he methodically went
about annoying his governess by pushing in and pulling out his chair
several times, watching her face. The governess, keeping her voice down,
gave him two or three orders to sit down and, in effect, stop the monkey
business, but it was only when his sister spoke to him that he came around
and applied the small of his back to his chair seat. He immediately picked
up his napkin and put it on his head. His sister removed it, opened it,
and spread it out on his lap.
About the time their tea was brought, the choir member caught me
staring over at her party. She stared back at me, with those house-counting
eyes of hers, then, abruptly, gave me a small, qualified smile. It was
oddly radiant, as certain small, qualified smiles sometimes are. I smiled
back, much less radiantly, keeping my upper lip down over a coal-black
G.I. temporary filling showing between two of my front teeth. The next
thing I knew, the young lady was standing, with enviable poise, beside
my table. She was wearing a tartan dress—a Campbell tartan, I believe.
It seemed to me to be a wonderful dress for a very young girl to be
wearing on a rainy, rainy day. “I thought Americans despised tea,” she
said.
It wasn’t the observation of a smart aleck but that of a truth-lover or
a statistics-lover. I replied that some us never drank anything but tea. I
asked her if she’d care to join me.
“Thank you,” she said. “Perhaps for just a fraction of a moment.”
I got up and drew a chair for her, the one opposite me, and she sat
down on the forward quarter of it, keeping her spine easily and beautifully
straight. I went back—almost hurried back—to my own chair, more
than willing to hold up my end of a conversation. When I was seated, I
couldn’t think of anything to say, though. I smiled again, still keeping
my coal-black filling under concealment. I remarked that it was certainly
terrible day out.
“Yes; quite,” said my guest, in the clear, unmistakable voice of a smalltalk
detester. She placed her fingers flat on the table edge, like someone
at a séance, then, almost instantly, closed her hands—her nails were bitten
down to the quick. She was wearing a wristwatch, a military-looking
one that looked rather like a navigator’s chronograph. Its face was
much too large for her slender wrist. “You were at choir practice,” she
said matter-of-factly. “I saw you.”
I said I certainly had been, and that I had heard her singing separately
from the others. I said I thought she had a very fine voice.
She nodded. “I know. I’m going to be a professional singer.”
“Really? Opera?”
“Heavens, no. I’m going to sing jazz on the radio and make heaps of
money. Then, when I’m thirty, I shall retire and live on a ranch in Ohio.”
She touched the top of her soaking-wet head with the flat of her hand.
“Do you know Ohio?” she asked.
10 · J. D. Salinger For Esmé – With Love and Squalor · 11
I said I’d been through it on the train a few times but that I didn’t
really know it. I offered her a piece of cinnamon toast.
“No, thank you,” she said. “I eat like a bird, actually.”
I bit into a piece of toast myself, and commented that there’s some
mighty rough country around Ohio.
“I know. An American I met told me. You’re the eleventh American
I’ve met.”
Her governess was now urgently signaling her to return to her own
table—in effect, to stop bothering the man. My guest, however, calmly
moved her chair an inch or two so that her back broke all possible further
communication with the home table. “You go to that secret Intelligence
school on the hill, don’t you?” she inquired coolly.
As security-minded as the next one, I replied that I was visiting
Devonshire for my health.
“Really,” she said. “I wasn’t quite born yesterday, you know.”
I said I’d bet she hadn’t been, at that. I drank my tea for a moment. I
was getting a trifle posture-conscious and I sat up somewhat straighter
in my seat.
“You seem quite intelligent for an American,” my guest mused.
I told her that was a pretty snobbish thing to say, if you thought
about it at all, and that I hoped it was unworthy of her.
She blushed—automatically conferring on me the social poise I’d
been missing. “Well. Most of the Americans I’ve seen act like animals.
They’re forever punching one another about, and insulting everyone,
and—You know what one of them did?”
I shook my head.
“One of them threw an empty whiskey bottle through my aunt’s
window. Fortunately, the window was open. But does that sound very
intelligent to you?”
It didn’t especially, but I didn’t say so. I said that many soldiers, all
over the world, were a long way from home, and that few of them had
had many real advantages in life. I said I’d thought that most people
could figure that out for themselves.
“Possibly,” said my guest, without conviction. She raised her hand
to her wet head again, picked at a few limp filaments of blond hair, trying
to cover her exposed ear rims. “My hair is soaking wet,” she said. “I
look a fright.” She looked over at me. “I have quite wavy hair when it’s
dry.”
“I can see that, I can see you have.”
“Not actually curly, but quite wavy,” she said. “Are you married?”
I said I was.
She nodded. “Are you very deeply in love with your wife? Or am I
being too personal?”
I said that when she was, I’d speak up.
She put her hands and wrists farther forward on the table, and I
remember wanting to do something about that enormous-faced wristwatch
she was wearing—perhaps suggest that she try wearing it around
her waist.
“Usually, I’m not terribly gregarious,” she said, and looked over at
me to see if I knew the meaning of the word. I didn’t give her a sign,
though, one way or the other. “I purely came over because I thought you
looked extremely lonely. You have an extremely sensitive face.”
I said she was right, that I had been feeling lonely, and that I was very
glad she’d come over.
“I’m training myself to be more compassionate. My aunt says I’m a
terribly cold person,” she said and felt the top of her head again. “I live
with my aunt. She’s an extremely kind person. Since the death of my
mother, she’s done everything within her power to make Charles and
me feel adjusted.”
“I’m glad.”
“Mother was an extremely intelligent person. Quite sensuous, in
many ways.” She looked at me with a kind of fresh acuteness. “Do you
find me terribly cold?”
I told her absolutely not—very much to the contrary, in fact. I told
her my name and asked for hers.
She hesitated. “My first name is Esmé. I don’t think I shall tell my
full name, for the moment. I have a title and you may just be impressed
by titles. Americans are, you know.”
12 · J. D. Salinger For Esmé – With Love and Squalor · 13
I said I didn’t think I would be, but that it might be a good idea, at
that, to hold on to the title for awhile.
Just then, I felt someone’s warm breath on the back of my neck. I
turned around and just missed brushing noses with Esmé’s small brother.
Ignoring me, he addressed his sister in a piercing treble: “Miss Megley
said you must come and finish you tea!” His message delivered, he retired
to the chair between his sister and me, on my right. I regarded him
with high interest. He was looking very splendid in brown Shetland
shorts, a navy-blue jersey, white shirt, and striped necktie. He gazed back
at me with immense green eyes. “Why do people in films kiss sideways?”
he demanded.
“Sideways?” I said. It was a problem that had baffled me in my childhood.
I said I guessed it was because actors’ noses are too big for kissing
anyone head on.
“His name is Charles,” Esmé said. “He’s extremely brilliant for his
age.”
“He certainly has green eyes. Haven’t you, Charles?”
Charles gave me the fishy look my question deserved, then wriggled
downward and forward in his chair till all of his body was under the
table except his head, which he left, wrestler’s-bridge style, on the chair
seat. “They’re orange,” he said in a strained voice, addressing the ceiling.
He picked up a corner of the tablecloth and put it over his handsome,
deadpan little face.
“Sometimes he’s brilliant and sometimes he’s not,” Esmé said.
“Charles, do sit up!”
Charles stayed right where he was. He seemed to be holding his
breath.
“He misses our father very much. He was s-l-a-i-n in North Africa.”
I expressed regret to hear it.
Esmé nodded. “Father adored him.” She bit reflectively at the cuticle
of her thumb. “He looks very much like my mother—Charles, I mean. I
look exactly like my father.” She went on biting at her cuticle. “My mother
was quite a passionate woman. She was an extrovert. Father was an
introvert. They were quite well mated, though, in a superficial way. To
be quite candid, Father really needed more an intellectual companion
than Mother was. He was an extremely gifted genius.”
I waited, receptively, for further information, but none came. I looked
down at Charles, who was now resting the side of his face on his chair
seat. When he saw that I was looking at him, he closed his eyes, sleepily,
angelically, then stuck out his tongue—an appendage of startling length—
and gave what in my country would have been a glorious tribute to a
myopic baseball umpire. It fairly shook the tearoom.
“Stop that,” Esmé said, clearly unshaken. “He saw an American do
it in a fish-and-chips queue, and now he does it whenever he’s bored.
Just stop it, now, or I shall send you directly to Miss Megley.”
Charles opened his enormous eyes, as sign that he’d heard his sister’s
threat, but otherwise didn’t look especially alerted. He closed his eyes
again, and continued to rest the side of his face on the chair seat.
I mentioned that maybe he ought to save it—meaning the Bronx
cheer—till he started using his title regularly. That is, if he had a title, too.
Esmé gave me a long, faintly clinical look. “You have a dry sense of
humor, haven’t you?” she said—wistfully. “Father said I have no sense
of humor at all. He said I was unequipped to meet life because I have no
sense of humor.”
Watching her, I lit a cigarette and said I didn’t think a sense of humor
was of any use in a real pinch.
“Father said it was.”
This was a statement of faith, not a contradiction, and I quickly
switched horses. I nodded and said her father had probably taken the
long view, while I was taking the short (whatever that meant).
“Charles misses him exceedingly,” Esmé said, after a moment. “He
was an exceedingly lovable man. He was extremely handsome, too. Not
that one’s appearance matters greatly, but he was. He had terribly penetrating
eyes, for a man who was intrinsically kind.”
I nodded. I said I imagined her father had had an extraordinary vocabulary.
“Oh, yes; quite,” said Esmé. “He was an archivist—amateur, of
course.”
14 · J. D. Salinger For Esmé – With Love and Squalor · 15
At that point, I felt an importunate tap, almost a punch, on my upper
arm, from Charles’ direction. I turned to him. He was sitting in a
fairly normal position in his chair now, except that he had one knee tucked
under him. “What did one wall say to the other wall?” he asked shrilly.
“It’s a riddle!”
I rolled my eyes reflectively ceilingward and repeated the question
aloud. Then I looked at Charles with a stumped expression and said I
gave up.
“Meet you at the corner!” came the punch line, at top volume.
It went over biggest with Charles himself. It struck him as unbearably
funny. In fact, Esmé had to come around and pound him on the
back, as if treating him for a coughing spell. “Now stop that,” she said.
She went back to her own seat. “He tells that same riddle to everyone he
meets and has a fit every single time. Usually he drools when he laughs.
Now, just stop, please.”
“It’s one of the best riddles I’ve heard, though,” I said, watching
Charles, who was very gradually coming out of it. In response to this
compliment, he sank considerably lower in his chair and again masked
his face up to the eyes with a corner of the tablecloth. He then looked at
me with his exposed eyes, which were full of slowly subsiding mirth
and the pride of someone who knows a really good riddle or two.
“May I inquire how you were employed before entering the Army?”
Esmé asked me.
I said that I hadn’t been employed at all, that I’d only been out of
college a year but that I like to think of myself as a professional shortstory
writer.
She nodded politely. “Published?” she asked.
It was a familiar but always touchy question, and one that I didn’t
answer just one, two, three. I started to explain how most editors in
America were a bunch—
“My father wrote beautifully,” Esmé interrupted. “I’m saving a number
of his letters for posterity.”
I said that sounded like a very good idea. I happened to be looking
at her enormous-faced, chronographic wristwatch again. I asked if it had
belonged to her father.
She looked down at her wrist solemnly. “Yes, it did,” she said. “He
gave it to me just before Charles and I were evacuated.” Self-consciously,
she took her hands off the table, saying, “Purely as a memento, of course.”
She guided the conversation in a different direction. “I’d be extremely
flattered if you’d write a story exclusively for me sometime. I’m an avid
reader.”
I told her I certainly would, if I could. I said that I wasn’t terribly
prolific.
“It doesn’t have to be terribly prolific! Just so that it isn’t childish and
silly.” She reflected. “I prefer stories about squalor.”
“About what?” I said, leaning forward.
“Squalor. I’m extremely interested in squalor.”
I was about to press her for more details, but I felt Charles pinching
me, hard, on my arm. I turned to him, wincing slightly. He was standing
right next to me. “What did one wall say to the other wall?” he asked,
not unfamiliarly.
“You asked him that,” Esmé said. “Now, stop it.”
Ignoring his sister, and stepping up on one of my feet, Charles repeated
the key question. I noticed that his necktie knot wasn’t adjusted
properly. I slid it up into place, then, looking him straight in the eye,
suggested, “Meetcha at the corner?”
The instant I’d said it, I wished I hadn’t. Charles’ mouth fell open. I
felt as if I’d struck it open. He stepped down off my foot and, with whitehot
dignity, walked over to his own table, without looking back.
“He’s furious,” Esmé said. “He has a violent temper. My mother had
a propensity to spoil him. My father was the only one who didn’t spoil
him.”
I kept looking over at Charles, who had sat down and started to
drink his tea, using both hands on the cup. I hoped he’d turn around,
but he didn’t.
Esmé stood up. “Il faut que je parte aussi.” she said, with a sigh. “Do
you know French?”
I got up from my own chair, with mixed feelings of regret and confu-
16 · J. D. Salinger For Esmé – With Love and Squalor · 17
sion. Esmé and I shook hands; her hand, as I’d suspected, was a nervous
hand, damp at the palm. I told her, in English, how very much I’d enjoyed
her company.
She nodded. “I thought you might,” she said. “I’m quite communicative
for my age.” She gave her hair another experimental touch. “I’m
dreadfully sorry about my hair,” she said. “I’ve probably been hideous
to look at.”
“Not at all! As a matter of fact, I think a lot of the wave is coming
back already.”
She quickly touched her hair again. “Do you think you’ll be coming
here again in the immediate future?” she asked. “We come here every
Saturday, after choir practice.”
I answered that I’d like nothing better but that, unfortunately, I was
pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to make it again.
“In other words, you can’t discuss troop movements,” said Esmé.
She made no move to leave the vicinity of the table. In fact, she crossed
one foot over the other and, looking down, aligned the toes of her shoes.
It was a pretty little execution, for she was wearing white socks and her
ankles and feet were lovely. She looked up at me abruptly. “Would you
like me to write to you?” she asked, with a certain amount of color in her
face. “I write extremely articulate letters for a person my—”
“I’d love it.” I took out pencil and paper and wrote down my name,
rank, serial number, and A.P.O. number.
“I shall write to you first,” she said, accepting it, “so that you don’t
feel compromised in any way.” She put the address into a pocket of her
dress. “Goodbye,” she said, and walked back to her table.
I ordered another pot of tea and sat watching the two of them till
they, and the harassed Miss Megley, got up to leave. Charles led the way
out, limping tragically, like a man with one leg several inches shorter
than the other. He didn’t look over at me. Miss Megley went next, then
Esmé, who waved at me. I waved back, half getting up from my chair. It
was a strangely emotional moment for me.
Less than a minute later, Esmé came back into the tearoom, dragging
Charles behind her by the sleeve of his reefer. “Charles would like
to kiss you goodbye,” she said.
I immediately put down my cup, and said that was very nice, but
was she sure?
“Yes,” she said, a trifle grimly. She let go Charles’ sleeve and gave
him a rather vigorous push in my direction. He came forward, his face
livid, and gave me a loud, wet smacker just below the right ear. Following
this ordeal, he started to make a beeline for the door and a less sentimental
way of life, but I caught the half belt at the back of his reefer, held
on to it, and asked him, “What did one wall say to the other wall?”
His face lit up. “Meet you at the corner!” he shrieked, and raced out
of the room, possibly in hysterics.
Esmé was standing with crossed ankles again. “You’re quite sure
you won’t forget to write that story for me?” she said. “It doesn’t have to
be exclusively for me. It can—”
I said there was absolutely no chance that I’d forget. I told her that
I’d never written a story for anybody, but that it seemed like exactly the
right time to get down to it.
She nodded. “Make it extremely squalid and moving,” she suggested.
“Are you at all acquainted with squalor?”
I said not exactly but that I was getting better acquainted with it, in
one form or another, all the time, and that I’d do my best to come up to
her specifications. We shook hands.
“Isn’t it a pity that we didn’t meet under less extenuating circumstances?”
I said it was, I said it certainly was.
“Goodbye,” Esmé said. “I hope you return from the war with all
your faculties intact.”
I thanked her, and said a few other words, and then watched her
leave the tearoom. She left it slowly, reflectively, testing the ends of her
hair for dryness.
18 · J. D. Salinger For Esmé – With Love and Squalor · 19
This is the squalid, or moving, part of the story, and the scene changes.
The people change, too. I’m still around, but from here on in, for reasons
I’m not at liberty to disclose, I’ve disguised myself so cunningly that
even the cleverest reader will fail to recognize me.
It was about ten-thirty at night in Gaufurt, Bavaria, several weeks
after V-E Day. Staff Sergeant X was in his room on the second floor of the
civilian home in which he and nine other American soldiers had been
quartered, even before the armistice. He was seated on a folding wooden
chair at a small, messy-looking writing table, with a paperback overseas
novel before him, which he was having great trouble reading. The trouble
lay with him, not the novel. Although the men who lived on the first
floor usually had first grab at the books sent each month by Special Services,
X usually seemed to be left with the book he might have selected
himself. But he was a young man who had not come through the war
with all his faculties intact, and for more than an hour he had been triplereading
paragraphs, and now he was doing it to sentences. He suddenly
closed the book, without marking his place. With his hand, he shielded
his eyes for a moment against the harsh, watty glare from the naked
bulb over the table.
He took a cigarette from a pack on the table and lit it with fingers
that bumped gently and incessantly against one another. He sat back a
trifle in his chair and smoked without any sense of taste. His gums bled
at the slightest pressure of the top of his tongue, and he seldom stopped
experimenting; it was a little game he played, sometimes by the hour.
He sat for a moment smoking and experimenting. Then, abruptly, familiarly,
and, as usual, with no warning, he thought he felt his mind dislodge
itself and teeter, like insecure luggage on an overhead rack. He
quickly did what he had been doing for weeks to set things right: he
pressed his hands hard against his temples. He held on tight for a moment.
His hair needed cutting, and it was dirty. He had washed it three
or four times during his two weeks’ stay at the hospital in Frankfurt on
the Main, but it had got dirty again on the long, dusty jeep ride back to
Gaufurt. Corporal Z, who had called for him at the hospital, still drove a
jeep combat-style, with the windshield down on the hood, armistice or
no armistice. There were thousands of new troops in Germany. By driving
with his windshield down, combat-style, Corporal Z hoped to show
that he was not one of them, that not by a long shot was he some new
son of a bitch in the E.T.O.
When he let go of his head, X began to stare at the surface of the
writing table, which was a catchall for at least two dozen unopened letters
and at least five or six unopened packages, all addressed to him. He
reached behind the debris and picked out a book that stood against the
wall. It was a book by Goebbels, entitled “Die Zeit Ohne Beispiel.” It
belonged to the thirty-eight-year-old, unmarried daughter of the family
that, up to a few weeks earlier, had been living in the house. She had
been a low official in the Nazi Party, but high enough, by Army Regulations
standards, to fall into an automatic-arrest category. X himself had
arrested her. Now, for the third time since he had returned from the hospital
that day, he opened the woman’s book and read the brief inscription
on the flyleaf. Written in ink, in German, in a small, hopelessly sincere
handwriting, were the words “Dear God, life is hell.” Nothing led
up to or away from it. Alone on the page, and in the sickly stillness of the
room, the words appeared to have the stature of an uncontestable, even
classic indictment. X stared at the page for several minutes, trying, against
heavy odds, not to be taken in. Then, with far more zeal than he had
done anything in weeks, he picked up a pencil stub and wrote down
under the inscription, in English, “Fathers and teachers, I ponder ‘What
is hell?’ I maintain that it is suffering of being unable to love.” He started
to write Dostoevski’s name under the inscription, but saw—with fright
that ran through his whole body—that what he had written was almost
entirely illegible. He shut the book.
He quickly picked up something else from the table, a letter from his
older brother in Albany. It had been on his table even before he had
checked into the hospital. He opened the envelope, loosely resolved to
read the letter straight through, but read only the top half of the first
page. He stopped after the words “Now that the g.d. war is over and
you probably have a lot of time over there, how about sending the kids a
couple of bayonets or swastikas . . .” After he’d torn it up, he looked
20 · J. D. Salinger For Esmé – With Love and Squalor · 21
down at the pieces as they lay in the wastebasket. He saw that he had
overlooked an enclosed snapshot. He could make out somebody’s feet
standing on a lawn somewhere.
He put his arms on the table and rested his head on them. He ached
from head to foot, all zones of pain seemingly interdependent. He was
rather like a Christmas tree whose lights, wired in series, must all go out
if even one bulb is defective.
The door banged open, without having been rapped on. X raised his
head, turned it, and saw Corporal Z standing in the door. Corporal Z
had been X’s jeep partner and constant companion from D Day straight
through five campaigns of the war. He lived on the first floor and he
usually came up to see X when he had a few rumors or gripes to unload.
He was a huge, photogenic young man of twenty-four. During the war,
a national magazine had photographed him in Hürtgen Forest; he had
posed, more than just obligingly, with a Thanksgiving turkey in each
hand. “Ya writin’ letters?” he asked X. “It’s spooky in here, for Chrissake.”
He preferred always to enter a room that had the overhead light turned
on.
X turned around in his chair and asked him to come in, and to be
careful not to step on the dog.
“Alvin. He’s right under your feet, Clay. How ‘bout turning on the
goddamn light?”
Clay found the overhead-light switch, flicked it on, then stepped
across the puny, servant’s-size room and sat down on the edge of the
bed, facing his host. His brick-red hair, just combed, was dripping with
the amount of water he required for satisfactory grooming. A comb with
a fountain-pen clip protruded, familiarly, from the right-hand pocket of
his olive-drab shirt. Over the left-hand pocket he was wearing the Combat
Infantrymen’s Badge (which, technically, he wasn’t authorized to
wear), the European Theatre ribbon, with five bronze battle stars in it
(instead of a lone silver one, which was the equivalent of five bronze
ones), and the pre-Pearl Harbor service ribbon. He sighed heavily and
said, “Christ almighty.” It meant nothing; it was Army. He took a pack of
cigarettes from his shirt pocket, tapped one out, then put away the pack
and rebuttoned the pocket flap. Smoking, he looked vacuously around
the room. His look finally settled on the radio. “Hey,” he said. “They got
this terrific show comin’ on the radio in a coupla minutes. Bob Hope,
and everybody.”
X, opening a fresh pack of cigarettes, said he had just turned the
radio off.
Undarkened, Clay watched X trying to get a cigarette lit. “Jesus,” he
said, with spectator’s enthusiasm, “you oughta see your goddam hands.
Boy, have you got the shakes. Ya know that?”
X got his cigarette lit, nodded, and said Clay had a real eye for detail.
“No kidding, hey. I goddam near fainted when I saw you at the hospital.
You looked like a goddam corpse. How much weight ya lose? How
many pounds? Ya know?”
“I don’t know. How was your mail when I was gone? You heard
from Loretta?”
Loretta was Clay’s girl. They intended to get married at their earliest
convenience. She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple
exclamation points and inaccurate observations. All through the war,
Clay had read all Loretta’s letters aloud to X, however intimate they
were—in fact, the more intimate, the better. It was his custom, after each
reading, to ask X to plot out or pad out the letter of reply, or to insert a
few impressive words in French or German.
“Yeah, I had a letter from her yesterday. Down in my room. Show it
to ya later,” Clay said, listlessly. He sat up straight on the edge of the bed,
held his breath, and issued a long, resonant belch. Looking just semipleased
with his achievement, he relaxed again. “Her goddam brother’s
gettin’ outa the Navy on account of his hip,” he said. “He’s got this hip,
the bastard.” He sat up again and tried for another belch, but with below-par
results. A jot of alertness came into his face. “Hey. Before I forget.
We gotta get up at five tomorrow and drive to Hamburg or someplace.
Pick up Eisenhower jackets for the whole detachment.”
X, regarding him hostilely, stated that he didn’t want an Eisenhower
jacket.
22 · J. D. Salinger For Esmé – With Love and Squalor · 23
Clay looked surprised, almost a trifle hurt. “Oh, they’re good! They
look good. How come?”
“No reason. Why do we have to get up at five? The war’s over, for
God’s sake.”
“I don’t know—we gotta get back before lunch. They got some new
forms in we gotta fill out before lunch. . . . I asked Bulling how come we
couldn’t fill ‘em out tonight—he’s got the goddam forms right on his
desk. He don’t want to open the envelopes yet, the son of a bitch.”
The two sat quiet for a moment, hating Bulling.
Clay suddenly looked at X with new—higher—interest than before.
“Hey,” he said. “Did you know the goddam side of your face is jumping
all over the place?”
X said he knew all about it, and covered his tic with his hand.
Clay stared at him for a moment, then said, rather vividly, as if he
were the bearer of exceptionally good news, “I wrote Loretta you had a
nervous breakdown.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. She’s interested as hell in all that stuff. She’s majoring in psychology.”
Clay stretched himself out on the bed, shoes included. “You
know what she said? She says nobody gets a nervous breakdown just
from the war and all. She says you probably were unstable like, your
whole goddam life.”
X bridged his hands over his eyes—the light over the bed seemed to
be blinding him—and said that Loretta’s insight into things was always
a joy.
Clay glanced over at him. “Listen, ya bastard,” he said. “She knows
a goddam sight more psychology than you do.”
“Do you think you can bring yourself to take your stinking feet off
my bed?” X asked.
Clay left his feet where they were for a few don’t-tell-me-where-toput-my-feet
seconds, then swung them around to the floor and sat up.
“I’m goin’ downstairs anyway. They got the radio on in Walker’s room.”
He didn’t get up from the bed, though. “Hey. I was just tellin’ that new
son of a bitch, Bernstein, downstairs. Remember that time I and you
drove into Valognes, and we got shelled for two goddam hours, and that
goddam cat I shot that jumped up on the hood of the jeep when we were
layin’ in that hole? Remember?”
“Yes—don’t start that business with that cat again, Clay, God damn
it. I don’t want to hear about it.”
“No, all I mean is I wrote Loretta about it. She and the whole psychology
class discussed it. In class and all. The goddam professor and
everybody.”
“That’s fine. I don’t want to hear about it, Clay.”
“No, you know the reason I took a pot shot at it, Loretta says? She
says I was temporarily insane. No kidding. From the shelling and all.”
X threaded his fingers, once, through his dirty hair, then shielded his
eyes against the light again. “You weren’t insane. You were simply doing
your duty. You killed that pussycat in as manly a way as anybody
could’ve under the circumstances.”
Clay looked at him suspiciously. “What the hell are you talkin’
about?”
“That cat was a spy. You had to take a pot shot at it. It was a very
clever German midget dressed up in a cheap fur coat. So there was absolutely
nothing brutal, or cruel, or dirty, or even—”
“God damn it!” Clay said, his lips thinned. “Can’t you ever be sincere?”
X felt suddenly sick, and he swung around in his chair and grabbed
the wastebasket—just in time.
When he had straightened up and turned toward his guest again, he
found him standing, embarrassed, halfway between the bed and the
door. X started to apologize, but changed his mind and reached for his
cigarettes.
“C’mon down and listen to Hope on the radio, hey,” Clay said, keeping
his distance but trying to be friendly over it. “It’ll do ya good. I mean
it.”
“You go ahead, Clay. . . . I’ll look at my stamp collection.”
“Yeah? You got a stamp collection? I didn’t know you—”
“I’m only kidding.”
24 · J. D. Salinger For Esmé – With Love and Squalor · 25
Clay took a couple of slow steps toward the door. “I may drive over
to Ehstadt later,” he said. “They got a dance. It’ll probably last till around
two. Wanna go?”
“No, thanks. . . . I may practice a few steps in the room.”
“O.K. G’night! Take it easy, now, for Chrissake.” The door slammed
shut, then instantly opened again. “Hey. O.K. if I leave a letter to Loretta
under your door? I got some German stuff in it. Willya fix it up for me?”
“Yes. Leave me alone now, God damn it.”
“Sure,” said Clay. “You know what my mother wrote me? She wrote
me she’s glad you and I were together and the whole war. In the same
jeep and all. She says my letters are a helluva lot more intelligent since
we been goin’ around together.”
X looked up and over at him, and said, with great effort, “Thanks.
Tell her thanks for me.”
“I will. G’night!” The door slammed shut, this time for good.
X sat looking at the door for a long while, then turned his chair around
toward the writing table and picked up his portable typewriter from the
floor. He made space for it on the messy table surface, pushing aside the
collapsed pile of unopened letters and packages. He thought if he wrote
a letter to an old friend of his in New York there might be some quick,
however slight, therapy in it for him. But he couldn’t insert his notepaper
into the roller properly, his fingers were shaking so violently now. He
put his hands down at his sides for a minute, then tried again, but finally
crumpled the notepaper in his hand.
He was aware that he ought to get the wastebasket out of the room,
but instead of doing anything about it, he put his arms on the typewriter
and rested his head again, closing his eyes.
A few throbbing minutes later, when he opened his eyes, he found
himself squinting at a small, unopened package wrapped in green paper.
It had probably slipped off the pile when he had made space for the
typewriter. He saw that it had been readdressed several times. He could
make out, on just one side of the package, at least three of his old A.P.O.
numbers.
He opened the package without any interest, without even looking
at the return address. He opened it by burning the string with a lighted
match. He was more interested in watching a string burn all the way
down than in opening the package, he opened it, finally.
Inside the box, a note, written in ink, lay on top of a small object,
wrapped in tissue paper. He picked out the note and read it.
17, — Road,
—, Devon
June 7, 1944
DEAR SERGEANT X,
I hope you will forgive me for having taken 38 days to begin our
correspondence but, I have been extremely busy as my aunt has undergone
streptocococus of the throat and nearly perished and I have been
justifiably saddled with one responsibility after another. However I have
thought of you frequently and of the extremely pleasant afternoon we
spent in each other’s company on April 30, 1944 between 3:45 and 4:15
P.M. in case it slipped your mind.
We are all tremendously excited and overawed about D Day and
only hope that it will bring about the swift termination of the war and a
method of existence that is ridiculous to say the least. Charles and I are
both quite concerned about you; we hope you were not among those
who made the first initial assault upon the Cotentin Peninsula. Were
you? Please reply as speedily as possible. My warmest regards to your
wife.
Sincerely yours,
ESMÉ
P.S. I am taking the liberty of enclosing my wristwatch which you may
keep in your possession for the duration of the conflict. I did not observe
whether you were wearing one during our brief association, but this one
is extremely water-proof and shock-proof as well as having many other
virtues among which one can tell at what velocity one is walking if one
26 · J. D. Salinger
wishes. I am quite certain that you will use it to greater advantage in
these difficult days then I ever can and that you will accept it as a lucky
talisman.
Charles, whom I am teaching to read and write and whom I am
finding an extremely intelligent novice, wishes to add a few words. Please
write me as soon as you have the time and inclination.
HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO
HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO
LOVE AND KISSES CHARLES
It was a long time before X could set the note aside, let alone lift
Esmé’s father’s wristwatch out of the box. When he did finally lift it out,
he saw that its crystal had been broken in transit. He wondered if the
watch was otherwise undamaged, but he hadn’t the courage to wind it
and find out. He just sat with it in his hand for another long period.
Then, suddenly, almost ecstatically, he felt sleepy.
You take a really sleepy man, Esmé, and he always stands a chance
of again becoming a man with all his fac—with all his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s
intact.
Maps
In 2013, an anonymous hacker mapped the Internet through illegal means, and in the process exposed rampant security problems. The project, called Internet Census 2012, used 420,000 networked devices, dubbed the Carna Botnet, to ping IP addresses across the globe in 2012. Every one of the devices was either entirely unsecured with no password protection, or used the standard password "root" that comes with many off-the-shelf routers (users are supposed to change the password, but rarely do). The hacker released all of the collected data to the public domain in a sort of research paper. The animation above is a map based on that data that shows 24-hours of Internet use. CARNA BOTNET
06.10.15
WHEN YOU HEAR the word “Internet,” what do you picture in your mind? Is it a series of pipes, or a three-dimensional spacescape, or maybe a browser on your phone’s screen? Visualizing the Internet is tough, perhaps because it’s this weird combination of physical and conceptual things. But that’s also what makes it an appealing endeavor.
There is of course a physical architecture of cables, wires and switches that exists, but these material things are more like a backbone or a substrate that enables the Internet to exist. And while these tangible aspects of the Internet are hard enough to visualize, the conceptual part is a mind bender. People have assigned all sorts of physical descriptors to it, attempts to give it a shape. They call it the inter-tubes or the inter-webs, the information superhighway, or the cloud.
Perhaps the most ubiquitous nickname is also the least concrete: cyberspace. But even this amorphous moniker implies a geography, or at least a spatial aspect. And where there is a spatial aspect of any sort, even imagined, there will be maps.
But how do you map the Internet? This is an intriguing problem that has drawn many different attempts from cartographers, computer scientists, visual artists, data wranglers and information scientists. We’ve collected some of our favorite maps of the Internet in the gallery above, from the adorably schematic 1977 map of the Internet’s larval stage, known as ARPANET, to geographical maps of the deep-sea cables that transfer the information, to sophisticated computer-generated topologic maps of the connections that make up cyberspace.
Some of these visualizations focus on websites, some on users, some on connections and some on concepts. Many use proximity to represent some sort of relatedness, just as Waldo Tobler taught cartographers. For some, closeness represents similarity, for others it indicates connectedness. Others have mapped the Internet onto an existing architecture, like the Tokyo Metro.
The results are varied and beautiful and will give you lots of visuals to fill your head when you hear the word Internet in the future.
The Northern Lights flare up over Grimersta Lodge on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis in the early hours of March 18, 2015. SANDIE MACIVER/DEMOTIX/CORBIS
The aurora australis on March 17-18 this year, as captured by the Suomi-NPP satellite. CURTIS SEAMAN (CIRA/COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY)
On Care for Our Common Home
THE POPE’S MEMO ON CLIMATE CHANGE IS A MIND-BLOWER
Sure, Francis has his more traditional moments. Abortion and assisted suicide are still no-go for the leader of the world’s Catholics. But Francis has been explicit about links between capitalism, materialism, and threats to the world’s poor. There’s a reason he named himself after St. Francis of Assisi—famously poor, famously eco-conscious—after all.
Now the Pope is taking on science. Specifically, in a new encyclical—that’s a letter laying out official Catholic doctrine—Francis describes Earth’s problem with an increasingly messed-up climate, why that’s the purview of religion, and who will suffer the most if people don’t do anything about it. The encyclical, “On Care for Our Common Home,” makes explicit the connection between climate change and oppression of the poorest and most vulnerable. It’s well-argued, clear, at times quite moving…and 42,000 words long. So here’s the good-parts version.
THE THESIS STATEMENT
It is no longer enough to speak only of the integrity of ecosystems. We have to dare to speak of the integrity of human life, of the need to promote and unify all the great values. Once we lose our humility, and become enthralled with the possibility of limitless mastery over everything, we inevitably end up harming society and the environment.
NATURE ISN'T A POSSESSION
If we approach nature and the environment without this openness to awe and wonder, if we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs. By contrast, if we feel intimately united with all that exists, then sobriety and care will well up spontaneously. The poverty and austerity of Saint Francis were no mere veneer of asceticism, but something much more radical: a refusal to turn reality into an object simply to be used and controlled.
Rather than a problem to be solved, the world is a joyful mystery to be contemplated with gladness and praise.
THE CLIMATE IS MESSED UP AND PEOPLE HAVE TO FIX IT
The climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all. At the global level, it is a complex system linked to many of the essential conditions for human life. A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system. In recent decades this warming has been accompanied by a constant rise in the sea level and, it would appear, by an increase of extreme weather events, even if a scientifically determinable cause cannot be assigned to each particular phenomenon. Humanity is called to recognize the need for changes of lifestyle, production and consumption, in order to combat this warming or at least the human causes which produce or aggravate it.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF CLIMATE CHANGE ARE A SOCIAL JUSTICE ISSUE
Even as the quality of available water is constantly diminishing, in some places there is a growing tendency, despite its scarcity, to privatize this resource, turning it into a commodity subject to the laws of the market. Yet access to safe drinkable water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights. Our world has a grave social debt towards the poor who lack access to drinking water, because they are denied the right to a life consistent with their inalienable dignity.
Each year sees the disappearance of thousands of plant and animal species which we will never know, which our children will never see, because they have been lost for ever. The great majority become extinct for reasons related to human activity. Because of us, thousands of species will no longer give glory to God by their very existence, nor convey their message to us. We have no such right.
SCIENTISTS ARE RIGHT, AND THIS IS ABOUT MORE THAN SCIENCE
We must be grateful for the praiseworthy efforts being made by scientists and engineers dedicated to finding solutions to man-made problems. But a sober look at our world shows that the degree of human intervention, often in the service of business interests and consumerism, is actually making our earth less rich and beautiful, ever more limited and grey, even as technological advances and consumer goods continue to abound limitlessly. We seem to think that we can substitute an irreplaceable and irretrievable beauty with something which we have created ourselves.
BLAME THE MEDIA
Real relationships with others, with all the challenges they entail, now tend to be replaced by a type of internet communication which enables us to choose or eliminate relationships at whim, thus giving rise to a new type of contrived emotion which has more to do with devices and displays than with other people and with nature.
This lack of physical contact and encounter, encouraged at times by the disintegration of our cities, can lead to a numbing of conscience and to tendentious analyses which neglect parts of reality….We have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.
BUT LET'S NOT FORGET THAT TECHNOLOGY IS A WONDERFUL THING
Humanity has entered a new era in which our technical prowess has brought us to a crossroads. We are the beneficiaries of two centuries of enormous waves of change: steam engines, railways, the telegraph, electricity, automobiles, aeroplanes, chemical industries, modern medicine, information technology and, more recently, the digital revolution, robotics, biotechnologies and nanotechnologies. It is right to rejoice in these advances and to be excited by the immense possibilities which they continue to open up before us, for “science and technology are wonderful products of God-given human creativity.”
...UNTIL IT TAKES OVER PEOPLE'S LIVES
Our freedom fades when it is handed over to the blind forces of the unconscious, of immediate needs, of self-interest, and of violence. In this sense, we stand naked and exposed in the face of our ever-increasing power, lacking the wherewithal to control it. We have certain superficial mechanisms, but we cannot claim to have a sound ethics, a culture and spirituality genuinely capable of setting limits and teaching clear-minded self-restraint.
SERIOUSLY, STOP LOOKING AT YOUR PHONE
A constant flood of new consumer goods can baffle the heart and prevent us from cherishing each thing and each moment. To be serenely present to each reality, however small it may be, opens us to much greater horizons of understanding and personal fulfillment.
The richer are getting richer by screwing the world’s poor and the environment.
The foreign debt of poor countries has become a way of controlling them, yet this is not the case where ecological debt is concerned. In different ways, developing countries, where the most important reserves of the biosphere are found, continue to fuel the development of richer countries at the cost of their own present and future.
GOD DID NOT SAY PEOPLE COULD DO WHATEVER THEY WANTED TO EARTH
We are not God. The earth was here before us and it has been given to us. This allows us to respond to the charge that Judaeo-Christian thinking, on the basis of the Genesis account which grants man “dominion” over the earth (cf. Gen 1:28), has encouraged the unbridled exploitation of nature by painting him as domineering and destructive by nature. This is not a correct interpretation of the Bible as understood by the Church.
When nature is viewed solely as a source of profit and gain, this has serious consequences for society. This vision of “might is right” has engendered immense inequality, injustice and acts of violence against the majority of humanity, since resources end up in the hands of the first comer or the most powerful: the winner takes all.
The natural environment is a collective good, the patrimony of all humanity and the responsibility of everyone. If we make something our own, it is only to administer it for the good of all. If we do not, we burden our consciences with the weight of having denied the existence of others.
Mistreatment of the environment is as bad as a lot of really bad stuff, like child abuse and stem cells.
The culture of relativism is the same disorder which drives one person to take advantage of another, to treat others as mere objects, imposing forced labour on them or enslaving them to pay their debts. The same kind of thinking leads to the sexual exploitation of children and abandonment of the elderly who no longer serve our interests. It is also the mindset of those who say: Let us allow the invisible forces of the market to regulate the economy, and consider their impact on society and nature as collateral damage.
SERIOUSLY, LAY OFF THE EMBRYONIC STEM CELL RESEARCH
There is a tendency to justify transgressing all boundaries when experimentation is carried out on living human embryos. We forget that the inalienable worth of a human being transcends his or her degree of development.
AND HOW ABOUT A LITTLE MORE OPEN-MINDEDNESS FOR TRANSGENDER PEOPLE?
Learning to accept our body, to care for it and to respect its fullest meaning, is an essential element of any genuine human ecology. Also, valuing one’s own body in its femininity or masculinity is necessary if I am going to be able to recognize myself in an encounter with someone who is different. In this way we can joyfully accept the specific gifts of another man or woman, the work of God the Creator, and find mutual enrichment. It is not a healthy attitude which would seek “to cancel out sexual difference because it no longer knows how to confront it”.
THE POPE WANTS TO TALK THIS OUT
There are certain environmental issues where it is not easy to achieve a broad consensus. Here I would state once more that the Church does not presume to settle scientific questions or to replace politics. But I am concerned to encourage an honest and open debate so that particular interests or ideologies will not prejudice the common good.
Running Fence
"Jeanne-Claude and I borrow space and create a gentle disturbance in it for just a few days. When they appear for a few days, they carry this tremendous freedom of irresponsibility." ~ Christo
The Floating Piers
The Floating Piers (Project for Lake Iseo, Italy)
Collage 2014
17 x 22" (43.2 x 55.9 cm)
Pencil, wax crayon, enamel paint, photograph by Wolfgang Volz, map, fabric sample and tape
Photo: André Grossmann
© 2014 Christo