The Uncollected J.D. Salinger.

by J.D. Salinger.

A Boy in France.

by J.D. Salinger.

After he had eaten half a can of pork and egg yolks, the boy laid his head back on the rain-sogged ground, hurtfully wrenched his head out of his helmet, closed his eyes, let his mind empty out from a thousand bungholes, and fell almost instantly asleep. When he awoke, it was nearly ten o'clock--wartime, crazy time, nobody's time--and the cold, wet, French sky had begun to darken. He lay there, opening his eyes, till slowly but surely the little war thoughts, those that cold not be disremembered, those that were not potentially and thankfully void, began to trickle back into his mind. When his mind was filled to its unhappy capacity, one cheerless, nightful trend rose to the top: Look for a place to sleep. Get on your feet. Get your blanket roll. You can't sleep here.

The boy raised his dirty, stinking, tired upper body, and from a sitting position, without looking at anything, he got to his feet. Groggily he bent over, picked up and put on his helmet. He walked unsteadily back to the blanket truck, and from a stack of muddy blanket rolls he pulled out his own. Carrying the slight, unwarm bundle under his left arm, he began to walk along the bushy perimeter of the field. He passed by Hurkin, who was sweatily digging a foxhole, and neither he nor Hurkin glanced with any interest at the other. He stopped where Eeves was digging in, and he said to Eeves, "You on tonight, Eeves?"

Eeves looked up and said, "Yeah," and a drop of sweat glistened and disengaged itself from the end of his long Vermont nose.

The boy said to Eeves, "Wake me up if anything gets hot or anything," and Eeves replied, "How'll I know where you're gonna be at?" and the boy told him, "I'll holler when I get there."

I won't dig in tonight, the boy thought, walking on. I won't struggle and dig and chop with that damn little entrenching tool tonight. I won't get hit. Don't let me get hit, Somebody. Tomorrow night I'll dig a swell hole, I swear I will. But for tonight, for just now, when everything hurts, let me just find someplace to drop. All of a sudden the boy saw a foxhole, a German one, unmistakably vacated by some Kraut during the afternoon, during the long, rotten afternoon.

The boy moved his aching legs a little faster, going toward it. When he got there he looked down into it, and his whole mind and body almost whimpered when he saw some G.I.'s dirty field jacket neatly folded and placed on the bottom of the hole, in the accepted claim. The boy moved on.

He saw another Kraut hole. He hurried awkwardly toward it. Looking down into it, he saw a gray woolen Kraut blanket, half spread, half bunched on the damp floor of the hole. it was a terrible blanket on which some German and recently lain and bled and probably died.

The boy dropped his blanket roll on the ground beside the hole, and then he removed his rifle, his gas mask, his pack and helmet. Then he stooped beside the hole, dropped the little distance to his knees, reached down into the hole and lifted out the heavy, bloody, unlamented Kraut blanket. Outside the hole, he rolled the thing into an absurd lump, picked it up and threw it into the dense hedgerow behind the hole. He looked down into the hole again. The dirt floor, he saw, was messy with what had permeated two folds of the heavy Kraut blanket. The boy took his entrenching tool from his pack, stepped into the hole and leadenly began to dig out the bad places.

When he was finished he stepped out of the hole, undid his blanket roll and laid the blankets out flat, one on top of the other. As if they were one, he folded the blankets in half the long way, and then he lifted this bed thing, as though it had some sort of spine to it, over to the hole and lowered it carefully out of sight.

He watched the pebbles of dirt tumble into the folds of his blankets. Then he picked up his rifle, gas mask and helmet, and laid them carefully on the natural surface of the ground at the head of the hole.

The boy lifted up the two top folds of his blankets, placed them aside slightly, and then he stepped with his muddy shoes into his bed. Standing up, he took off his field jacket, bunched it up into a ball, and then he lowered himself into position for the night. The hole was too short. He could not stretch out without bending his legs sharply at the knees. Covering himself with the top folds of his blankets, he laid his filthy head back on his filthier field jacket. He looked up into the darkening sky and felt a few mean little lumps of dirt trickle into his shirt collar, some lodging there, some continuing down his back. He did nothing about it.

Suddenly a red ant bit him nastily, uncompromisingly, on the leg, just above his leggings. he jammed a hand under the covers to kill the thing, but the movement caught itself short, as the boy hissed in pain, refeeling and remembering where that morning he had lost a whole fingernail.

Quickly he drew the hurting, throbbing finger up to the line if his eye and examined it in the fading light. then he placed the whole hand under the folds of the blankets, with the care more like that proffered a sick person than a sore finger, and let himself work the kind of abracadabra familiar to and special for G.I.'s in combat.

"When I take my hand out of this blanket," he thought, "my nail will be grown back, my hands will be clean. My body will be clean. I'll have on clean shorts, clean undershirt, a white shirt. A blue polka-dot tie. A gray suit with a stripe, and I'll be home, and I'll bolt the door. I'll put some coffee on the stove, some records on the phonograph, and I'll bolt the door. I'll read my books and I'll drink coffee and I'll listen to music, and I'll bolt the door. I'll open the window, I'll let in a nice, quiet girl--not Frances, not anyone I've ever known--and I'll bolt the door. I'll ask her to read some Emily Dickinson to me--that one about being chartless--and I'll ask her to read some William Blake to me--that one about the little lamb that made thee--and I'll bolt the door. She'll have an American voice, and she won't ask me if I have any chewing gum or bonbons, and I'll bolt the door."

The boy took his hurting hand out of the blankets suddenly, expecting and getting no change, no magic. Then he unbuttoned the flap of his sweat-stained, mud-crumbly shirt pocket, and took out a soggy lump of newspaper clippings. He laid the clippings on his chest, took off the top one and brought it up to eye level. It was a syndicated Broadway column, and he began to read in the dim light:

"Last night--and step up and touch me, brother--I dropped in at the Waldorf to see Jeanie Powers, the lovely starlet, who is here to attend the premiere of her new picture, The Rockets' Red Glare. (And don't miss it, folks. It's grand.) We asked the corn-fed Iowa beauty, who is in the big town for the first time in her lovely lifetime, what she wanted to do most while she was here. "Well," said the Beauty to the Beast, "when I was on the train, I decided that all I really wanted in New York was a date with a real, honest-to-goodness G.I.! And what do you suppose happened? The very first afternoon I was here, right in the lobby of the Waldorf I bumped square into Bubby Beamis! He's a major in public relations now, and he's stationed right in New York! How's that for luck?" . . . Well, your correspondent didn't say much. But lucky Beamis, I thought to my--"

The boy in the hole crumpled the clipping into a soggy ball, lifted the rest of the clippings from his chest, and dropped them all, on the natural ground to the side of the hole.

He stared up into the sky again, the French sky, the unmistakably French, not American sky. And he said aloud to himself, half snickering, half weeping, "Oo la-la!"

All of a sudden, and hurriedly, the boy took a soiled, unrecent envelope from his pocket. Quickly he extracted the letter from inside it and began to reread to for the thirty-oddth time:

MANASQUAN, NEW JERSEY,.

July 5, 1944.

Dear Babe: Mama thinks you are still in England, but I think you are in France. Are you in France? Daddy tells mama that he thinks you are in England still, but I think he thinks you are in France also. Are you in France?

The Bensons cane down to the shore early this summer and Jackie is over at the house all the time. Mama brought your books with us because she thinks you will be home this summer. Jackie asked if she could borrow the one about the Russian lady and one of the ones you used to keep on your desk. I gave them to her because she said she would not bend the pages or anything. Mama told her she smokes too much, and she is going to quit. She got poisoned from sunburn before we came down. She likes you a lot. She may go in the Wacks.

I saw Frances on my bike before we left home. I yelled at her, but she did not hear me. She is very stuck up and Jackie is not. Jackie's hair is prettier also.

There are more girls than boys on the beach this year. You never see any boys. The girls play cards a lot and put a lot of sun tan oil on each others back and lay in the sun., but go in the water more than they used to. Virginia Hope and Barbara Geezer had a fight about something and don't sit next to each other on the beach anymore. Lester Brogan was killed in the army where the Japs are. Mrs. Brogan does not come to the beach anymore except on Sundays with Mr. Brogan. Mr. Brogan just sits on the beach with Mrs. Brogan, and he does not go in the water, and you know what a good swimmer he is. I remember when you and Lester took me out to the float once. I go out to the float myself now. Diana Schults married a soldier that was at sea Girt and she went back to California with him for a week, but he is gone now and she is back. Diana lays on the beach by herself.

Before we left home, Mr. Ollinger died. Brother Teemers went into the store to get Mr. Ollinger to fix his bike and Mr. Ollinger was dead behind the counter. Brother Teemers ran crying all the way to the court house and Mr. Teemers was busy talking to the jury and everything. Brother Teemers ran right in anyway and yelled Daddy Daddy Mr. Ollinger is dead.

I cleaned out your car for you before we left for the shore. There was a lot of maps behind the front seat from your trip to Canada. I put them in your desk. There was also a girls comb. I think it was Frances. I put it in your desk also. Are you in France?

Love,

MATILDA.

P.S.: Can I go to Canada with you next time you go? I won't talk much and I'll light your cigarettes for you without really smoking them.

Sincerely yours,

MATILDA.

I miss you. Please come home soon.

Love and kisses,

MATILDA.

The boy in the hole carefully put the letter back inside the dirty, worn envelope, and put the envelope back into his shirt pocket.

Then he raised himself slightly in the hole and shouted, "Hey, Eeves! I'm over here!"

And across the field Eeves saw him and nodded back.

The boy sank back into the hole and said aloud to nobody, "Please come home soon." Then he fell crumbily, bent-leggedly, asleep.

A Girl I Knew.

by J.D. Salinger.

At the end of my freshman year of college, back in 1936, I flunked five out of five subjects. Flunking three out of five would have made me eligible to report for an invitation to attend some other college in the fall. But men in this three-out-of-five category sometimes had to wait outside the Dean's office as long as two hours. Men in my group - some of whom had big dates in New York that same night - weren't kept waiting a minute. It went one, two, three, the way most men in my group like things to go.

The particular college I had been attending apparently does not simply mail people's grades home, but prefers to shoot them out of some kind of gun. When I got home to New York, even the butler looked tipped off and hostile. It was a bad night altogether. My father informed me quietly that my formal education was formally over. In a way, I felt like asking for a crack at summer school or something. But I didn't. For one reason, my mother was in the room, and she kept saying that she just knew I should have gone to see my faculty adviser more regularly, that that was what he was there for. This was the kind of talk that made me want to go straight to the Rainbow Room with a friend. At any rate, one thing leading to another, when the familiar moment came to me to advance one of my fragile promises really to apply myself this time, I let it go by unused.

Although my father announced the same night that he was going to put me directly into his business, I felt confident that nothing wholly unattractive would happen for at least a week or so. I knew it would take a certain amount of deep, constructive brooding on my father's part to figure out a way of getting me into the firm in broad daylight - I happened to give both his partners the willies on sight.

I was taken a little aback, four or five evenings later, when my father suddenly asked me at dinner how I would like to go to Europe to learn a couple of languages the firm could use. First to Vienna and then maybe to Paris, he said unelaborately.

I replied in the effect that the idea sounded all right to me. I was breaking off anyway with a certain girl on Seventy-Fourth Street. And I very clearly associated Vienna with gondolas. Gondolas didn't seem like too bad a setup.

A few weeks later, in July of 1936, I sailed for Europe. My passport photograph, it might be worth mentioning, looked exactly like me. At eighteen. I was six feet two, weighed 119 pounds with my clothes on, and was a chain smoker. I think that if Goethe's Werther and all his sorrows had been placed on the promenade deck of the S.S. Rex beside me and all my sorrows, he would have looked by comparison, like a rather low comedian.

The ship docked at Naples, and from there I took a train to Vienna. I almost got off the train at Venice, when I found out just who had the gondolas, but two people in my compartment got off instead - I had been waiting too long for a chance to put my feet up, gondolas or no gondolas.

Naturally, certain when-you-get-to-Vienna rules had been laid down before my ship sailed from New York. Rules about taking at least three hours of language lessons daily; rules about not getting too friendly with people who take advantage of other, particularly younger, people; rules about not spending money like a drunken sailor; rules about the wearing of clothes in which a person wouldn't catch pneumonia; and so on. But after a month or so in Vienna I had most of that taken care of: I was taking three hours of German lesson every day - from a rather exceptional young lady I had met in the lounge of the Grand Hotel. I had found, in one of the far-outlying districts, a place that was cheaper than the Grand Hotel - the trolleys didn't run to my place after ten at night, but the taxis did. I was dressing warm - I had bought myself three pure-wool Tyrolean hats. I was meeting nice people - I had lent three hundred shillings to a very distinguished-looking guy in the bar of the Bristol Hotel. In short, I was in a position to cut my letter home down to the bone.

I spent a little more than five months in Vienna. I danced. I went ice skating and skiing. For strenuous exercise, I argued with an Englishman. I watched operations at two hospitals and had myself psychoanalyzed by a young Hungarian woman who smoked cigars. My German lessons never failed to hold my unflagging interest. I seemed to move, with all the luck of the undeserving, from gemutlichkeit to gemutlichkeit. But I mention these only to keep the Baedeker straight.

Probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. How well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn't necessarily affect the transformation. She was there, and she was the whole city, and that's that.

Leah was the daughter in the Viennese-Jewish family who lived in the apartment below mine - that is, below the family I was boarding with. She was sixteen, and beautiful in an immediate yet perfectly slow way. She had very dark hair that fell away from the most exquisite pair of ears I have ever seen. She had immense eyes that always seemed in danger of capsizing in their own innocence. Her hands were very pale brown, with slender, actionless fingers. When she sat down, she did the only sensible thing with her beautiful hands there was to be done: she placed them on her lap and left them there. In brief, she was probably the first appreciable thing of beauty I had seen that struck me as wholly legitimate.

For about four months I saw her two or three evenings a week, for an hour or so at a time. But never outside the apartment house in which we lived. We never went dancing; we never went to a concert; we never even went for a walk. I found out soon after we met that Leah's father had promised her in marriage to some young Pole. Maybe this fact had something to do with my not quite palpable, but curiously steady disinclination to give our acquaintanceship the run of the city. Maybe I just worried too much about things. Maybe I consistently hesitated to risk letting the thing we had together deteriorate into a romance. I don't know any more. I used to know, but I lost the knowledge a long time ago. A man can't go along indefinitely carrying around in his pocket a key that doesn't fit anything.

I met Leah a nice way.

I had a phonograph and two American phonograph records in my room. The two American records were a gift from my landlady - one of those rare, drop-it-and-run gifts that leave the recipient dizzy with gratitude. On one of the records Dorothy Lamour sang Moonlight and Shadows, and on the other Connie Boswell sang Where Are You? Both girls got pretty scratched up, hanging around my room, as they had to go to work whenever I heard my landlady's step outside my door.

One evening I was in my sitting room, writing a long letter to a girl in Pennsylvania, suggesting that she quit school and come to Europe to marry me - a not infrequent suggestion of mine in those days. My phonograph was not playing. But suddenly the words to Miss Boswell's song floated, just slightly damaged, through my open window: "Where are you?

Where have you gone wissout me?

I sought you cared about me.

Where are you?"

Thoroughly excited, I sprang to my feet, then rushed to my window and leaned out.

The apartment below mine had the only balcony of the house. I saw a girl standing on it, completely submerged in the pool of autumn twilight. She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together. The way the profile of her face and body refracted in the soupy twilight made me feel a little drunk. When a few seconds had throbbed by, I said hello to her. She then looked up at me, and though she seemed decorously startled, something told me she wasn't too surprised that I had heard her doing the Boswell number. This didn't matter, of course. I asked her, in murderous German, if I might join her on the balcony. The request obviously rattled her. She replied, in English, that she didn't think her "fahzzer" would like me to come down to see her. At this point, my opinion of girls' fathers, which had been low for years, struck bottom. But nevertheless I managed a drab little nod of understanding.

It turned out all right, though. Leah seemed to think it would be perfectly all right if she came up to see me. Entirely stupefied with gratitude, I nodded, then closed my window and began to wander hurriedly through my room, rapidly pushing things under other things with my foot.

I don't really remember our first evening in my sitting room. All our evenings were pretty much the same. I can't honestly separate one from another; not anymore, anyway.

Leah's knock on my door was always poetry - high, beautifully wavering, absolutely perpendicular poetry. Her knock started out speaking of her own innocence an beauty, and accidentally ended speaking of the innocence and beauty of all very young girls. I was always half-eaten away by the respect and happiness when I opened the door for Leah.

We would solemnly shake hands at my sitting-room door. Then Leah would walk, self-consciously but beautifully, to my window seat, sit down, and wait for our conversation to begin.

Her English, like my German, was nearly all holes. Yet invariably I spoke her language and she mine, although any other arrangement at all might have made for a less perforated means of communication.

"Uh. Wie geht es Ihnen?" I'd start out. (How are you?) I never used the familiar form in addressing Leah.

"I am very well, sank you very much," Leah would reply, never failing to blush. It didn't help much to look at her indirectly; she blushed anyway.

"Schon hinaus, nicht wahr?" I'd ask, rain or shine. (Nice out, isn't it?) "Yes," she'd answer, rain or shine.

"Uh. Waren Sie heute in der Kino?" was a favorite question of mine. (Did you go to the movies today?) Five days a week Leah worked in her father's cosmetics plant.

"No. I was today working by my fahzzer."

"Oh, dass ist recht! Uh. Ist es schon dort?" (Oh, that's right. Is it nice there?) "No. It is a very big fabric, with very many people running around about."

"Oh. Dass ist schlecht." (That's bad.) "Uh. Wollen Sie haben ein Tasse von Kaffee mit mir haben?" (Will you have a cup of coffee with me?) "I was already eating."