For Esmé—with Love and Squalor by J. D. Salinger

First published: 1950

Type of plot: Psychological

Time of work: April, 1944, to May, 1945

Locale: Dover, England, and Gaufurt, Bavaria

Principal Characters:

• Staff Sergeant X, a young American stationed in Europe in the last year of World War II
• Esmé, a thirteen-year-old English girl whom X meets
• Clay (Corporal Z), X's insensitive jeepmate during this year

The Story

The story opens in 1950, immediately after the narrator has received an invitation to Esmé's wedding. He and his "breathtakingly levelheaded" wife have decided that he cannot go, so, instead, he writes these "few revealing notes on the bride as I knew her almost six years ago."

The story proper (still in the first person) begins in April of 1944. The narrator is one of sixty enlisted men stationed in rural England, undergoing pre-Invasion Intelligence training. On the afternoon of his last day in Devon, he walks through the rain to the small town and wanders into choir rehearsal in a church. There he notices a girl with "the sweetest-sounding" voice, "an exquisite forehead, and blase eyes." Later the girl, her five-year-old brother, Charles, and their governess come into the tearoom, where the narrator has gone to escape the rain. The girl gives him an "oddly radiant" smile and then comes over to talk with him because he looks "extremely lonely." Esmé is precious and precocious, her conversation peppered with large words and delightful misinformation about the United States ("I thought Americans despised tea").

The narrator learns that Esmé is titled, that both her parents are dead (she wears her father's oversized military wristwatch), and that she is being reared by an aunt. When Esmé finds out that the narrator is a writer, she asks if he would write a story for her and suggests that he "make it extremely squalid and moving." When she leaves, Esmé asks if he would like her to write to him. "It was a strangely emotional moment for me," the narrator relates. Esmé says good-bye and adds, "I hope you return from the war with all your faculties intact."

The second half of the story—"the squalid, or moving part," as the narrator says in its first line—takes place in Gaufurt, Bavaria, and is narrated in the third person. The protagonist (now "cunningly" disguised as "Staff Sergeant X") is sitting at a table in his second-floor room in an occupied German house several weeks after V-E Day (in other words, more than a year after the first scene). He has returned that day from a two-week stay in a Frankfurt hospital, where he was sent after an apparent nervous breakdown, but he does not look much improved. His hands shake, he has a facial tic, and his gums bleed at the touch of his tongue. In an attempt to hold on to something, he opens a book by Joseph Goebbels that was once owned by the thirty-eight-year-old woman who lived in this house and whom X arrested as a minor Nazi functionary. On the flyleaf, the woman has written, "Dear God, life is hell," Beneath that inscription, X now writes, "Fathers and teachers, I ponder 'What is Hell?' I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love," but when he finishes, he discovers that what he has written is "almost entirely illegible."

After a painful scene with his jeepmate, Clay, whose insensitivity to X's real situation keeps him from being very helpful, it is clear that X is near collapse. Suddenly, in the pile of unopened mail in front of him, he spots a package, opens it, and finds a letter from Esmé written almost a year earlier, with her father's wristwatch, sent to X "as a lucky talisman." The crystal to the watch is broken, and X does not have the courage to see if the watch still works. After holding it in his hand "for another long period," X realizes that "suddenly, almost ecstatically, he felt sleepy." The gift has somehow saved him, for, as he writes in the last line, a really sleepy man "always stands a chance of again becoming" a man with all his faculties "intact."

Bibliography

Alexander, Paul. Salinger: A Biography. Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1999.

Alsen, Eberhard. A Reader's Guide to J. D. Salinger. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002.

Belcher, William F., and James W. Lee, eds. J. D. Salinger and the Critics. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1962.

French, Warren T. J. D. Salinger. Rev. ed. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976.

Hamilton, Ian. In Search of J. D. Salinger. New York: Random House, 1988.

Kotzen, Kip, and Thomas Beller, eds. With Love and Squalor: Fourteen Writers Respond to the Work of J. D. Salinger. New York: Broadway Books, 2001.

Lundquist, James. J. D. Salinger. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1979.

Steinle, Pamela Hunt. In Cold Fear: "The Catcher in the Rye" Censorship Controversies and Postwar American Character. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000.

Sublette, Jack R. J. D. Salinger: An Annotated Bibliography, 1938-1981. New York: Garland, 1984.