His 1950 short story “For Esmé – with Love and Squalor” was inspired by Jean Miller, the young girl who was 14 when they first met. Salinger was devastated and wrote her a stinging letter of rebuke, in which he reportedly drew a cartoon of Chaplin holding his penis as he chased after Oona. While Salinger was away on war duty, O’Neill became the fourth wife of the 54-year-old film star Charlie Chaplin.
Some of his biographers believe this fondness for young girls started with his love for 16-year-old Oona O’Neill, the daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill. In 1953, on his birthday, he left the city to live in a secluded 90-acre rural compound in Cornish.Īlthough the Salinger myth is of the oddball introvert, his early life in the tiny rural town was filled with socialising, especially with young women. “Contact with the public hinders my work,“ he said. Over the next two years, he decided that his only chance to continue a life dedicated to writing was to eschew celebrity life and New York’s literary cliques. The same man who went to London in 1951 and drank cocktails at the home of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh disliked the idea that he was now public property. Salinger did not like the fame that came with a hit book. The celebrated opening of the novel – “If you really want to know about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap.” – enraptured readers and helped make the book an instant success. He annulled the marriage and cut off all contact. The union lasted just eight months and ended abruptly when he discovered she had been a Gestapo informant during the war. While undergoing treatment, he met a half-German, half-French woman called Sylvia Welter and they were married within weeks.
“You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live,” he told his daughter Margaret.Īccording to Kenneth Slawenski, one of Salinger’s biographers, the traumatised young soldier was sent to hospital at the end of the war, for what would now probably be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder. He was present during the brutal and bloody Battle of Hürtgen Forest in late 1944. Salinger served as an infantry man and in counter-intelligence and participated in the assault on Utah Beach as part of the D-day landings. “I have survived a lot,” he said, although he never talked publicly about what he had seen at a concentration camp. The Second World War was a defining experience and the horrors he witnessed left him with mental scars for life. In the spring of 1942, Salinger was drafted into the US army.
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