The total official literary output of J. D. Salinger was expected to grow considerably following his death in 2010. Legend had it that the famously reclusive writer spent his decades of retirement from public life toiling on fiction only his death would allow to see the light.
If those manuscripts exist, they remain locked away. But in 2014 there was a brief trickle of posthumous output, three more short stories to add to the nine we have, along with Catcher In The Rye and four novellas.
These, still the newest Salinger stories as of the beginning of 2025, include two of the oldest, first published in magazines in 1940. The other appeared for the first time in late 1944, by which time Salinger was a combat intelligence officer on the Siegfried Line.
Like Robert Altman liked to say of his movie M*A*S*H, Three Early Stories wasn’t released so much as it escaped. Published either in Story magazine or the University of Kansas Review, they languished in relative obscurity for decades, known only to Salinger fans along with 19 other stories legally accessible only from back issues of old magazines.
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| The March-April 1940 issue of Story Magazine included J. D. Salinger's first published story, "The Young Folks." The magazine's co-founder, Whit Burnett, was an early mentor of Salinger as well as other notable authors. Image from https://www.betweenthecovers.com/pages/books/80479/j-d-salinger/story-the-young-folks-in-story-magazine-march-april-1940?soldItem=true |
Getting them out there for people to read would seem a feat worth celebrating. But what a puny package! Each story fills 11 or 12 expansively typeset pages, broken up by occasional black-and-white illustrations. The entire book is just 69 pages, half of them blank.
For the price of a normal-sized book, what you get here are three shorter-than-normal short stories of varying quality. They reveal Salinger’s stylistic aims and stirrings of his signature voice more than his philosophy or deft gift for construction. They also suggest a strong influence from other great writers, i. e. Fitzgerald and Hemingway, more than you might expect from Salinger’s reputation. It really is one good story and a couple of curios, but like they say, your miles may vary.
“The Young Folks”
About eleven o’clock, Lucille Henderson, observing that her party was soaring at the proper height, and just having been smiled at by Jack Delroy, forced herself to glance over in the direction of Edna Phillips, who since eight o’clock had been sitting in the big red chair, smoking cigarettes and yodeling hellos and wearing a very bright eye which young men were not bothering to catch.
With this whimsically sardonic paragraph, Salinger began his published career in early 1940. “The Young Folks” is a story about college kids in an age just before the G. I. Bill made higher education widely available to most Americans. It spotlights Edna and her winsome attempts at pleasant conversation with a bored nailbiter, one William Jameson Jr.
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| "Who're ya looking at? I know most of the gang here tonight." Poor Edna tries to be helpful while a bored Jameson scopes out other women at the party in "The Young Folks." Above, a New Year's Eve celebration, 1940. Image from https://fineartamerica.com/featured/new-years-party-1940-granger.html |
As the opening suggests, Edna is not much in the looks department, but she is upbeat and does all the work in her chat with Bill. Like the other stories here, you get a series of conversations between two people; here Edna and host Lucille make the other pairing.
The story has been compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I see it too, specifically “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” with its focus on sad Edna set against a background of unconscious privilege. In both pieces the object is humor, which Salinger accomplishes mostly with rueful asides: “They arose simultaneously. Edna was taller than Jameson and Jameson was shorter than Edna.”
Maybe the most notable aspect of the story for his fans is Salinger’s disengaged portrait of a city party scene where people float around the edges without making an impression, and a talk between two people with different levels of engagement which dries up in real time. There is a stinger at the end, but like everything else about “The Young Folks” it is muted. Salinger showcases knowledge for how pre-adults talk about life and school, and it works for what it is.
“Go See Eddie”
Salinger’s second published story, from late 1940, has more going on in the way of narrative, though without any of the charm. I can see why it got rejected by Story magazine and found a home only with an academic publication. This time it’s just one two-handed conversation: a young woman and her brother, who is visiting her apartment.
While Helen regards herself in the mirror, Bobby tells her he has been hearing things about her love life he doesn’t like:
“You and your goddam grand persons. You know more goddam grand persons. The guy from Cleveland. What the hell was his name? Bothwell. Harry Bothwell. And how ‘bout that blond kid used to sing at Bill Cassidy’s? Two of the goddamndest grandest persons you ever met.”
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| Helen's attention in "Go See Eddie" is divided between her brother and her reflection in the mirror. The latter gets most of her attention: She just got up and went back to her dressing table to brush her hair, her thick red hair. Image from https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/old-1940s-sepia-photo-of-dreamy-young-woman-looking-in-theater-mirror-gm811936064-131353493 |
Her current relationships include an affair with a married man whose wife he knows and likes. Bobby urges her to stop this and get a job on a chorus line with a guy they both know named Eddie. How working on a chorus line is going to get her on the straight and narrow isn’t really explained. Nothing is; the dialogue is elliptical and inconclusive all the way through to its ambiguous resolution.
There is a nice descriptive moment of the sunlight catching the two of them, “lushing her milky skin, and doing nothing for Bobby but showing up his dandruff and the pockets under his eyes.” But we never really know these characters, let alone get to caring for them.
“Go See Eddie” is more a mood piece than story. It sets up an interesting premise, develops it with a few terse exchanges, then brings you to a vague conclusion. Not bad, but lacking.
“Once A Week Won’t Kill You”
Published a few years later in 1944, like “The Young Folks” for Story magazine, this is the closest of the three to what I think of as a Salinger piece. It is solid, evocative, and open-ended in the Nine Stories manner, if limited like the other two by its brevity.
Dickie Camson packs a suitcase while his wife Virginia looks on. Like the other stories, Salinger presents us with only surface details, not interior thoughts in the recognizable Hemingway iceberg manner. Eventually we realize he is about to go to the Army to fight in the war:
“I hope they put you in the Calvary. The Calvary’s lovely,” she said. “I’m mad about those little sword do-hickies they wear on their collars. And you love to ride and all.”
“The Cavalry,” said the young man, with his eyes shut. “There’s not much chance of that stuff. Everybody’s going to the Infantry, these days.”
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| An Army induction center, where men are formally sent to military service. Dickie is getting ready for his turn at the start of "Once A Week Won't Kill You." "I hope at least they send you to London," his wife says. "I mean, where there's some civilized people." Image from https://www.fineartstorehouse.com/bettmann-archive/world-war-ii-induction-center-39265593.html |
Dickie then stops to see his Aunt Rena, a cheerful eccentric who lives with the couple in her own room. Earlier we saw him ask his wife to take the aunt to the movies once a week, keep her from being too lonely: “He had wanted her to be the one woman in 1944 who did not have someone’s hourglass to watch. Now he knew he had to give her his.”
Salinger apparently wrote this on a troop ship before disembarking in England in the lead-up to D-Day. In many of its details, there is a sense of autobiography, such as Dickie speaking both German and French and pondering the possibility of becoming an officer.
Several
other thus-officially-uncollected Salinger stories also center around life in
war; military service forced on him a crueler if more rounded perspective that
served his fiction well, however damaging it was to his psyche. If we ever do get
another breach from the formidable Salinger dam, I hope those stories find
their way out, too.
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