j.d. salinger

Now that J.D. Salinger’s is dead and gone, I suspect lots of people will be reading his works, possibly for the first time. Legions will be exposed to his iconic novel of tortured youth, “The Catcher in the Rye,” where the word “lousy,” appears dozens of times. As I was going through my books the other day, a Sisyphean task, I came across a nearly pristine copy of “Catcher,” printed by Bantam Books in 1965. I also discovered a 1961 hardback edition of “Franny & Zooey” published by Little, Brown, and a 1960 paperback copy of “Nine Stories,” printed by Signet. Somewhere in the house I think we have a copy of “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, “ but not “Seymour: An Introduction.”

The sight of “Nine Stories,” set my heart aflutter as I remembered the collection contains my very favorite piece of Salinger’s minimal output, a strange, sad, pitch perfect story called “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut.” The reason I’ve always liked the story so much is because it sums up every bogey man that ever frightened me about living in Connecticut.

A word about “Catcher.” I confess much as I appreciate Salinger’s skill in writing it, the story never seriously spoke to me. I just could not relate. I wasn’t a boy, I never went to boarding school, and as an only child, the poignancy of Holden Caulfield’s love for his sister Phoebe, the lone person in his life he doesn’t deem a phony, was an alien concept. It is true, though, as a youth, I did feel tortured. But anomie was never my problem, so whatever Holden Caulfield was going through, it didn’t speak to me.

“Uncle Wiggly,” was my kind of story. Everything takes place on a freezing weekday afternoon around 1946 when the war had just ended. Eloise is a young married woman with a young child who lives in an unnamed town in Connecticut. She’s invited her former college roommate (they both dropped out) Mary Jane to come for lunch as Mary Jane, who lives and works in the city, has to drive to Larchmont anyway on an errand for her boss. Mary Jane gets lost on the Merrit and doesn’t arrive until three. Lunch ruined, Eloise immediately starts fixing drinks and in no time the women are loaded.

Buzzed, they launch into a dissection of every girl they knew at school and who married who. Eloise married Lew who works in the city. Mary Jane was briefly wed to an aviation cadet from Dill, Mississippi ,who spent two of the three months Mary Jane was married to him in jail for stabbing a military officer. Mary Jane is doubled over with laughter by almost everything Eloise says. Eloise illustrates her stories by leaping off the sofa to demonstrate bumps and grinds. She gets caught up in a story about a former boyfriend, a soldier named Walt. She describes a night when they were running to catch a bus and Eloise fell and twisted her ankle. “He said ‘Poor Uncle Wiggly,” Eloise relates. “He meant my ankle. Poor old Uncle Wiggly he called it. God, he was nice.”

“Doesn’t Lew have a sense of humor?” Mary Jane asks. “Oh God! Who knows?” Eloise replies. “I guess so. He laughs at cartoons and stuff.” Just then Eloise’s odd looking, myopic daughter Ramona enters the room. Ramona is a loner who has an invisible friend named Jimmy Jimmereeno. Among Ramona’s most notable traits is a propensity for nose picking.

It’s getting dark and icing up, but the women proceed to get smashed. Eloise’s husband calls for a ride home from the station but she tells him to hitch a ride. Mary Jane frets about the advancing hour, but Eloise tells her to phone her boss to say she can’t make it. “Tell him you’re dead,” she says, twice. Mary Jane winds up passing out on the sofa and lonely Ramona, having been fed a solitary dinner in the kitchen by an invisible maid, puts herself to bed.

Critics have opined that the war is the theme of “Nine Stories,” a war in which Salinger fought. Talking about Walt, killed in the war, triggers an indescribable sadness in Eloise, who believed marriage to a good man and motherhood and a Colonial in Connecticut would be the charms she would need to ward off chaos.

So much has been made about Salinger’s obsession with phonies. In a nutshell, he hated them. And yet the three female characters who appear in “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut,” aren’t phonies at all. Scarily, they are very real, as real as you and me.