“For Esme – With Love and Squalor” (1950)

[spoilers?] I’m not sure I have ever realized before what a nearly perfect short story this is by J.D. Salinger. Strike that “nearly.” Salinger takes his faith in children as the best of humanity and combines it with war experience for a powerful evocation of trauma and how it works. As a World War II soldier Salinger participated in the D-Day Normandy invasion, storming the beach. If the Utah Beach sector looked like what we saw in the opening of the movie Saving Private Ryan, it’s useful to keep in mind. This story is told as the before and after of that event, Salinger coming to terms with his own experience, or trying. In the first part of the story the first-person narrator, the soldier, is in England on a rainy day, finishing up training for the invasion. He has some time for himself and gets out of the rain in a tearoom. There he sees a girl he had seen moments earlier in a church, at a choir practice. She stood out to him. She’s 13, with her 5-year-old brother in tow. They are orphans. This is Esme, a serious girl absorbing the hard lessons of life. They strike up a conversation. He tells her he is a short-story writer. The bravery of it, even to a 13-year-old, is bracing. She asks him to write a story for her sometime. This part of the story is often funny. “I prefer stories about squalor,” she tells him. She is wearing a chronographic watch her father gave her. He died in the war. The scene in the tearoom is warm and charming. In the second half of the story, after Normandy, the narrator switches to third-person. “This is the squalid, or moving, part of the story,” he writes, “and the scene changes. The people change, too.... I’ve disguised myself so cunningly that even the cleverest reader will fail to recognize me.” Of course, that’s not true at all. We see him coping to hold himself together emotionally and failing. He has a stack of unopened letters he’s not looking at, but a package from Esme catches his eye. She has sent him her father’s chronographic watch and a letter. The watch has been smashed in transit, which I believe may be the saddest things I’ve ever read. But her letter is very cheering—the kind of cheering that makes you cry. It’s all a sudden rush of a roller coaster right at the end and it left me wrung out in all the best ways.

J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
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