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Salinger's last brush with institutional wisdom came at Columbia, where he signed up for a short-story course given by Whit Burnett, editor of Story. In 1942 the author was drafted and used his week end passes to hole up in hotel rooms with his typewriter. Typical of his output then was an earnest piece for Story, and a weepy lament in the Saturday Evening Post about a sensitive young man who dies before he has time to finish the world's greatest novel, but whose brother, in penitence for his sins, abandons his own career as the world's greatest songwriter to finish the book.
By 1944 the author was stationed in Tiverton, Devonshire, training with a small counterintelligence detachment of the 4th Infantry Division—almost exactly the situation of Sergeant X, the tormented hero of the warmest and best of the Nine Stories, For Esme—With Love and Squalor (the author, like Sergeant X, passed the time by listening to choir practice at a Methodist church in Tiverton). On June 6, five hours after the first assault forces hit Utah Beach, Salinger landed with the 4th in Normandy, stayed with the division through the Battle of the Bulge. He was an aloof, solitary soldier whose job was to discover Gestapo agents by interviewing French civilians and captured Germans. In France, Staff Sergeant Salinger had an audience with War Correspondent Ernest Hemingway, who read Salinger's work and, possibly in appreciation of it ("Jesus, he has a helluva talent"), took out his Luger and shot the head off a chicken. Salinger used a similar incident in Esmé.
Foxhole Writer. With a swagger, the prospering young author in 1944 sent Burnett a $200 check to help other young writers, and added: "Am still writing whenever I can find the time and an unoccupied foxhole." He carried a typewriter around in his Jeep, and an Army acquaintance remembers him typing away, crouching under a table, while his area was under attack. Salinger's stories were improving, although his dialogue still had the kind of workmanlike falsity taught in writing classes. In one of his Post stories, Salinger introduced Sergeant
Vincent Caulfield, who "has a kid brother in the Army who flunked out of a lot of schools" and who is apparently killed in action in the Pacific. The story shows Salinger's fictional preoccupation with dead brothers, and his bent for starting his legends by killing off his main character. (The Glass legend similarly began with Seymour's suicide, in A Perfect Day for Banana fish, in 1948.)