Tag: Reading

by James Wallace Harris, 8/18/26

It’s been almost seventy years since I’ve cried — well, the boo-hooing, body-shaking, snot-slinging kind of crying. For most of my life, I was in control of my emotions. However, since I’ve gotten older, movies, books, sappy commercials, and even old songs will make my eyes water a bit. Reading “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” gave my eyes a soaking and even stopped up my sinuses.

That’s my concrete review of this story. Now for the verbose version.

I’ve developed a literary theory that I call the “Message in a Bottle” theory. All humans live inside their heads like living alone on a deserted island. Writing, especially fiction, is one solitary individual putting a message in a bottle and throwing it upon the ocean, hoping someone will read it.

However, messages in a bottle have an inherent limitation. Language is a poor tool for describing what we feel. I doubt I’d want to experience what was in J. D. Salinger’s head when he wrote: “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor.” It would have been too intense, too painful. Actually, it might have killed me to have had telepathic contact with Salinger. So, in that regard, we should be thankful for the limitations of words.

On the other hand, I think we wish we weren’t alone. I’m not sure even the closest of lovers ever get that near to each other. I suppose if telepathy existed, it would allow us to share feelings and maybe feel we weren’t alone. I’ve often wondered if twins achieve anything close to telepathy. Theoretically, those poor souls who have multiple personalities could share their feelings, but from everything I’ve heard about such folks, they only occupy the body one at a time.

Most writers create works that don’t attempt to describe what’s inside their heads. They either paint with words something they see outside of themselves and hope readers recognize it. Or imagine something they hope readers will recognize.

J. D. Salinger worked to describe exactly what he felt. I assume that’s why he’d get so furious with editors when they tried to alter his work. He knew the limitations of words, so he used them very carefully. Like any message-in-a-bottle story, the words are going to fall. However, Salinger knew that if he could use just the right words, they could trigger pale imitations of his emotions in us. The key was coding his message just so.

“For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” is about a staff sergeant in London just before being shipped out on D-Day. And that same sergeant after the war ends. J. D. Salinger endured five brutal WWII campaigns, from D-Day to walking into a concentration camp.

There is no way readers can understand what J. D. Salinger experienced. Salinger’s biographers, David Shields and Shane Salerno, in Salinger, said: “Of the 337 days the war lasted for the American soldier in Europe, Salinger was in combat for 299.” We could read every history of WWII combat in Europe and never come within light-years of what Salinger experienced. Salinger had a nervous breakdown after his company discovered the death camp.

How can anyone write about that experience? The thing is, we can’t, not in any definitive or rational way. Salinger continued to write throughout the war, carrying around chapters of Catcher in the Rye with him in combat. He obviously wanted to express himself. And after the war, he disavowed the stories he had written before it.

“For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” is merely a postcard from hell. It was published in The New Yorker, April 8, 1950. You can read it online here. Or buy a copy of Nine Stories, one of four official Salinger books. (One famous novel, and three story collections.)

After the war, it was obvious that Salinger had what we now call PTSD. Of all the stories I’ve read by Salinger, this one is his most direct attempt to convey his war experience.

After 1945, Salinger had a thing for children and young people. The people who knew him felt children represented pre-war innocence to Salinger.

In the first half of the story, an American staff sergeant visits a children’s choir in London and then goes to a tearoom. This part is told in first person.

While drinking his first cup of tea, the thirteen-year-old girl, Esmé, who had been the standout singer in the choir, her little brother Charles, and their aunt arrive in the tearoom and seat themselves near the narrator. Esmé and Charles come over to his table, and the sergeant and children have a charming conversation. (There are many parallels in this story’s structure to Salinger’s more famous story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”)

In the second half of the story, it switches into the third person. The setting is Bavaria several weeks after V-E Day. Staff Sergeant X is barely hanging on mentally. His buddy Clay says, “I wrote Loretta you had a nervous breakdown.” X is sitting at a table with mail and packages addressed to him. Salinger is conjuring Kafka.

When Clay leaves, X opens a package and discovers it’s from Esmé.

This is when my eyes get watery. They are watering again as I type. It is a very effective message in a bottle. I can never know what was inside Salinger’s head, but it must have been beyond intense. Reading his biography is incredibly intense. The poor bastard was fucked up for the rest of his life.

My theory is fucked up people resonate with Salinger, and that’s why he’s sold more than 60 million copies of his famous novel. Many of those readers drove Salinger to hide from the world when they tried to chase him down. He even came to regret publishing The Catcher in the Rye.

I believe Salinger was so successful because he was so damn good at writing messages in a bottle. The question is: Are readers still successfully decoding his stories?

Many literary critics believe a story has to stand on its own. And I can understand that sentiment, but I disagree quite strongly. I’ve read The Catcher in the Rye twice in my lifetime. Both times it made a great impression. But I need to read it again since I’ve read Salinger. My earlier impressions weren’t even close.

Before now, I had no idea how tortured Salinger’s soul was when I read The Catcher in the Rye. I understood Holden Caulfield was a tortured teen, not to the level GI Salinger was. There are novels by certain writers, like Thomas Wolfe, Jack Keruoauc, and Philip K. Dick, that you can’t really understand until you read several biographies about them. What they have in common is tortured souls.

I doubt I would have teared up for “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” if I had not read Salinger. If you’ve read the story, or will read it, let me know how it affected you. Let me know if you’ve read about Salinger.

By the way, if you’re not willing to read a 600-page biography, there’s a documentary based on the book. Watch it on Amazon Prime. It conveys only 1% of the information and intensity of reading the biography, but it does help you understand J. D. Salinger.

JWH

by James Wallace Harris, 12/27/25

There are some conservative Republicans who wish to censor history by forgetting events in America’s past. They worry that such history could make their children feel bad about themselves. They want to remember a past that makes America look great again. Please read Donald Trump’s executive order regarding this issue.

Karen Russell’s latest novel, The Antidote, philosophises why we need to remember everything, even things our ancestors did that make America look bad. Russell uses fantasy to educate us about reality. When my friend Annie first recommended that we read this novel together, the fantasy elements turned me off. As a life-long science fiction reader, I was in the mood to read realistic fiction for a change. The older I get, the more I want nonfiction, but I can’t give up fiction completely.

Throughout the first half of The Antidote, I was annoyed with all its fantastic elements. However, I eventually realized that Russell was using them as a plot device to get her readers to contemplate real history. Eventually, I felt Russell had read a great deal of American history that disturbed her, and she was using her novel to come to grips with why we shouldn’t forget that which many want to erase from American history books.

Memory is the main theme of this novel. Both personal memories and historical memory.

The Antidote makes a case against five crimes our ancestors committed. These tragic deeds explore the dimensions of greed. Each of these historical atrocities has been well-documented in nonfiction books I’ve read over the years. Reading the novel made me ask: Which has more impact, fiction or nonfiction? Listening to The Antidote made me feel closer to the suffering.

How many books have you read that deal with these historical events? Did you learn more from reading fiction or nonfiction?

• How did we take land from the Native Americans?
• How did we force Native Americans onto reservations and attempt to reeducate them with our culture and values?
• How did poor farming practices cause the environmental catastrophe of the Dust Bowl?
• How did we institutionalize unwed mothers and steal their babies?
• How do we allow the murders of women to go uninvestigated and underreported?

The Antidote is primarily set in the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska, in 1935, between two significant real events, the Black Sunday dust storm (April 14, 1935) and the Republican River flood (May 31-June 1, 1935). The story is told sequentially, but with flashbacks. We hear the story told from many voices. Four primary characters: The Antidote (Antonina Rossi, AKA, the Prairie Witch), Asphodel Oletsky (Del), Harp Oletsky (Del’s uncle), and Cleo Allfrey (photographer), along with two significant secondary characters, a cat and a scarecrow.

Antonina, a middle-aged woman, had been institutionalized at age 15 for being an unwed mother. Her son had been forcefully taken away from her. She makes her living as a vault, or prairie witch. Antonina can enter a trance while another person relates a memory they wish to forget. That process will erase the memory from the teller’s mind and store it in hers. Antonina gives them a written receipt that will trigger that memory, and she can reinstate it at a future time. Antonina does not remember what she vaults. She is paid for this service, but her clients consider her no better than a prostitute.

Asphodel “Del” Oletsky, a fifteen-year-old girl, just five feet tall, is the captain of Uz’s high school girls’ basketball team. Her mother was murdered when she was young, and she lives with her uncle Harp Oletsky. Cleo is a young black woman who travels the country documenting the depression for FDR’s government. The plot of the novel eventually brings them all together.

The novel begins with a roundup of jack rabbits and clubbing them to death. My father was born in Nebraska and was Del’s age in 1935. He told me stories about how the farmers would exterminate the jack rabbits. My mother also went to high school around this time and played basketball. My grandmother was on a basketball team in Indiana at the turn of the century.

My memories immediately made me connect with the story. We remember the good ones, but forget the bad ones.

The story then goes into catching a serial killer of young women. The sheriff even connects the killer to Del’s mother’s cold case. This murder mystery is the apparent backbone of the plot, but it’s not the real story.

The Antidote immediately triggered a memory of an article I recently read, “The Nurse Who Names the Dead” by Christa Hillstrom. The article was about Dawn Wilcox, who created a database to track the number of men killing women. She discovered that femicide goes vastly underreported. One of the truths of Russell’s novel is that she’s writing about evils that have always existed. Can we ever break the cycle?

Dust and evil color this novel with darkness. I listened to the audiobook edition, and it felt like I was watching an old black-and-white movie. I’d call it noir magical realism.

I admit, I had to push myself to keep listening for the first half of this book. I was just put off by the fantasy elements. But the characters grew on me. And by the middle of the story, I was hooked. The last half of the book often made me teary-eyed. For most of the novel, I felt Russell was too writerly, but when Harp gives his big speech near the end, I must say I was quite impressed with the writing and the description of the riot and storm.

Throughout this story, I kept thinking about the Oz books by L. Frank Baum. Uz almost sounds like Oz. Plus, the story has a tornado and a talking scarecrow.

I wanted to connect the elements of this story with all the nonfiction books I’ve read that back up its fictional history. Especially, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan, plus the Ken Burns’ documentary, The Dust Bowl. However, I can’t remember where I read about the other issues in this book. My mind is getting old and tired.

My friend Linda and I often talk about how humans repeat the same crimes throughout history. In recent months, we’ve focused on how greed is the primary driver of evil. As you read The Antidote (if you do), think about how greed motivates people to do what they do. We’re all greedy to a degree, and that might be a survival mechanism, but there seems to be a point when more greed makes us evil. I see that everywhere.

I’m also watching The American Revolution by Ken Burns. It brings up many things that some Republicans would like the world to forget. Like I said, we don’t change. But we should ask, what are we doing now that people in the future will wish to forget that we did?

The Antidote by Karen Russell was on 11 best-books-of-the-year lists for 2025.

JWH