Originally published in the New Yorker in 1950, For Esme – With Love and Squalor” is a remarkable semi-autobiographical story, having been greatly influenced by J.D Salinger’s own experiences as a soldier working in the counter-intelligence unit of the United States Army in World War II. The story is divided into two parts, the first part being narrated by a first-person narrator, and the second by a limited third-person narrator. The entire story is arranged inside a frame narrative of a letter from the narrator to the titular character, Esme, although the story is not written in epistolary form.
American writer J.D. Salinger, best known for his novel The Catcher in the Rye, was also a prolific short-story writer, some of his shorter works having been widely read and anthologized.
For Esme – With Love and Squalor | Summary
The story begins with the narrator receiving an invitation to attend a wedding in England on the 18th of April, a wedding that he really wants to attend, but won’t be able to as he is expecting a visit from his mother-in-law around the same time. Regardless of his physical presence at the wedding, however, he proclaims that he is not the type who lets a wedding pass without any excitement or surprise and chooses to disclose a few facts about the bride whom he met almost six years ago. He is not aiming to please anyone, and would be glad if his notes cause the groom some uneasiness, as he is aiming to “edify” and “instruct”.
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He begins recounting his memories from April 1944, when he was in Devon, England, being one of sixty American soldiers receiving specialized pre-invasion training. The soldiers in his group were all introverted, “letter-writing types” who rarely spoke to each other outside the hours of duty. Outside training, the narrator would wander around the countryside on clear days, and read a book on rainy days. On the last day of the three-week course, a particularly rainy Saturday, the narrator along with his comrades is supposed to leave for London on a train scheduled at 7 p.m. By 3, he is packed and ready to go, including a gas-mask container that he has filled with books, having thrown the gas-mask off a porthole of his ship, knowing that he will never get it out in time if the enemy actually uses gas bombs. After watching the rain from the window for some time, he abruptly puts on his raincoat and walks out in the storm. He stops to read the bulletin board in front of the church in the center of the town, reading the numerals on it. He reads a list containing the names of children who are to attend choir practice and decides to enter the church.
He passes a dozen adults and settles in the front row, watching twenty children aged from about seven to thirteen sitting on chairs on the rostrum. Their coach was instructing them to sing while opening their mouths wider, asking them to understand and absorb the meaning of the verses they were singing. At her signal, the children begin singing without instruments or interference, their voices unified, “melodious and unsentimental”, and although the hymn was unknown to the narrator, he kept hoping that it would last long. As he scanned the children’s faces, one of them caught his attention. She is a girl of about thirteen, seated on the end chair of the front row which is nearest to the narrator-
“with straight ash-blond hair of ear-lobe length, an exquisite forehead, and blasé eyes that… might very possibly have counted the house.”
Her voice could be heard distinctly from the other voices as it had “the best upper register, the sweetest-sounding, the surest, and it automatically led the way.” The girl, however, appeared bored with her own ability and yawned twice in the middle of the song in a “ladylike”, close-mouthed manner. As the song ends and the coach starts chastising the girl for yawning, the narrator leaves the church. He crosses the street and enters a tearoom that appears empty, ordering tea and cinnamon toast.
As he settles down and begins to reread a couple of old letters from his wife and mother-in-law, the girl from the choir enters the tearoom with a child who looks like her brother, and a woman, presumably their governess. She sits on a table that is directly in front of the narrator, pleasing him. Her little brother, however, is not ready to sit down and keeps annoying their governess by sliding in and out of his chair despite her orders, until his sister orders him to sit down and he obeys. She catches the narrator staring at her and stares back for a moment, before giving him “a small, qualified smile” that is “oddly radiant”. In answer, the narrator smiles back in a much less radiant manner, trying to keep the charcoal filling in his front teeth from showing. The “young lady” now comes and stands beside his table in a poised manner, wearing a wonderful Campbell tartan dress. “I thought Americans despised tea”, she remarks, genuinely curious. The narrator replies that some Americans prefer tea to all other drinks, and invites her to join him, which she accepts. She sits down, displaying great poise and posture, staying true to the narrator’s manner of addressing her as a “young lady”.
As he begins the conversation by remarking on the weather, he realizes that she detests small talk. He notices that she is wearing a ‘military-looking’ watch that is too large for her wrist as she tells him that she remembers him from choir practice, confirming the narrator’s assessment of her as a good observer. He confirms her observation and compliments her voice, and she replies that she confidently replies that she will be a jazz singer and make lots of money, retiring at thirty and living on a ranch in Ohio. She asks the narrator if he knows Ohio, and he tells him that he has only crossed it a couple of times. As he warns him about the roughness of the country in Ohio, she tells him that another American has already warned him about it, the narrator being the eleventh American that she has met. She asks him if he attends the “secret Intelligence school on the hill”, and while he denies it, she is not fooled and smugly tells him that she “wasn’t born yesterday”. She remarks that he looks “quite intelligent for an American”, and the narrator calls out her snobbery. She blushes but insists on the wild manners that she has seen in the ones that she met, claiming that one of them even threw a bottle of whiskey at her aunt’s window.
While the narrator tries to excuse the behavior by citing their loneliness and the hardships that they encounter, the girl does not seem convinced. Fretting about her hair momentarily, she asks him if she is married. When he tells her that he is, she asks him if he is “very deeply in love with” his wife, or if it is too personal a question. The narrator, however, does not seem to have a problem with the question. She claims that she is not “terribly gregarious”, but the narrator appeared very lonely, which made her come over to him. He thanks her for her consideration and tells her that he is, in fact, feeling lonely. She is trying to be more compassionate as her aunt tells her that she is a “terribly cold person”. She is an orphan who lives with her aunt, along with her brother. She tells him how intelligent and sensuous her mother was, and asks him if he finds her to be cold, which he denies strongly, finding her very warm instead. As he introduces himself and asks her for her name, she tells him her name is Esme but refuses to disclose her surname as she has a title, which she thinks he might be impressed by, like most Americans.
At this moment, the narrator catches Esme’s brother, Charles, standing behind him, who tells his sister that their governess wants her to go back to her own table and finish her tea, an order that she has been ignoring for some time and continues to ignore. Little Charles settles down on the chair between the narrator and Esme, innocently asking the narrator “Why do people in films kiss sideways”. As this baffled the narrator himself in childhood, he humorously replies that they have too large noses to kiss directly. Esme introduces her brother, informing the narrator that he is “extremely brilliant for his age.” As Charles begins his childish antics, his sister tells the narrator that he really misses their father who was very fond of him, as he looks like their mother. She, on the other hand, resembles her father, who was killed in North Africa.
As Charles’ mischievous antics continue, his sister threatens him that she will send him back to their governess. The narrator jokes about Charles’ Bronx cheer, and Esme comments on his dry sense of humor. She and her father reportedly didn’t have any, which she is worried would make life difficult for her. After a moment, she tells him that “Charles misses him exceedingly,” adding that “He was an exceedingly lovable man. He was extremely handsome, too.” The narrator nods, supposing her father also had an exceptional vocabulary, which is reflected in his daughter. At this point, Charles entertains the narrator with a witty riddle, laughing at his own riddle with childish pride and delight. The narrator compliments his abilities, pleasing him further. Esme enquires about the narrator’s former profession before joining the army, and he tells her that he is a short story writer. She asks if he is published, and he avoids the question. She tells him that her father wrote beautifully and she is preserving his letters.
The narrator asks if the large watch on her wrist belongs to her father, and she tells him that it does. She suddenly requests him to write a story about her. As he tries to humbly decline, she insists that it does not need to be “prolific”, just not “childish and silly” and preferably with a lot of “squalor” as she is “extremely interested in squalor”. Her brother decides to throw a temper tantrum at this moment, forcing her to leave unwillingly. She bids adieu in French, and the narrator returns her farewell in English. They shake hands and he notices that her palms are damp and sweaty, a sign of nervousness. She asks if he will be there at the next choir practice, and he tells her that it would not be possible. She asks him if she can write to him and he immediately agrees, giving her his address. She promises to write first so that he doesn’t feel “compromised”. She leaves the tearoom, only to come back in a minute dragging Charles, who she claims, wants to kiss the narrator. The child grudgingly kisses the narrator, who manages to win his favor back by asking him his own riddle. As he runs out of the tearoom squealing in delight, Esme reminds the narrator to write her the story, and he tells her that he has never written a story for anyone, and he would love to. She reminds him again to make it “extremely squalid and moving”. She bids goodbye, hoping that he would return from the war “with all his faculties intact”. As she leaves, the narrator feels “strangely emotional”.
The next part of the story is the “squalid part”. There is a change of scene and characters, although the narrator is still present, albeit disguised. It is ten-thirty in Gaufurt, Bavaria, weeks after the armistice. Staff Sergeant X is in his room in a civilian home with nine other soldiers. He was trying to read a novel and was having difficulty reading it. He was a young man “who had not come through the war with all his faculties intact”, and he had been triple-reading paragraphs and sentences for the past hour. He closes the book and lights a cigarette with fingers that are constantly shaking, exhibiting symptoms of Combat Stress Reaction (CSR). He would make his gums bleed by pressing his tongue against them for hours, and sometimes he felt “his mind dislodge itself and teeter, like insecure luggage on an overhead rack.” His hair is dirty and unkempt, and it is mentioned that he was hospitalized for two weeks. His compatriot, Corporal Z, or Clay still appeared unaffected by the war, driving with his windshields down even before the armistice.
Sergeant X lets go of his aching head and stares at a German book by Goebbels, titled “Die Zeit Ohne Beispiel.” It belonged to the woman who owned the house, a Nazi official who X himself had arrested. He opens the book and reads the brief German inscription that she has written –
“Dear God, life is hell.” “Nothing led up to or away from it. Alone on the page, and in the sickly stillness of the room, the words appeared to have the stature of an uncontestable, even classic indictment.”
He stares at the page for some time and writes down with a pencil stub
“Fathers and teachers, I ponder ‘What is hell?’ I maintain that it is suffering of being unable to love.”
He is about to sign it as Dostoevsky but is horrified at the illegibility of his own handwriting. He picks up an old letter from his older brother who had asked for some “bayonets or swastikas” for his kids, now that the war was over, a letter that he had torn apart. He lay his head on the table, his entire body aching.
Just then, Corporal Z walks in without knocking, his constant companion throughout the war, a handsome, photogenic man whose photographs made the front covers of magazines in their wartime issues. He finds the unlit room spooky, and X warns him not to step on the dog in the corner. Clay turns on the light and sits down, informing X about a radio program that is about to begin. X, however, isn’t interested. Clay exclaims at X’s shaking hands, telling him that he had looked like a corpse in the hospital. X tries to change the subject by asking about Clay’s fiancée, Loretta, whose letters he would read out to X, however intimate, and ask him for help with the replies. Clay tells X that they need to pick up Eisenhower jackets for the whole detachment, but X angrily says that he doesn’t want one. Clay is freaked out by the side of the narrator’s face which is showing uncontrolled movement from a nervous tic. He tells him that he had disclosed to Loretta about his “nervous breakdown”, as she was majoring in psychology. She had insisted that “nobody gets a nervous break-down just from the war and all.”, adding that he probably had been “unstable” his whole life.
X sarcastically writes off Loretta’s remarks, offending Clay who insists that she knows much more about psychology than X. He recounts shooting a cat that climbed on the hood of the jeep during heavy shelling, despite the narrator’s repeated pleas of not wanting to hear it, and tells him that he wrote about that to Loretta who discussed it with her entire class and professor, concluding that Clay had become momentarily “insane” by the shelling. X sarcastically mocks him, taunting that he had killed the cat only because it was a German spy. He suddenly throws up on a waste basket beside him
. Clay leaves, after trying to persuade his comrade to come and socialize more, in vain. As he leaves, X picks up his typewriter, attempting to write a letter to his friend in New York, but failing to insert the paper roll in the typewriter because of his shaking hands. He suddenly notices a small unopened package that has been readdressed several times. He opens it uninterestedly, only to find Esme’s letter (thus revealing that X is, in fact, the narrator) – apologizing for the delay in beginning the correspondence as she was busy caring for her ailing aunt. However, she had thought about him and their “extremely pleasant exchange” often and hoped for a speedy termination of the war. She hopes for his well-being and sends her regards. She has also enclosed her father’s wristwatch that she had been wearing during their meeting, and she informs him about its many virtues and hopes that he will accept it as a “lucky talisman”. The letter ends with a dozen Hellos from Charles, and Esme’s appeal to X to write back as soon as possible.
The sergeant stared at the watch for a long time, and suddenly “almost ecstatically, he felt sleepy”. The story ends with the narrator expressing his heartfelt gratitude to Esme, who can bring back a man from the depths of trauma and despair, “and he always stands a chance of again becoming a man with all his fac- f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact.”
