Short Story Month Dec. 4: Salinger

“For Esmé — With Love and Squalor” by J. D. Salinger

Quote of Note: “Esmé gave me a long, faintly clinical look. “You have a dry sense of humor, haven’t you?” she said — wistfully. “Father said I have no sense of humor at all. He said I was unequipped to meet life because I have no sense of humor.”
Watching her, I lit a cigarette and said I didn’t think a sense of humor was of any use in a real pinch.
“Father said it was.”
This was a statement of faith, not a contradiction, and I quickly switched horses. I nodded and said her father had probably taken the long view, while I was taking the short (whatever that meant).”

These days, stories of chance meetings and random acts of kindness abound. Maybe the internet makes it easier for these stories to spread or maybe there’s an increased demand for stories that promise to “restore your faith in humanity’, but either way, Salinger’s story “For Esmé — With Love and Squalor”, about a chance meeting between a young, precocious girl and a soldier, would fit in perfectly during this era of clickable, sensationalized stories of human connection. And yet, very little about this story is sensational or sappy or saccharine. The depth of emotion and implication in Salinger’s dialogue forbids it. So much is packed into Esmé’s direct and simple small talk with the narrator; the reader learns about the death of Esmé’s father and senses the narrator’s relative uneasiness despite being an adult speaking with a child.