She went on to say that she wanted all her children to absorb the meaning of the words they sang, not just mouth them, like silly-billy parrots.

—“For Esmé—with Love and Squalor”

During a time when many writers are reconsidered, reconstructed, rediscovered, or revisited, the last ten years have been remarkable for the apparent decline of critical interest in J. D. Salinger. Over the last two decades, Salinger has had so little to say that his commentators, once a spirited and argumentative group, seem to have followed the lead of the master and have become, for the most part, silent. Many readers of Salinger's work vacillate regularly between the conviction that he is in New Hampshire composing masterpiece after masterpiece but refusing to publish, and the less fantastic, more sobering suspicion that he is simply growing vegetables and repeating the Jesus Prayer. Nevertheless, the small body of fiction remains as a cryptic reminder of a significant contemporary writer who has adopted an enigmatic public silence. While any resolution to the mystery of Salinger's silence must remain elusive for the moment, certain implications in his best short story may go some way in accounting for the retreat, without having to construe it as an outgrowth of his later preoccupation with Zen. His continuing silence may well have evolved from the conviction that deeply felt human emotions need no expression—a position implied by the successful aesthetic resolution of “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor.”

In the fifties and sixties, the critical debate over “For Esmé” focused on various aspects of love and squalor as they relate to the narrator （Sergeant X）, Esmé, Charles, and Clay （Corporal Z）. While the story does in fact dramatize Sergeant X's redemption from an emotional and physical breakdown through the transformative powers of love, the narrative also—and most importantly—examines the reasons why forms of expression—whether conversational, literary, or epistolary, to name a few—either have meaning and propagate love, or lack meaning and impede emotional stability. For Salinger, failures of language advance the horror, vacuity, and despair of modern life. Throughout the narrative, Salinger reflects his concern with exploring the validity of language by persistently alluding to such indirect, constructed modes of discourse as letters, books, or inscriptions. Failed forms of communication seem to be everywhere, the most notable of which is Sergeant X's illegible response to a Nazi woman's inscription, “Dear God, life is hell,” in Goebbels' “Die Zeit Ohne Beispiel.” In “For Esmé” letters, books, conversations, and inscriptions usually create （or continue） rather than alleviate the emotional vacuum in which most of the characters live. Nowhere else in Salinger's fiction does he more intensely present the paradox and dilemma of modern man: to speak is not to express; to employ forms of expression is often to evade the difficulties of significant communication. Beneath the most obvious progression of action and theme in “For Esmé” resides the moral basis for Salinger's art which indicates why, at the end of the story, two successful acts of communication are completed, while, throughout most of the story itself, dramatizing the reasons why most acts of expression fail.

In a story replete with failed forms of communication, one must consider why Esmé's saving letter has such a positive effect, and how it has anything to do with the rest of the narrative as well as Salinger's later and continuing silence. These issues can be explored by first examining the story's many human relationships. In “For Esmé,” it is difficult to find many instances of love based on sympathetic understanding and shared experiences. Debased, destructive relationships predominate and are manifested most vividly through the narrator's relation to his wife and mother-in-law, his fellow soldiers in camp, and Clay and Loretta. Underlying these failures of love and sympathy reside the breakdown and deterioration of the power of language to express true feeling.

At the outset of the story, Salinger satirizes the mundane actualities and practical considerations of postwar America. The narrator's wife, a “breathtakingly levelheaded girl,” and the impending visit of Mother Grencher, who, at fifty-eight, is “not getting any younger,” detain him from going to Esmé's wedding. Apparently, the wife has little sense of Esmé's importance to her husband, and the narrator, while wryly undercutting his wife's practicality, does not seem capable of acting against her wishes. His tongue seems to be firmly in cheek as he ticks off the reasons why the proposed trip need not be made. In fact, he seems to be repeating the strictures as they were dictated to him. Such a failure marks a continuation of the “stale letters” the narrator received during the war. Reports on the service at Schrafft's and requests for cashmere yarn, like the prohibition against attending the wedding, extend selfish interests, while, at the same time, they evidence little concern for the narrator's needs.

His difficulties with these two women signal a problem that appears elsewhere in other forms—the sterility of conventional relationships. There is, for example, no fellowship among the troops at the training camp. The absence of community is predicated upon the failure of language. These letter-writing types, living in a self-imposed limbo, pen their letters in order to avoid human contact. The narrator, in particular, uses forms of expression to distance himself from those around him; he escapes, for example, into the books which he carries about in his gas mask container. His general disgust with experience appears most clearly through his use of cliché. Such tired language mocks the traditional bravado associated with war, and it exploits the disparity between fresh rhetorical assessments and degraded, sterile statements:

I remember standing at an end window of our Quonset hut for a very long time, looking out at the slanting, dreary rain, my trigger finger itching imperceptibly, if at all. I could hear behind my back the uncomradely scratching of many fountain pens on many sheets of V-mail paper. Abruptly, with nothing special in mind, I came away from the window and put on my raincoat, cashmere muffler, galoshes, woolen gloves, and overseas cap. … Then, after synchronizing my wristwatch with the clock in the latrine, I walked down the long, wet cobblestone hill into town. I ignored the flashes of lightning all around me. They either had your number on them or they didn't.

Just as the narrator's exploitation of cliché reflects the general bleakness of military life, so also does the perversion of romantic language point to significant failures in conventional ways of ordering experience. The relationship between Clay and Loretta is maintained through meaningless forms which make their courtship an exercise in mutual self-delusion. Intending to marry “at their earliest convenience,” she writes to him “fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations.” Their relationship epitomizes the way in which language in “For Esmé” fails to communicate deep feeling, but instead propagates the antithesis of love—squalor. Salinger implies that their lack of self-awareness and moral introspection is not merely contemptible, but is actually a succinct embodiment of those very forces of insensitivity and self-justification which create and sustain the absurdity of war. Clay revels in the delusion that temporary insanity, rather than sadism, made him shoot a cat.

In “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,” such characters as the narrator's wife and mother-in-law, Clay and Loretta, are impervious to the existential ravage inflicted by the war; others, like the soldiers in the camp and the narrator himself, perceive the bleakness of experience but can do little or nothing to overcome it or escape from it. By escaping into letter-writing, into books, or by adopting a cynical attitude, they repudiate the possibility of community and compound their isolation through acts of quiet desperation.

Nonetheless, the very fact that the story is even told in the first place suggests that there is a way to be immersed in squalor, recognize it as such, and eventually overcome it. “For Esmé” depicts extreme human misery, the suffering of being unable to love, at the same time that the narrator's very capacity to tell his story provides the completion of the psychological therapy which began when he read Esmé's letter and fell asleep. In telling the story, the narrator has clearly achieved a balance in his life, which, at the outset of the story, is implied by his good-natured, if ironic, tone. Unlike all other attempts to communicate, Esmé's letter and the process of telling the tale itself come directly out of the forces underlying their personal encounter in the Devon tearoom and possess a basis in love which is founded upon similar recognitions of the effect of squalor on the other. These acts of communication are not spontaneous emanations, but come out of periods of retrospection and consolidation during which each perceives the import of that “strangely emotional” time which they spent together. Esmé's decision to send X her father's watch could not have been hasty or gratuitous. A six-year period of recovery precedes the composition of the narrator's “squalid and moving” story. For Salinger, it seems, meaningful human expression must be founded on authentic emotions which evolve into a sympathetic comprehension of another's individuals needs. Forms of expression are, in themselves, neutral; they become meaningful or parodic to the extent that love or squalor resides at the heart of the relationship. The love that Salinger affirms in “For Esmé” does not depend on words, but on an emotional inner transformation which must be understood and assimilated before it can be expressed. Forms of expression cannot create love, as Clay and Loretta try to do through letters, but only express what has mysteriously been there from the start. In “For Esmé,” we encounter a significant moment in Salinger's fiction, a moment during which ineffable emotional states find expression in literary forms.

Given what has been argued thus far, it would be helpful to examine just how the conversation between the narrator and Esmé in the tearoom relates to his epiphany at the conclusion of the story. Basically, we shall see how their conversation offers vital insights into the psychological needs of each character, even though the apparent surface meaning of their words does not seem to indicate the formation of a deep and lasting bond of love.

For both the narrator and Esmé, language does not directly mirror their true inner states, but instead provides a defense, a kind of mask from behind which the suffering self cryptically speaks. The narrator adopts a protective cynicism, which largely accounts for the strange shifting of tone and point of view evident throughout the meeting, Esmé's famous malaprops and inflated diction are the basic elements with which she constructs her persona. For both characters, language offers a way to cover up their psychological fragility, insecurity, and acute self-consciousness, even though some very minor actions help to reflect most clearly the tenuousness of their respective poses. The narrator, for example, smiles but is careful to hide his “coalblack filling,” while Esmé's fingernails are bitten to the quick and her tendency to keep touching her hair belies her posture of self-assurance.

It is probably not necessary to detail Esmé's strained attempts to appear older, more mature, self-possessed. Nonetheless, a brief look at the way the narrative voice oscillates between sarcasm and sincerity will suggest how language covers up, rather than directly reflects, the true state of the narrator's being. When watching the choir practice, the narrator emanates a glib, sardonic attitude: “Their voices were melodious and unsentimental, almost to the point where a somewhat more denominational man than myself might, without straining, have experienced levitation.” His deflation of the choir is offset a few lines later by a genuine admiration for Esmé's voice: “Her voice was distinctly separate from the other children's voices, and not just because she was seated nearest me. It had the best upper register, the sweetest-sounding, the surest, and it automatically led the way.” During their conversation itself, his tone and emotional state continue to fluctuate between sarcasm and sincerity. When asked whether he attends that “secret Intelligence school on the hill,” he notes that he is “as security-minded as the next one” and therefore tells Esmé that he is “visiting Devonshire for my health.” Shortly thereafter, the narrator admits that he is glad she came over, since he “had been feeling lonely.”

Generally, their conversation is amiable, congenial, interesting, and leaves the narrator pondering the “strangely emotional” moment which the departure of Charles and Esmé creates. On the surface, this meeting does not seem to satisfactorily explain Esmé's capacity to overwhelm X with love at the end of the story. On the basis of the language and action alone, one may be inclined to view Leslie Fiedler's nearly blasphemous assertion that “For Esmé” is “a popular little tearjerker” with some sympathy. The conversation, however, helps to suggest some basic facts about each character: the narrator is greatly in need of emotional sustenance; Esmé, midway between childhood and adulthood, must cope with the pain of having lost both parents at the same time that she must bear the responsibility of taking care of her brother. Their conversation implies, but does not explicitly record, the extent of each character's emotional reaction. Ultimately, one must perceive that, underlying the words and actions of this scene, some kind of inscrutable magnetism touches the narrator and Esmé, which evolves from an instinctual and unconscious sense that each possess what the other most deeply needs. In light of the subsequent action, it can be argued that Esmé senses in the narrator the capacity to represent a surrogate father, while the narrator, disgusted by the petty actualities of stale middle-class life and the bleak atmosphere among the letter-writing types, senses in Esmé a saving balance between the “silly-billy” innocence of children and the squalor of adulthood. In the tearoom, neither character is fully aware of the implications of this “strangely emotional moment.” But as time passes, each retrospectively achieves insight into the nature of their love, and the capacity to respond is manifested by the creation of meaningful forms of expression. Only later, with Esmé's letter and the loan of her father's watch, do we find that she fully recognizes the import of the meeting. For the narrator, the recitation of the story—the artistic process—fulfills his promise to write Esmé a story both “squalid and moving.”

Salinger denies us a view of the psychological process which prompts Esmé to forward her father's watch. We do, however, witness X's emergence from a hell characterized by explicit failures of language to communicate love. While his inability to read, write, or think clearly is a result of the “suffering of being unable to love,” human contact causes even further deterioration. His conversation with Clay and the letter from his brother structurally parallel X's earlier conversation with Esmé and the letter he later opens from Esmé. Here, however, these forms of communication perform exactly the opposite office, indicating that language, not founded on love and a sympathetic comprehension of another's condition, express negation and advances alienation. Because of his insensitivity, Clay cannot comprehend the extent and cause of X's emotional deterioration. Clay does not even understand why X sarcastically interprets Clay's reasons for killing “that pussycat in as manly a way as anybody could've under the circumstances.” The conversation culminates in X's nausea, which follows Clay's most ironic failure to perceive the meaning of X's words:

“That cat was a spy. You had to take a pot shot at it. It was a very clever German midget dressed up in a cheap fur coat. So there was absolutely nothing brutal, or cruel, or dirty, or even—”

“God damn it!” Clay said, his lips thinned. “Can't you ever be sincere?”

X suddenly felt sick, and he swung around in his chair and grabbed the wastebasket—just in time.

This is undoubtedly the same wastebasket which holds the torn remnants of his brother's request for souvenirs, the accoutrements of the very war which threatens to destroy X's being. His brother's letter was probably sent in the unquestioned belief that the Sergeant receiving the letter would be the same one who left home. This Sergeant, however, has gone through a revolution of consciousness, profoundly altering his relation to home, self, and society. Americans back home like X's wife, mother-in-law, and brother inhabit a spatial, experiential, and psychological world which is entirely foreign to X's life. They have no way to comprehend the waste and horror which X has seen. Thus, his brother's letter accentuates distance, fails to provide relief, and moves X closer to an absolute loss of reason.

Neither callous letter, nor talking to Clay about Loretta, nor listening to Bob Hope on the radio can help X to recover his faculties. Instead, he needs personal contact with someone who has a sensitive understanding of the way war can destroy one's being. Like X, Esmeacute; has been ravaged by the war and, emotionally, her experiences and problems are similar to the Sergeant's: she has been stripped of her former source of coherence, order, and love through the death of her parents; Sergeant X's former way of ordering experience no longer pertains to his life; both need to reconstruct their lives after being “wounded” by the war. By chance, X opens Esmé's letter and receives help from the only available source. The act of reading the letter stuns him, touching off an awareness of the significance of their meeting in the tearoom. The letter and the loan of her father's watch spring from Esmé's deep desire to express love. It is not so much the letter's stilted words or the statistics which affect X; instead, it is his deeply felt, overwhelming experience of Esmé's love which begins his cure by inducing sleep.

“For Esmé” reflects the power of language to communicate love. Here, Salinger successfully mediates between silence and sentimentality by presenting two instances of expression—Esmé's letter to the narrator and the narrator's story “for Esmé”—which evolve from each character's comprehension of the meaning of love. These forms of expression represent moral and aesthetic resolutions to the problems of human communication permeating the narrative. Unlike the endings of many classic American tales, the conclusion of “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” fulfills the process of self-recovery rather than simply bringing the hero to a point at which he either has nowhere to go or is about to make use of what he has learned. “For Esmé” has closure at the same time that it suggests how the narrator will live within society, even though his experiences have taught him the inherent failure of conventional society. On the one hand, the ending of the story completes the process of therapy which began with the discovery of Esmé's letter, fulfills the promise to write her a story, and completes the office of symbolic father. As Ihab Hassan notes, the story can be looked at as a “modern epithelium.” It is also a wedding gift, a parting gesture of love from father to daughter. On the other hand, the narrator has managed to gain a balanced perspective; he has found a way to avoid paralyzing isolation and survive with good humor even though living within a world dominated by the likes of his wife and mother-in-law. Even though he may be impeded from acting as he would like, he still has his art.

Communication is difficult within such a world, but possible. Salinger dramatizes this difficulty by crowding his world with people who are not so much malicious as unconscious. The best one can say about Clay, for example, is that he tries to help X. But like most characters in Salinger's fiction, Clay is impeded by his utter incapacity to transcend the values which he holds sacred and never questions. Thus, one response to the horror which threatens civilization resides in accommodating oneself completely to the stereotypical conventionalities of middle-class existence—the world of Saks, cashmere, convenient marriages, college psychology courses, war souvenirs, and complacent acceptance of army bureaucracy. But in presenting two successful expressions of love, Salinger offers an optimistic answer to the implied question: How can one respond to the void after confronting, in Esmé's words, “a method of existence that is ridiculous to say the least?”

Nevertheless, “For Esmé” presents the early signs in Salinger of his apparent acceptance of silence, not as a negative or cowardly retreat from the literary field, as some of his detractors would have it, but as a positive, implicit recognition of emotions that are in themselves meaningful and therefore need no expression. This story is so interesting because it confronts the difficulty of significant human communication at a time when he still seemed to believe in writing （or at least publishing）. “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” is indeed a high point in Salinger's art for many of the reasons his other commentators have noted. Most notably, though, it addresses one of the central problems of Salinger's fiction in particular and modern literature in general—the problem of finding valid forms of communication—at the same time that the story suggests that love is the force which animates expression. In a story in which love ultimately triumphs, the relationship between the narrator and Esmé embodies a beautiful, if tenuous, example of how individuals might pass through squalor to love, achieving meaningful, redemptive expression, even though the successful uses of language are a constant reminder of its general failure.