Salinger's story, "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor," has been anthologized, selected as his best story, and in general accorded the high point of his as yet beginning career. And the attention that has been given to Esmé is warranted, for it juxtaposes in one story two of Salinger's major theses, love and squalor, in one of his favorite subjects, children: Esmé, the distillation of squalor, of people who are, according to the choir director in the story, "silly-billy parrots" if they sing without knowing the meaning of the words; and Charles, Esmé's five year old brother, the epitome of love. Not all critics agree, but I should like to suggest, contrary to some recent interpretations, that it is Charles, rather than Esmé, who is the key to the story. It is his riddle of what one wall says to another: "Meetcha at the corner," which is the nexus between Sergeant X and the world, and it is Charles's final, spontaneous, and insistent Hello, Hello, Hello, Hello, Hello, affixed to the end of Esmé's letter, that brings Sergeant X's F-A-C-U-L-T-I-E-S back together.

The contrast between Charles and Esmé is the burden of the first half of the story. The second half, in which the I point-of-view is shifted to Sergeant X "so cunningly that even the cleverest reader will fail to recognize me," is the squalid or moving part of the story, and shows a projection of Esmé's squalor (lack of compassion, of affection) in Corporal Clay, his girl friend, Loretta in the States, her psychology professor, Sergeant X's older brother—the same squalor, magnified further, which war itself shows in the punishment of a German girl who has been a minor Nazi official. It is the extension of this squalor, that war engenders, that has driven Sergeant X to the brink of disintegration, of faculties shattered. Esmé's letter, with Charles's P.S. at the end, brings the worlds of I and Sergeant X together at the conclusion of the story.

In the first half, the character of the narrator has been well established by the time he meets Esmé, Charles, and their governess, Miss Megley, in a tea-room in England during the war. (pp. 262-63)

Except for the two introductory paragraphs, the tone [of this half] has been wry, jocular—a man making fun not only of the army but of himself.

[Wandering] the streets in the rain, he hears children singing in church and enters. They are practicing. One of the singers is a young girl "whose eyes seemed to be counting the house." Even in a church. It is the first intimation we have of Esmé's character, and it is given by the narrator half in admiration, half in amazement.

After the practice, they meet by accident again at a nearby tea-room, where Esmé comes with Charles and their governess. Before the narrator quite realizes how, Esmé is standing with "enviable poise" beside his table. Invited, she sits down, a "truth lover or a statistics lover" of thirteen. He is the eleventh American she has met. She sits beautifully straight on her chair so that he too must come out of his army slouch. Her conversation with the narrator is that of a census taker—"Are you deeply in love with your wife?" "How were you employed before entering the army?"—or has the tone of an almanac dispensing facts—"To be quite candid Father really needed more of an intellectual companion than Mother was" (her parents become case histories in psychology); her wet hair, now straight, is when dry "not actually curly but quite wavy" (she is meticulously exact even in a situation in which a young girl might normally be tempted to alter truth a trifle, claiming curls rather than waves).

She finally asks the narrator, even though she is somewhat disappointed that he is not a published writer, to write her a story about squalor. "About what?" he says, incredulous, for he is confronted with a girl who believes everything can be learned by statistics, by so many notes taken, by so many Americans kept count of, by so many figures put together. "Silly-billy parrots" the choir director had said of those who mouth words without knowing their meanings. She is talking about Esmés.

In contrast is Charles, disdainful of appearances like wet hair, of the facts that his sister cherishes ("He certainly has green eyes. Haven't you, Charles?" the narrator asks him. "They're orange," Charles says); enjoying his game of riddles; arching his back across the chair in contrast to Esmé's perfectly achieved poise; covering up his face with his napkin; giving a Bronx cheer at one point of the conversation between his sister and the narrator; engulfed with laughter at his own jokes; and furiously disappointed when the Sergeant tells him the answer to the riddle when asked the second time. He is everything his sister is not (She takes his wet cap from his head when they enter the tearoom "by lifting it off his head with two fingers, as if it were a laboratory specimen"). The last image that we have of the two of them in this part of the story is the picture that remains: Charles, blushing but determined, comes back to kiss the Sergeant good-bye. Asked the answer to the riddle, his face lights up. He shrieks: "Meet you at the corner," (and he does at the end of the story, saying at the corner of sanity and insanity to the Sergeant, Hello, Hello, Hello) and races out of the room "possibly in hysterics." Esmé leaves too, "slowly, reflectively, testing the ends of her hair for dryness"; one risking embarrassment to show his friendship; the other, worried about her own appearance.

The second, or squalid part of the story, extends Esmé's attitude to other people, etching the dilettantism into callousness, into stupidity, into destruction. For what does it mean to know squalor without love? It means a Corporal Clay who uses Sergeant X to write letters home to impress his girl, Loretta. It means a Loretta who uses the war experiences of men overseas as case histories in her psychology class (Esmé's treatment of her father and mother's relationship)…. It means finally the last protest of Sergeant X, scribbled almost illegibly underneath: "Fathers and teachers, I ponder 'What is hell?' I maintain it is the suffering of being unable to love," which are the words of Father Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov. (Esmé: "My Aunt says that I'm a terribly cold person." "I am training myself to be more compassionate.") And Sergeant X's faculties under these pressures begin to disintegrate.

On his desk is a pile of packages, letters, books, that he has left unopened for days. He pushes them aside to use his typewriter to write a letter connecting him to someone, somewhere. But he cannot. He collapses on the typewriter. When he opens his eyes again, he sees a green package ("He certainly has green eyes, haven't you, Charles?" "They're orange," Charles says). Unconsciously Sergeant X moves to open the package.

It is a present and a note from Esmé—her father's watch (broken), and the notation that it was an extremely pleasant afternoon that they had spent "in each other's company on April 30, 1944, between 3:45 and 4:15 P.M. in case it slipped your mind."

But appended to the note is a message from Charles, of one wall saying to another, without thought, without knowledge, without statistics, but with compassion and affection: Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello. And Sergeant X's F-A-C-U-L-T-I-E-S disintegrating under squalor gradually come back together again. Much as we like Esmé's intelligence, poise, and breath-taking levelheadedness, it is her brother Charles, with the orange eyes and the arching back and the smacking kiss, who knows without counting the house, without 3:45 and 4:15 P.M.'s, the riddles of the heart. (pp. 263-64)