Sergeant Salinger by Jerome Charyn

The inimitable Jerome Charyn has turned his pen to probe the transformative war experiences of one of America's most famous writers, J.D. Salinger. Like so many of his generation, WWII left its indelible footprints on Salinger, as manifested in his stories and his troubled life. 

Charyn begins with Sonny Salinger as a love-struck Park Avenue boy with a few stories under his belt. Sonny was smitten with teenage vamp Oona O’Neill (daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill), but Oona had big plans; he was merely a pleasant diversion. 

The army decided to overlook Sonny's heart murmur and called him to duty. Sonny went overseas, a secret counterintelligence agent whose job was to seek out and interrogate Nazi collaborators. 

Oona went to Hollywood where her life plans were altered by Charlie Chaplin. In England, the heartbroken Sonny frequented a local pub, scribbling a story about Holden Caulfield at war.

Sonny experienced the most atrocious killing fields of WWII.

There was Devon's Slapton Sands where 1700 GIs rehearsing for Utah Beach were killed by friendly fire. He was at Utah Beach on D-Day, and at the Battle of the Bulge, and he saw the first liberation of a concentration camp.

Sonny was tasked with sniffing out Nazis and Nazi collaborators in every hamlet. He knew that the people he interrogated were as broken by the war as he was.

The depravity and waste of war was overwhelming. Sonny became a ghost. Frayed, he secretly checked into a German civilian hospital.

Back at work as 'the grand inquisitor,' one of the doctors who had nursed Sonny was brought before him for interrogation. He married her, and with fake papers, brought his German Nazi bride home to America to meet his Jewish family.

The marriage failed.

Charyn includes images from Salinger's fiction, especially the Nine Stories--an Eisenhower coat, Sonny at the beach making sand castles with children and remembering Bananafish, hanging in British pubs to write. Salinger's Glass family are referenced, and the carousel in Central Park. Guest appearances are made by Hemingway and Teddy's son General Roosevelt.

In 2018 I reviewed Eberhard Alsen's book J.D.Salinger and the Nazis. When I last read The Catcher in the Rye for book club in 2016, I considered how PTSD influenced the novel. 

Charyn  draws readers on a journey into the darkness of monstrous carnage. As I read, joy was sucked from my world, colors faded, I felt cheerless. Sonny's disillusion and trauma leaves him a tin man, and we understand, because we feel it, too.

A glimmer of hope comes at the end."Whatever music he had lost in the carnage at Slapton Sands, at Hurtgen, and among the smoldering corpses at Kaufering IV had come back."

We know the books that Salinger would write and their impact. Instead of Holden Caulfield's war death, he wrote a novel about a teenage Holden who dreams of protecting children from the adult world. He had seen the devaluation of human lives sacrificed to false gods. And we know how damaged he was, how he became an unsettling, mysterious hermit. Charyn's novel leads us to understand the forces that shaped Salinger and inform his writing.

I was given an ARC by the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Read Charyn's article J. D. Salinger The Lost Bar Mitzvah Boy here.

Sergeant Salinger
by Jerome Charyn
Bellevue Literary Press
Publication January 5, 2021
Trade Paper US $16.99 ISBN: 9781942658740
Trade Cloth US $28.99 ISBN: 9781942658825
Ebook ISBN: 9781942658757

from the publisher

J.D. Salinger, mysterious author of The Catcher in the Rye, is remembered today as a reclusive misanthrope. Jerome Charyn’s Salinger is a young American WWII draftee assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps, a band of secret soldiers who trained with the British. A rifleman and an interrogator, he witnessed all the horrors of the war—from the landing on D-Day to the relentless hand-to-hand combat in the hedgerows of Normandy, to the Battle of the Bulge, and finally to the first Allied entry into a Bavarian death camp, where corpses were piled like cordwood.

After the war, interned in a Nuremberg psychiatric clinic, Salinger became enchanted with a suspected Nazi informant. They married, but not long after he brought her home to New York, the marriage collapsed. Maladjusted to civilian life, he lived like a “spook,” with invisible stripes on his shoulder, the ghosts of the murdered inside his head, and stories to tell.

Grounded in biographical fact and reimagined as only Charyn could, Sergeant Salinger is an astonishing portrait of a devastated young man on his way to becoming the mythical figure behind a novel that has marked generations.

A Singular Beauty by Jerome Charyn

It was from my mother that I learned how memory could kill.~~from A Singular Beauty by Jerome Charyn

As she walked down the street, people were stopped in their tracks by her Hollywood beauty. Faigele attracted men in power, but it was her strength that allowed her to manipulate them.

A Singular Beauty recalls Jerome Charyn's mother and his childhood in the Bronx.

Faigele and and her brother Mordecai were from Grodno, Belarus. In 1927, Faigele's brother sent her to America, promising to join her later. She never heard from him again. Her deep depression left preschooler 'Baby' Charyn as her caretaker. Only when it was arranged for her to receive a fake letter from her brother did she rejoin the world.

The Bronx kindergarten was closed, so Faigele and 'Baby' Charyn taught themselves to read with Bambi. When Faigele became a poker dealer, Baby came with her into a world of criminals and politicians and his mother's lover.

An evocative and unsettling portrait of an era, a neighborhood, and a family, Baby somehow rising above the dysfunctional and complex family and social impediments, this brief memoir makes a lasting impression. Charyn's memories are embellished with a writer's flare so that his story becomes more than memories shared, taking on a cinematic vividness . 

I received a free ebook from the author. My review is fair and unbiased.

from the publisher

In A Singular Beauty, Jerome Charyn magically transports the reader back to his childhood in 1940s Bronx, filled with the tensions of World War II, the rationing of food and fuel, and corrupt public officials who feast on immigrant poverty and hardship. This is the story of his mother, "Faigele," the queen of poker dealers in the West Bronx. Her legendary beauty hypnotizes us as her days and nights are consumed by politicians and crooks; always at her side is young Jerome, whom everyone calls "Baby." The poker hall becomes his kindergarten. Is he her accomplice, her companion, or her cover? Charyn's memoir captures the essence of a child thrust into the role of an adult as he navigates a movie-set world tempered by the harsh realities of the neighborhood and the times.

"He doubtless knows that he has captured an era to perfection . . . This is a terrific little book," -- John Irving, Bestselling author, National Book Award and Oscar winner, from his New York Times Book Review of this memoir.

Jerome Charyn is an award-winning American author. With more than 50 published works, Charyn has earned a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life

A Singular Beauty
by Jerome Charyn
Stay Thirsty Press, An Imprint of Stay Thirsty Publishing, A Division of Stay Thirsty Media, Inc. (November 8, 2020)
ASIN : B08MZC6HFP
97 pages
$4.99

Johnny One-Eye : A Tale of the American Revolution by Jerome Charyn

"Where should I begin my unremarkable life?"~Johnny One-Eye

Johnny One-Eye proclaims to have led an unremarkable life.

Don't believe it.

Born John Stocking, age uncertain, as is his sire; son of Gert, madame of Queen's Yard, and raised with her nuns; King's College educated and former classmate of 'Ham' Alec Hamilton; lost an eye serving under Benedict Arnold; employed and threatened by patriots and redcoats alike; a scribbler, a pirate, an innkeeper, prisoner, changeling, divil---and "a man who hid beneath a madrigal of words."

"Are you soldier or civilian?" the general asked John when they first meet. John is bound and with a rifle against his side, caught in the act of adding a purgative to the general's soup.

"Both. I'm a secret agent," Johnny quips.

Major Treat, Washington's chief of intelligence, calls Johnny a frog "who leaps back and forth between the royals and us." Which makes him a brilliant character to bring readers behind the scenes, patriot and British.

Johnny is buffeted by the shifting tides of war, depending on which army is in control of New York. He is only loyal to the people he loves.

John loves the king for his education at King's College. He loves Benedict Arnold, even after his acts of treason. He loves Gert. He loves George Washington who finds solace with his beloved red-haired Gert--and in games vingt-et-un at Queen's Yard. And sometimes he finds solace with Johnny, a tenuous connection to Gert.

Most of all, Johnny loves Clara, a foundling octoroon who is more than a nun for hire, even more than an Aristotle-reading uncommon beauty. Imperious and defiant, Clara dominates unforgettable scenes, including ministering to the African soldiers abandoned by the British after the battle of Yorktown.

Charyn's war novel takes readers through history in the style of the 18th c novels with stories adventurous and bawdy, panoramic in scope. Yes, it is "rollicking" and "picaresque" as the cover contends. Perhaps it is this time of Covid-19, but I also felt the hangman's noose and cold rifle against my ribs, the losses and the desperation.

***

Like so many civilians caught up in times of war, Johnny serves at the pleasure of those in power. He is surrounded by men desperate to gain advantage over the enemy. Everyone can be forced to become a spy--an orphan boy, a desperate widow, an octoroon whore.

I think of my own ancestor conscripted into the Confederate militia although he came from pacifist Swiss Brethren who did not believe in oaths to the state. Or my German nationalist Baptist great-grandfather who left Russia to escape serving in the czar's army. The winds of war drove my husband's Palatine ancestors to leave their once verdant homeland, some to England and America, and some to Poland then Russia and finally to America. My ancestor's grave marks him a Revolutionary War veteran, but he was conscripted. We little people are nothing but chaff buffeted by the wind.

Our true stories are about who we love.

***

This 'tale of the American Revolution' includes all the history I have read, Benedict Arnold despised as a traitor by patriots and loyalists alike, John Andre and Lafayette and Alexander Hamilton and Peggy Shippen and the British generals and admirals appear.

As do the major moments.

George Washington, his leadership threatened, shocks and softens the hearts of men when he dons his spectacles and admits, "I have grown gray in your service and now find myself growing blind..."

I get a lump in my throat. He was not perfect. But he did forgo personal power for an idea--a country ruled by the people and not a monarchy. A republic, if we can keep it.

"But this war cannot go on forever. One side will win," Johnny says to Mrs. Loring, 'war wife' of General Howe of the redcoats. She responds, "I am not so certain. Both sides might also lose." Johnny considers that perhaps both sides had already lost, "with killing and plunder as a permanent language."

George Washington won the war and a nation was born. At the end of the novel he is lionized, his errors overlooked. But he is a ghost after seven years of war, wandering his farm, peacetime "but a sweet deception."

Johnny survives the hurricane. He gains the reward of true love. It is all any of us really want in this life. Survive the battle anyway we can and cleave to those we love. 

Emily Dickinson III: The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson by Jerome Charyn

The intriguing title and image (or, should I say the provocative title and image) caught my eye before I had read my first Jerome Charyn novel. I knew I had to read it as I developed my Emily Dickinson quilt.

The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson is the culmination of Chrayn's life-long love of the poet. "I never quite recovered from reading her," he writes in the "Author's Note".

His portrayal of the poet will shatter your received image of Emily Dickinson. Narrated by Emily herself, the novel imagines the men and women who rocked her world and inspired her explosive output of secret love poetry.

Emily's voice is singular and alive, studded with images from her poems. The poems themselves do not appear, but are clandescently scribbled off-screen, although some were secreted into the public's hands against her wishes. We don't need them much; Emily's voice speaks her poetry.

Solving the mystery of Emily's love life has long baffled her readers. Was she lesbian, her sister-in-law Sue or their friend Kate Scott Turner Anthon her great love? Or was she enthralled by 'her Philadelphia', the Rev. Charles Wadsworth of Arch Street Presbyterian Church? She heard him preach while passing through Philly and corresponded with him. Or was it her mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson who was a rare chosen recipient of her poetry? Or local newspaperman Sam Bowles?

Or someone lost to history? Like a handsome handyman at Mount Holyoke seminary?

She falls for the lowly orphaned handyman (later turned thief and circus clown). She would have eloped with the Amherst College tutor. She wants to hold the Rev. Wadsworth's hands, scarred from the manual labor that paid his way through school. Society--and the Dickinson patriarch--deem these men unfit for Emily's hand.

In the novel, Emily stalks the objects of her desire. She arranges secret meetings and roams the streets. She is wracked with unfulfilled desire, willing to cross Victorian lines of propriety.

The novel is an amazing marriage of fact and poetry and imagination that might just blow the top of your head off.

I purchased a paperback copy.

The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson
by Jerome Charyn
W. W. Norton & Co.
Paperback Price$14.95
ISBN: 978-0-393-33917-8

Emily Dickinson Part Two A Loaded Gun by Jerome Charyn

This February I began reading books about Emily Dickinson and  The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson in preparation for making a quilt for the author.

I had this quilt in mind for several years as part of my series that has included William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, and T. S. Eliot, and the Bronte sisters. My original idea seemed a horrible cliche'--the poet hidden behind a curtained window--and I stalled. I needed a new vision for my quilt.

I was finally set back into motion after reviewing the galley of These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson by Martha Ackmann.

Next, I ordered A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century by Jerome Charyn (The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King, Cesare). Charyn's essays draw from Dickinson's writings and scholarly studies in a search to finally pin down the slippery poet. Every time we think we have her pegged we find we are holding a void. She will not, can not, be categorized and shelved.

I couldn't let it go. I'd spent two years writing a novel about her, vaporizing her letters and poems, sucking the blood out of her bones, like some hunter of lost souls.~ Author's Note, A Loaded Gun by Jerome Charyn

Charyn's novel The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson (on my TBR pile) did not offer him a sense of closure. "I knew less and less the more I learned about her," he admits.

In this book, he begins with my first encounter with Dickinson: Julie Harris's performance as The Belle of Amherst which I watched many times on a small black and white television. It was my first impression of the poet.

Charyn considers all the poet's relationships, from her companion Carlo, a Newfoundland dog, to her late in life love affair with Judge Otis, with all the thunderstruck men and heartbreaking women in between.

Emily's letters and poems show her deep passions. The spinster was no prude. She had strong loves, earth shattering heartbreaks, and was more than acquainted with despair.

Some chapters take us into roundabout side trips as Charyon explores the multiple influences of the poet. Relax, enjoy the ride.

I loved the chapter Ballerinas in a Box, beginning with the early 20th c poets who discovered Dickinson, to her love affair with Kate Scott, to the art of Joseph I. Cornell, to ballerinas, exploring the nature of art.

Charyn casts his net deep and wide, considering psychology and biography and retellings and imaginings.

Only to conclude that Emily wears too many masks to truly know her. She remains a mystery beyond our ken.

And we, like ghouls, try to toy with her biography, to link her language with her life. We cannot master her, never will, as if her own words skates on some torrid ice that is permanently beyond our pale, yet we seek and seek, as if somehow that soothes us, as if we might crack a certain code, when all we will ever have is "A Woe/of Ecstasy."~ from A Loaded Gun by Jerome Charyn

A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century
by Jerome Charyn
Bellevue Literary Press
Trade Paper US $19.95
ISBN: 9781934137987
Ebook
ISBN: 9781934137994

Read the 'missing chapter' at Stay Thirsty magazine
https://www.staythirstymedia.com/201601-091/html/201601-charyn-emily.html

*****

Previously I had skipped around the Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. I decided to start from the beginning of the volume. I noted her use of flowers, nature, and color in the early poems, sources to be considered for use in my quilt. 

I read into some of my favorites, such as this poem segment I shared on #SundaySentence hosted by @ImDavidAbrams on Twitter:

I got so I could take his name--
Without--Tremendous gain--

That Stop sensation--on my Soul--
And Thunder--in the Room--

I got so I could walk across
That Angle in the floor,

Where he turned so, and I turned--how-
And all our Sinew tore--

*****

I have decided to use a fusible collage technique on my quilt to make multiple portrait blocks, inspired by Charyn's comment about Dickinson's many masks. I can see the Victorian ideal of the retiring spinster writing about flowers, the mad woman dressed in white who would not leave her home, the dark woman who challenged convention and religion, the passionate woman of many loves, and the poet obsessed with words.

A poet with so many sides can't be contained in one image.

Cesare: A Tale of War-Torn Berlin by Jerome Charyn

They would embroider, multiply, manufacture, until I was their Caligari with his slave, Cesare, who strangled enemies of the Reich at will and then returned to his coffin at Tipitz-Ufer. ~Admiral William Canaris in Cesare by Jerome Charyn

From the beginning, I knew I had entered a noir world of tales and terror where fantasy and fact spun a deeper journey into the known, for surely nothing can convey truth better than fiction.

Reading Cesare by Jerome Charyn I knew I had to see The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari again, for the imagery of the doctor and his sleepwalking murderer is central to the novel. It is set in a world gone mad and filled with madmen. Yes, I am talking about the movie--and I am talking about the novel.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a 1920 German film in which horror builds upon horror, the action set against contorted Expressionist Art sets. A doctor is monomaniacally obsessed with controlling a somnambulist, Cesare, who in his sleep murders on command. In the end, we are unsure who is really mad.

We were all madmen at the Abwehr. We had to be. How else could we have survived the Furher's fiery wind day after day? ~ Admiral William Canaris in Cesare by Jerome Charyn 

In Jerome Charyn's Cesare, we met the orphan Erik Holdermann, raised by whores who pool their money to send him to school. There he is discovered by a benevolent department store baron who sends Eric to his an estranged uncle--only to be treated like a household slave. But the Uncle's daughter, the imperious Lisalein, bewitches the boy. Lisalein is fierce and beautiful, a cruel Estella toward men; under the Nazis she becomes a crusading angel for the Jews.

While at cadet school Eric unwittingly saved the life of Admiral Canaris, the head of the "asylum called the Abwehr," the German Military Intelligence. Canaris brings Eric into the Abwehr to eliminate their enemies, becoming Dr. Caligari to Eric's Cesare.

Dr. Caligari's will controls Cesare in his coffin

Eric is Admiral Canaris' liaison with the Nazi Gestapo and SS; the Abwehr was at odds with them, hiding and protecting select Jews, one Jew at a time. Eric was protected and feared by his reputation, for the enemies of the Abwehr disappeared.

Hitler's mad dominions meant nothing to Erik. He was loyal to Uncle Willie and played Cesare for him. ~ from Cesare by Jerome Charyn

To rescue Lisalien, Eric enters the contorted reality of Theresienstadt, a PR facade constructed to hide the truth of the Nazi death camps.

The book reads like a twisted dark fairy tale, stepped in the details of a time in history so chillingly horrific some deny it ever happened. And like all good horror stories, it will disturb your sleep.

I was given access to an egalley by the publisher through Edelweiss in return for a fair and unbiased review.

Cesare: A Novel of War-Torn Berlin
Jerome Charyn
Bellevue Literary Press
Publication January 7, 2020
ISBN: 9781942658504, 1942658508
Hardcover $26.99 USD, $35.99 CAD, £19.99 GBP

The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King

Ya-ha-haw!

Who can resist that pulp fiction era cover art, reserved for stories about daredevil heroes?

Yes--That is Teddy Roosevelt, our 25th president, dressed in his Brooks Brothers uniform, custom-made for his fantasy-come-true chance to play at war on San Juan's hills, his sidekick mascot cougar at his side!

I can't think of any other president so deserving of action hero fame, for TR's life was made up of Big Moments that prove that fact truly is stranger than fiction.

And Jerome Charyon's The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King takes readers on a thrill ride of TR's early life.

Born wealthy, son of a veritable saint nicknamed Great Heart, and brother to a self-destructive sybarite. Became a boy state assemblyman, taking on the corrupt New York party machine. Married for love; lost her and his beloved mother on the SAME DAY.  Ran off to the Wild West to work himself into oblivion, facing bad guys and evil Pinkertons. Left little Alice to his sister to raise until, returning home, he reencounters his childhood sweetheart Edith and realizes he has to marry her.

Our hero reenters NYC politics, again goes up against corruption, becoming a royal pain so the politicos send him packing to Washington, DC to be Secretary of the Navy. TR pushes for war in Cuba against the Spaniards, cobbles together a ragtag group nicknamed the Rough Riders who become media darlings. Ignored and maligned, after much suffering and victory, the hero of San Juan Hill is made NY State Governor. Again becoming a royal pain, he is pressured to be McKinley's VP where he, like every other VP, except perhaps Al Gore, rots away. And then Garfield is assassinated.

That's just the first part of TR's life.

You can read any one of several marvelous biographies, many thousands of pages have been written about him. Or...you could... go on a jaunt under Jerome Charyn's capable hands and meet the Cowboy King in his own voice. Or do both. Read the scholarly bios, but don't miss the chance to meet Teddy The Cowboy King. It's a rollicking good ride.

I received a free ebook from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

President Roosevelt from The Presidents Quilt
Design by Michael J. Buckingham,
Quilt by Nancy A. Bekofske

The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King: A Novel of Teddy Roosevelt and His Times
by Jerome Charyn
W. W. Norton & Company
Pub Date 08 Jan 2019
ISBN 9781631493874
PRICE $26.95 (USD)

The Presidents Quilt
made by Nancy A. Bekofske