The Children's Echelon

Salinger struggled to write “The Children’s Echelon.” while he was stationed in England with the 12th Infantry Regiment during preparations for the D-Day invasions.^[2]

Alternating between a first-person and third-person narratives while writing the work, Salinger had grave doubts as to the worthiness of the piece, which he initially attempted to model on Ring Lardner’s “I Can’t Breathe.” Biographer Kenneth Slawenski notes that “the work ran to twenty-six pages and 6,000 words, by far the longest story he had ever written.”^[3]

When Salinger submitted the work for consideration to editor Whit Burnett at Story, Burnett delivered “the most scathing critique ever suffered by a Salinger work.”^[4] Though Burnett acknowledged that the work had some merits, a Story interoffice memo registered: “In these times it would be a waste of paper to print the story.”^[5]

Salinger personally attributed the story’s failure to its length.^[6] Biographer Kenneth Slawenski remarks upon the story’s “overdrawn length and aimlessness…”^[7]

Salinger, an author who produced short fiction that typically did not run over 12 pages, “The Children’s Echelon” is exceeds two dozen. As such, Story editor Whit Burnett harbored doubts concerning Salinger’s “commitment” to writing a novel^[8] Salinger attempted to compensate for this apparent limitation by writing his works in more manageable “segments” which could be linked to form a book, or presented individually as short fiction.^[9]

Salinger is known to have referred to this work both as “The Children’s Echelon” and “Total War Diary.” in his correspondence. As the story was never published “it is known by both names today.”^[10]

• Slawenski, Kenneth. 2010. J. D. Salinger: A Life. Random House, New York. ISBN 978-1-4000-6951-4