PAUL ALEXANDER: As she was walking away, Salinger shouted after her, “I don’t even know who you are!”
JOYCE MAYNARD: [I felt] different stages of distress from the moment of his initial rejection of me. I expected to be with him forever. I really did. I felt the reverberations of his disdain and contempt for years. After almost everything else was gone, I held on to this idea that I once was special and deeply loved by him. I had lived for his approval and it was a very painful thing to lose it and then to discover that I hadn’t in fact been this single and precious person. I had been one of a series of who knows how many.
DAVID SHIELDS: The damage inflicted feels intentional. It’s punishment on Salinger’s part—punishment for being alive.
JEAN MILLER: That poor girl—he was so casual and cold to her. She was very courageous in breaking the code that we all had, not verbally but emotionally, signed onto: don’t talk. I thought her parents were similar to mine. I also think, when you compare a picture of me and her picture on the back of her book, we look very much alike.
GORE VIDAL: Since Maynard was the victim, she has the right to complain first. She was the victim of an old man’s lust and whatever happened between them. Who knows? Who cares? I think the defense always has the right to come forward with their case first. So she did. So she did.
JOYCE MAYNARD: For twenty-five years, I did not write or speak of what happened. The [critical] attacks, not only on my book but on my character, were brutal, intensely personal, and relentless, and even now—several years later—hardly a week goes by in which someone or other doesn’t remark to me, “Oh, you’re the one who wrote the book about Salinger.” I’m never angry when they say that. Of course that was said in the press about the book. My response is: I didn’t write a book about J. D. Salinger. I wrote a book about myself, and J. D. Salinger chose to be a part of my life and I chose to no longer exclude that fact of my life.
I did, however, receive affirmation of the work I’d written. I received letters from women and men well acquainted with shame and secret-keeping in their own lives, thanking me for my willingness to speak openly of experiences they had supposed were theirs alone or simply too painful to speak of. . . . Not wholly surprising to me were the letters I received from three other women telling me they had engaged in correspondences with J. D. Salinger eerily like my own, one within weeks of his dismissal of me. I have no doubt these women’s stories were true. They quoted lines from Salinger’s letters to them nearly identical to ones in his letters to me, whose contents had never been made public. Like me, these women had been approached by Salinger when they were eighteen years old. Like me, they once believed him to be the wisest man, their soul mate, their destiny. Like me, they had eventually experienced his complete and devastating rejection. Also like me, they had maintained for years the belief that they were obligated to keep the secret out of fear of the very form of condemnation I was now receiving for having refused to do so. My book’s not really a story about J. D. Salinger; it’s a story about shame and a young girl giving over her power to a much more powerful older man, and that’s a rather universal story, or at least a common one.
Joyce Maynard with her three children.
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JOYCE MAYNARD: Evidently it appeared to many of my critics that the sole significance of my life had been sleeping with a great man.
DAVID SHIELDS: It’s not as if Maynard isn’t highly exploitative in her own right, but it’s a bit of a daisy chain, because so much is at stake—the myth of the isolated male genius artist—and everyone is invested in it: newspapers, magazines, publishers, Salinger himself. The mystery surrounding the sphinx gets maintained.
LARISSA MacFARQUHAR: In the 25 intervening years, Maynard bought a house, nearly had a nervous breakdown, lost her virginity to the soundtrack of Pippin, met Mary Tyler Moore and Muhammad Ali, was raped, got married, appeared on TV, had three children, emptied her breast milk into the Atlantic, planted a garden, went broke, had an abortion, clawed through a heap of garbage looking for a lost retainer, wrote three novels, watched her parents get divorced and die, got divorced herself, bought another house, got breast implants and took them out, took tennis lessons, sold most of her possessions and moved from New Hampshire to California. Over the years, Maynard has related many of these events in her syndicated newspaper column and in articles for women’s magazines.
ELIZABETH GLEICK: Flatly written, with detail piling upon detail like so much slag on a heap, Maynard’s memoir returns repeatedly to the idea of emotional and literary honesty. “Some day, Joyce, there will be a story you want to tell for no better reason than because it matters to you more than any other,” Salinger [once told] her. “You’ll simply write what’s real and true.” Maybe this is it. But where Salinger, or many a better writer, would have fictionalized his truths, opening up new universes for the reader, Maynard sheds no light on anything beyond the little spotlight she is standing in. She had a complicated childhood, a shattering love affair, a complicated adulthood. Join the club, kiddo, as Salinger himself might say.
CYNTHIA OZICK: What we have is two celebrities, one who was once upon a time a real writer of substance and an artist, and one who has never been an artist and has no real substance and has attached herself to the real artist in order to suck out his celebrity. It’s really such a Jamesian story, isn’t it?
JONATHAN YARDLEY: [At Home in the World is] smarmy, whiny, smirky, and, above all, almost indescribably stupid.
JOYCE MAYNARD: I wonder, why you are so quick to see exploitation in the actions of a woman—sought out at eighteen by a man thirty-five years her senior who promised to love her forever and asked her to forswear all else to come and live with him, who waited twenty-five years to write her story (HER story, I repeat. Not his). And yet you cannot see exploitation in the man who did this. I wonder what you would think of the story if it were your daughter. Would you still tell her to keep her mouth shut, out of respect for this man’s privacy?
JULIET WATERS: The intensity of the literary catfight sparked by Maynard’s At Home in the World is a bit disturbing. There was a lacerating review in the New Yorker that casually dismissed the emotional and sexual abuse Maynard suffered at the hands of her parents with the claim that this paled compared to the sin of having “led their daughter to believe that she, and everything she says or writes, is of supreme interest.”
MICHIKO KAKUTANI: Although many readers will doubtless find the Salinger chapters the most compelling—and unsettling—part of this book, “At Home in the World” is not a sleazy tell-all memoir about the author’s affair with a famous (and famously reclusive) man. It’s actually an earnest, if at times self-serving, autobiography that, in the course of tracing the author’s coming of age, delineates her first serious love affair, one that happened to be with the author of “Catcher in the Rye.”
LISA SCHWARZBAUM: Defiant, taunting, score settling, and exhibitionistic as this memoir is, at least it isn’t as exasperatingly self-satisfied as most of Maynard’s other personal journalism; in its twisted way, and with a long, long way to go in the self-awareness department for the memoirist, it may be the most honest autobiographical work she’s done.
KATHA POLLITT: It’s easy to make fun of Joyce Maynard. As if her relentless self-marketing and theatricality weren’t enough, the very fact that she presents herself as vulnerable, a victim in recovery, leaves her open to mockery. In our heard-it-all-before sophistication, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that while still very young Maynard was on the receiving end of quite a bit of damage from adults. If she doesn’t always seem to understand her own story—if she seems like a 44-year-old woman who is still 18—maybe that goes to show how deep the damage went.
JOYCE MAYNARD: Anybody who had a correspondence of any length with Salinger probably knows two things about him. One is how funny and lovable and tender and utterly winning he could be. The other is how cruel. If you’ve experienced the cruelty, if you’ve been burned by that flame, you mi
ght not be very quick to go anywhere near it again. I heard quite a few stories from women after I published At Home in the World.
DAVID SHIELDS: One of the most powerful contradictions in Salinger consists of how little contradiction this completely contradictory, even hypocritical, man can countenance in others.
JOYCE MAYNARD: Based on what was so often said about me for breaking my own silence, the fears of these women to speak of their experiences appear justified. Even now, it seems, there are many who would say it remains a woman’s obligation to protect the secrets of a man for the simple reason that he demands it. More than that, it appears to be a matter of some dispute whether a woman has the right to tell the truth about her life—and if she does, whether the story of a woman’s life is viewed as significant or valuable.
I was giving a speech one time, and the woman who introduced me said, “Well, she used to be J. D. Salinger’s girlfriend.” I thought, “God, is that all I’ve been?” I didn’t want to be reduced to that.
A MAN MAYNARD DATED: Fifteen minutes into our first date [in the 1990s], Joyce kept referring to this guy named Jerry. She was talking about “Jerry this” and “Jerry that.” It was as though they still knew each other. It took me a few minutes to figure out that the Jerry she was talking about was J. D. Salinger.
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J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from card to Paul Fitzgerald, December 1998:
Paul, old friend, No real news, and little cheer this year, but winter, snow on the ground, is so reminiscent of places and Times half a century old. Not bad at all that we survived them. . . . A book I like very much, and you might, too Berlin Diaries, 1940–1945, by Maria Vassiltchikov.
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CATHLEEN McGUIGAN: Now, 27 years later, “Miss Maynard,” as he addressed her, is putting up that letter and 13 others for public auction next month at Sotheby’s in New York. . . . So rare are Salinger letters—and so notorious is their romance—that Sotheby’s estimates they will sell (as a group) for $60,000 to $80,000. . . .
Selling the letters, she says, is practical. “I’m a single mother of three children,” explains Maynard, 45, from her home in California. “I don’t feel any embarrassment at the financial reality of being a writer who’s not J. D. Salinger.”. . .
The new letters are hardly lurid or full of secrets—Maynard already described them in her memoir. Yet actually reading them . . . is a treat. . . . “[There are] wonderful things in those letters,” notes Maynard. “But there’s also an enormous amount of bitterness and disdain for the world.” . . .
Salinger is seductive in his praise of Maynard’s writing, her mind, his suggestion that they are soul mates. He signs off, “Love, Jerry.” What bright but naive 18-year-old with literary ambitions wouldn’t fall for this from a brilliant, sensitive, famous writer?
Writer Joyce Carol Oates says she has “mixed feelings” about the sale of the letters but notes that the press has treated Salinger “like he’s sacrosanct. . . . How old was he then? He must have known at the time that this was reckless behavior.” And Maynard apparently wasn’t the only woman to whom Salinger, now 80 and remarried, wrote. Oates says she has a close woman friend who had an affair with Salinger and has letters from him. Maynard herself has heard of others. “It was a painful discovery that there had been other girls,” she says. “But it began to set me free from the worship of this man who had presided over my life for so long.” When his letters go on the block in June, Maynard will be there to hear the gavel fall.
JOYCE CAROL OATES: What of the letter-writer’s complicity in his “betrayal”? No one forced J. D. Salinger in the spring of 1972 to initiate an epistolary relationship with an 18-year-old college freshman; no one forced the 53-year-old writer, at the height of his perhaps sufflated fame, to seduce her through words, and to invite her to live with him in rural New Hampshire.
Though Joyce Maynard has been the object of much incensed, self-righteous criticism, primarily from admirers of the reclusive Salinger, her decision to sell his letters is her own business, like her decision to write about her own life. Why is one “life” more sacrosanct than another? In fact, we might be sympathetic to J. D. Salinger’s increasingly futile efforts to safeguard his precious privacy, as we might be sympathetic to anyone’s efforts, but that he happens to be a writer with a reputation is irrelevant.
JOHN DEAN: When Maynard decided she was going to sell Salinger’s letters, she was smart enough, I’m sure, to know, because of Salinger’s lawsuit against Random House, she could not sell the content of the letters: all she could do is sell her right to own the physical letters themselves. She turned them over to Sotheby’s to sell; all they sold was the physical paper.
MAUREEN DOWD: I went to Sotheby’s . . . to have a gander at the notorious letters. The exercise was fascinating and a little creepy. The 53-year-old author kept warning his 18-year-old friend about the ways that celebrity and conspicuousness can warp talent. Now those warnings against exploitation are being exploited. His counsel for privacy and subtlety are being publicly and unsubtly sold to the highest bidder.
PHOEBE HOBAN: The only reason those [letters] are not in some private person’s hands now, but back in Salinger’s possession, is that Peter Norton, the software developer, thought it was such a terrible act of disloyalty that he bought the letters and returned them to Salinger. I thought it was one of the noble acts of the twentieth century.
JOHN DEAN: The buyer of the letters, Mr. Norton, returned them to Salinger: all he was doing was returning the physical possession of the letters because Salinger already owned the content of the letters. This kept them out of public circulation.
MARC PEYSER: Peter Norton, a software millionaire and art collector, forked over $156,000 last week to buy Salinger’s letters from navel-gazing writer Joyce Maynard, who lived with the reclusive author in the 1970s. Norton doesn’t criticize Maynard; he just wants to keep the letters from ruining Salinger’s privacy.
PETER NORTON: My intention is to do whatever he wants done with them. He may want them returned. He may want me to destroy them. He may not care at all.
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DAVID SHIELDS: Shortly after Salinger survived the attack from Maynard, he needed to gear up to do battle with another young woman about the same age as Maynard—his daughter, Margaret.
DOREEN CARVAJAL: The daughter of the obsessively private author J. D. Salinger is preparing to publish a memoir of her childhood and relationship with her father. The book by Margaret (Peggy) Salinger, 43, is tentatively titled “The Dream Catcher” and is scheduled to be published by Simon & Schuster’s Pocket Books in the fall of 2000. Ms. Salinger received an advance from Pocket Books of more than $250,000.
DAVID SHIELDS: In 2000 Salinger’s daughter, Margaret—who had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brandeis, received a master’s degree from Oxford, and attended Harvard Divinity School—published a book about her life with her father, Dream Catcher, which portrays Salinger pursuing cult-like Eastern religions, using herbal medicines, sitting in an orgone box in an attempt to gain certain benefits and cures, and drinking his own urine. Margaret says that her father wasn’t a catcher for her and suggests that he shouldn’t be a catcher for readers, either. Evoking many unhappy moments between herself and her father, she bears down particularly hard on what she considers his indifference toward her.
MARGARET SALINGER: It turned out that I had a classic case of a “new” or newly discovered disease first called Epstein-Barr virus, or CFS—chronic fatigue syndrome—or in England, myalgic encephalomyelitis. When I could no longer safely hold a teacup in my hand without dropping it, fibromyalgia was added to the pot. . . . I received notice that my disability payments were to be terminated. . . . I called and told my father the grave news that my disability payments had been cut off.
A week or two later, something arrived in the mail. He had taken out a three-year subscription, in my name, to a monthly booklet of testimonials to miraculous healing put out by the Christian Science Church. . . . I would g
et well when I stopped believing in the illusion of my sickness. What began to crack was my belief in the illusion of my father.
Margaret Salinger.
DINITIA SMITH: The Plaza [Hotel in New York] is a place of happy memories, where she used to stay with her father when they visited her godfather, William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker. She is looking at photographs in her book about her handsome young father, beaming as she learns to walk, as she sits on his shoulders, plays the piano. “He loves me,” said Ms. Salinger, as if surprised. “Isn’t he sexy! How funny he was.”
Her father loved her, but he was also pathologically self-centered, Ms. Salinger says. Nothing could interrupt his work, which he likened to a quest for enlightenment. He was also abusive toward her mother, Claire Douglas, Ms. Salinger says, keeping her a virtual prisoner in his house in Cornish, N.H., refusing to allow her to see friends and family. There is one moment that stands out above all, she said. “It is so horrible, it’s so powerful.” When she was pregnant and sick, instead of offering help, her father “said I had no right to bring a child into this lousy world,” she writes, “and he hoped I was considering an abortion.”
JOYCE MAYNARD: I read Peggy’s book. I think of her as Peggy because I knew her as Peggy when she was young. I feel great compassion and sympathy for her: she was treated terribly by her father; a father shouldn’t extract unconditional loyalty and silence. A child deserves support and loyalty, which she didn’t receive. She was abandoned by her father. . . .
I recognized on that first visit [to Salinger’s house] that he did not think everything about his daughter was great. I could really respect her, because I’d always been a pleaser. I’d been a good girl, I was somebody who wanted approval, who wanted to be loved, and she was more of a “Fuck you” kind of person than I had ever dared to be. It took me decades to get to be somebody like that. But she was strong, and she was tough, and she was a little bad.
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