Tag: J. D. Salinger

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Salinger’s Letters

Joyce Maynard was a writing prodigy (or was she?), published while still a teenager. J. D. Salinger read one of her pieces and contacted her, with encouragement and praise. They corresponded. They met. He was 53, she was 18. They became lovers. Eventually, the relationship ended. Joyce Maynard, repeatedly identified as a lover of J. D. Salinger’s, continued to get published, regularly. I have never read any of her books, though I saw the movie “To Die For”, based on her book, which was very smart and interesting. If you are a serious writer, you could not be more blessed than to have your novel filmed by Gus Van Sant.

In 1998, Joyce Maynard published a book detailing her relationship with J. D. Salinger, thus launching two scandals. The first, that she revealed and exploited her past relationship with a writer who very clearly valued his personal privacy. The second is that the famous writer J. D. Salinger had a marked preference for young, pretty, smart women. Maynard didn’t say so, but it is apparent that one of those young, pretty, smart women was Joyce Maynard who replaced a previous lover, and who was, in turn, replaced by another.

Okay, Joyce Maynard didn’t think that “smart” mattered so much as the youthfulness of these women– except for her. That would not play into her narrative. She wants you to know that J.D. rejected her mind for someone with a more attractive body.

I’m not sure what she thought he should have preferred, if not young, smart, attractive women.

Older women with cooking skills? Older smart women with more wisdom?

And I’m not sure why she might think he should prefer them. Because they deserved to be recognized for their intellect? More so than the younger women deserved to be recognized for their youth or beauty?

The documentary “Salinger” (2013) alluded to his attraction to women whose personalities were yet unformed. A good hard-core feminist would describe it as something else, as vulnerability, I guess, as if these women didn’t intend that their physical attractiveness would attract men who offered something pleasing to them in return: attention. Maybe flattery. Time and money? Possible literary success– a leg up in the cut-throat world of publishing?

The deal used to be this: if you wanted to use the media to gain fame and importance so you could sell more books or disks or movies, or yourself as a politician, then you were tacitly agreeing to the intrusion of the media into your private life, and if they discovered something salacious, tough beans.

If, on the other hand, you chose to keep your privacy, avoid the media, grant no interviews, stage no photo-ops, with or without your children, and so on, the main stream media would or should generally leave you alone.

Joyce Maynard had to portray herself as the “wronged woman”, because otherwise her attempts to sell her correspondence with Salinger to the highest bidder would have been revealed for precisely the repulsive, narcissistic, contemptible act that it was.

In 2010, Maynard adopted two Ethiopian girls. A year later, she decided that she could no longer care for them and sent them to live with a family in Wyoming. Then she announced that she needed her privacy (!) and removed all references to them from her website. I repeat– demanding that people respect her privacy… Yes. Respecting privacy is a good thing.

I doubt that any serious Salinger fans are even touched by the “scandal”, and they should not be. Does Joyce Maynard still demand the respect of writers and critics and people with good taste? She has tried her hardest to cast her exclusion from Salinger’s life in as favorable a light as possible, but the truth of it is far simpler: she is a relatively mediocre mind who, in the context of Salinger’s definitive desire for privacy, rationalized a vicious act of betrayal with “I needed the money to send my kids to college.”

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The “Prodigy”

As is well known, software guru Peter Norton purchased the Maynard-Salinger letters and returned them to Salinger, unexamined.

Salinger, who never used a computer, died January 27, 2010, one of the very, very few uncompromisers in a world full of the blah blah blah of wasted, diffuse, or sold-out, dishonest lives.

We are told that Joyce Maynard was published while still a teenager because she was a prodigy.

I believe it, I think.

But I will note that a few years ago I started inquiring into how people got published the first time. The myth is that a piece is submitted and it impresses the editors and is accepted, edited, and published. The truth is that someone generally knows someone.

So I’m not sure about Joyce Maynard.

Okay. I checked. Her mother was a published writer and journalist; and her father was a painter and English professor. So, someone possibly– maybe probably– knew someone.

Scratch the prodigy part.

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Having it Both Ways with J.D. Salinger

Some will argue that you can’t have it both ways: how can a woman say she is fully in charge of her body and her destiny, and then call herself a victim when, having given a man her heart of her own volition, he crushes it? How can a consensual relationship, as Salinger’s unquestionably were, constitute a form of abuse?

But we are talking about what happens when people in positions of power — mentors, priests, employers or simply those assigned an elevated status — use their power to lure much younger people into sexual and (in the case of Salinger) emotional relationships. Most typically, those who do this are men. And when they are done with the person they’ve drawn toward them, it can take that person years or decades to recover.

Joyce Maynard, J. D. Salinger’s former girlfriend, in the New York Times, September 15, 2013.

Exactly. How do you get to slime someone for not finding you lovable anymore? How do you get to label as an abuser the man you were attracted to because of his influence and fame and importance, as if you had no expectation of anything except his loyalty?

How do you get to destroy someone for taking advantage of your credulousness? I am woman. Hear me roar. See me standing toe-to-toe with men and holding my own, for I am smart and independent and capable of making my own decisions and taking responsibilities for my own actions, except when I want you to think of me as a victim, something I am so ashamed of I will appear on talk shows to discuss it.

Except when you don’t love me any more. Suddenly, you are a bully, and I am the schoolyard wimp. And you weren’t very nice to me. And your rudeness and meanness shall have a label and it shall be called “abuse” and you must be held responsible.

Let us not speak about a young writer flattered and intoxicated with the idea that a relationship with a famous author would advance her own career– that’s not part of the narrative we need to construct here.

And let’s not consider a woman who develops such a relationship with a man and then leaves him devastated, so that “it can take decades to recover”. In Maynard’s universe, it’s only the woman who has anything to recover when a relationship goes sour.

Because I am loveable. I am adorable. I worshipped you and brought you meals and you saw me naked and I indulged some of your dark fantasies and I pretended to be willing because you really loved me but you didn’t. I tried to interest you in my ideas, my talent– I really am a very, very talented person!– and you were bored and annoyed and now I can tell you that I knew, in my deepest heart, that you were jealous, oh yes you were, you felt threatened by my gifts because they were really as good or even greater than yours, and that’s why you rejected me and told me to leave.

Look at me now, on the talk shows, on the booklists, being interviewed, and sometimes they even ask me about my own work and not just about you, or what you are really like, or what you really think.

And more on Maynard and Salinger

There is ambivalence at the heart of this issue. You will sometimes hear feminists defend a young woman who strikes up a relationship with a powerful or wealthy older man. She is empowered. She is asserting her individuality and independence in making unpopular choices. She is in control of her sexuality and able to make intelligent choices based on the options available to her.

So if she inherits all the property, we hear nothing about abuse or exploitive relationships. At least, not from her side.

The Complete Essay in the New York Times

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Character Assassination: Joyce Maynard Betrays J.D. Salinger

While watching Miley Cyrus’ pornographic performance on the 2013 MTV awards, I thought about an article I’d read hours earlier, about a new biography of J. D. Salinger by David Shields and Shane Salerno, and about Joyce Maynard who tried to sell letters Salinger had written her when she was 18 and he was 53, which resulted in her moving in with him for a year. Maynard was vilified by some for trying to sell the letters to pay for her childrens’ tuition costs. Peter Norton, he of the famous Norton Utilities (well, famous back in the days of DOS), purchased the letters and gave them back to Salinger, displaying more class than anybody else involved in this celebrity dust-up, including Salinger.

The deal is usually this: you want to sell your book / movie / record by appearing in magazines and on talk shows, you give up your right to privacy. I’m not sure why that is a “deal” but it is. If you seek publicity for personal gain, you don’t seem to have the right to complain if someone tries to take pictures of you topless at a private beach. Or if people camp out in front of your door and photograph you every time you go out to dinner or to get groceries or pick up your child at school. Why is that a deal? Because the “moderates” of the media monster have decided that that is reasonable. The subject celebrity supposedly agrees to this exchange, tacitly, when they agree to some other specified act of publicity.  No– it’s because you seek publicity in order to sell your movie, your book, your recordings, so it’s hypocritical to complain about your privacy being invaded when you have clearly offered it in exchange for money or fame or power.

J. D. Salinger famously became a recluse. He had a taste of fame, didn’t like it, and stopped publishing, and retreated to a very private cabin on a 90 acre property in Cornish, New Hampshire. He built a separate house for his family. He had work to do, even if he wasn’t publishing.  He accepted that he would not sell as many books if he maintained his privacy, and most of the media respected that tacit arrangement.

Jonathan Franzen famously refused to appear on Oprah for the same reason.  Then he changed his mind– at the behest of his publishers– and did appear on Oprah knowing full well the consequences of a deal with the devil: the tabloid fame that follows.

The essential duplicity of Maynard’s action is the decision to expose, for public consumption, very private sexual acts. The obvious question is why. The obvious answer– from a publicist’s point of view– is to tell the truth, or the help other people, or to have closure, or to work through her depression. The real reason, without the slightest doubt, is to evoke sympathy, make money, whether through book sales, the auction of the letters, or personal appearances, and exploit the fame of the person you are exposing.

You may choose to believe Maynard’s rationalizations: I do not. I think it’s bullshit. It is exactly what it looks like and there is never any doubt about what it looks like: you took a very private relationship and splattered it all over the place knowing full well what kind of mincemeat most of the media will make of it by the time they’re through. You behaved a certain way while with Salinger– you kissed him back, embraced him, undressed for him, whatever, consented to intimacy without giving him the slightest indication that you would eventually use that information to sell yourself, to be noticed, to get press, to sell more books, to present yourself as some kind of victim.

It’s Goldman on Lennon, Hersh on Kennedy, Kelly on Sinatra: it’s all the same. And nobody is absolved by saying, oh, they should have known that would happen. If you can’t take the heat…

There is nothing shockingly new about the whole thing: it just throws the issue into sharper relief than usual. I remember Dylan shredding a reporter who asked him if he was a “spokesman” for his generation. No. Are you the spokesman for your generation? You actually felt bad for the reporter, but Dylan learned as well: you can’t win that kind of exchange over the long run, no matter how smart or quick you are.

You are never going to go camp out in someone else’s driveway and go through their garbage.

Some of the writers who defended Joyce Maynard for telling all and selling Salinger’s letters to her remark on how Salinger saw her picture and then contacted her by letter and eventually met her, invited her to live with him for nine months, and then dumped her.

They insist Salinger obviously noticed how beautiful she was.

Hardcover Looking back;: A chronicle of growing up old in the sixties Book

With all due respect, looking at the same picture, I think it more likely he was attracted to her mind.

Maynard was raked by some other commentators for having breast implants, then removing them, and writing about the entire experience in Vanity Fair. If Maynard wants you to believe that Salinger was attracted to her because of her looks– I’m not sure she does– and that there was something wrong with that, why the implants?