Looking Back (3 page)

“You think you know so much,” I would tell my young self. “
Just wait.
”

I remember a conversation I had many years later with my own daughter, when she was about the same age and came home to visit after her first semester at college. She had been taking a course called “Introduction to Feminism” taught by a famous former Berkeley radical, and she was exploding with ideas and opinions not yet fully supported by life experience. “Oh, Mama,” she said to me—weighing in on a decision I’d made that struck her as evidence of my lack of enlightenment concerning the female condition—“
you have no idea what women have gone through.
”

Here is some of what I did not know at 18 about what women go through, as they pass beyond their teens and into their twenties, and beyond that to the thirties, and the forties, to the age I own as I write this now: 58.

I didn’t know that my parents, the people to whom I dedicated
Looking Back
, and the home I’d lived in for all my growing-up years—the place I’d hitchhiked back to from New Haven for the purpose of writing my article because it had seemed to me like the one safe spot on earth—would break apart within months of finishing my book. Within twelve months my parents had divorced—with great anger and bitterness, brought on in no small part by the presence in my father’s life of a young girlfriend, only a few years older than I was.

The war in Vietnam ended around the time
Looking Back
was published. Nixon resigned. The soldiers came home. “The boys of 1953, my year, will be the last to go,” I’d written in my book. I didn’t know how many among that generation of young men would spend the rest of their lives struggling with what the experience of fighting in that war had done to their minds—and how through their attachment to those men, the women who loved them and the children they bore would struggle too.

I didn’t know—none of us did—that there would be something more dangerous about sex than pregnancy and that was AIDS. In 1972 the Beatles were still together. Girls at my high school had to pay 25 cents for the privilege of wearing pants to school—one day a year. Pluto was still a planet. Muhammad Ali was The Greatest. My parents were alive.

I knew I would have children and that part didn’t change. But I thought that when I got married, the marriage would last forever. I believed the words to songs, particularly the romantic ones. I believed in women’s liberation (the Equal Rights Amendment had been defeated the year before, but Billie Jean King would shortly beat Bobby Riggs). Product of an era when girls playing basketball were allowed no more than three dribbles (so as not to tax themselves, presumably) and those girls playing soccer at my school had to clear the field of stones before the game could begin (while the boys got the good field), I would have said I believed that women were entitled to any and all rights afforded men. I never for a day questioned that I would have a career. But I also eventually embarked on a marriage in which I accepted, for years, the notion that the majority of child care and housework would fall to the woman. Same as it had for my mother.

I supported Roe v. Wade and the right of a woman to choose abortion. I didn’t know yet that six years later, when I had an abortion myself, the real-life experience would feel a lot more complicated and painful than embracing the political position.

I was an old-fashioned girl who baked bread and wanted babies. (This was a nearly radical position at the time, by the way.) And like many girls (despite the powerful rise of feminism during these years, and my own intellectual support of what the feminists talked about), I was a good girl, raised to please. I derived my sense of my own worth from what the arbiters of power in my world conveyed—the editors of
Seventeen
and the
New York Times
, the admissions board at Yale, my parents. If a man I loved told me I was a wonderful girl and a real writer—as Jerry Salinger had told me when he wrote me that first letter—I felt I might be such a person. If that same man—so much wiser and more brilliant than I—told me differently, I would believe this, too.

All of that fall, while I was writing
Looking Back
, Jerry Salinger had expressed his displeasure in my project, even as he looked over my manuscript, suggesting changes—many of which are reflected in the final work. It was Salinger—who spent hours meditating daily and urged me to do the same—who inspired the reference in these pages to Zen meditation, though (having missed the point, perhaps) I made the suggestion that I practiced the art by watching television. It was Salinger who urged me to end my book with a reference to the birds on his bird feeder that day and the importance—in a climate of so much faddishness and fashion—of holding onto a respect for the natural world.

More important, it was Salinger who raised the question of whether my old dream of achieving fame and fortune in New York City would provide the basis for a meaningful life. Had he not written that first letter to me, and all the ones that followed—had I never met him—I can guess where I would have been headed: to a career in television, very likely, or as what he would have called “some goddamn female Truman Capote, hopping from one talk show couch to the next one,” carrying on a series of “hysterically amusing little exercises in assassination by typewriter.” Without ever asking myself the question (here came Salinger’s voice in my ear again): What purpose might all my words serve besides the shoring up of my own ego?

“Do you ever see a student any more who simply loves to write, for the pure joy of the thing?” he asked me. “Or are they all hell-bent in making a name for themselves?”

“Someday, Joyce,” he had said to me, “you’ll give up this business of delivering what everybody tells you to do. You’ll stop looking over your shoulder to make sure you’re keeping everybody happy. One day a long time from now you’ll cease to care anymore who you please or what anybody has to say about you. That’s when you’ll finally produce the work you’re capable of.”

 Back then, what mattered to me most was still to please the person I loved best. This mattered more than being a writer, or simply being myself. I would be whoever I needed to be, if it allowed me to hold onto the love of the man I believed to be funnier and more interesting and wiser and more enlightened than any other.

When, in January, a small item appeared in
Time
magazine, disclosing that I had dropped out of Yale and moved in with the author of
The Catcher in the Rye
, Jerry Salinger exploded at me with so much fury I hid in the closet until I fell asleep there and emerged begging forgiveness.

In the spring of 1973, three weeks before the much-publicized release of
Looking Back
, on a trip with Jerry and his children to Florida, he told me he was weary of me and weary of our relationship. He placed a 50-dollar bill in my hand, put me in a taxi, and sent me to the airport with instructions to clear my things out of his house before he and the children returned home.

This I did.

In that first article I’d published in the
New York Times
, just eleven months earlier, I’d spoken of my dream to live in the country. “I feel a sudden desire to buy land,” I’d written. “Just a small plot of earth so that whatever they do to the country I’ll have a place where I can go—a kind of fallout shelter, I guess. . . . A little house, a comfortable chair, peace and quiet—retirement sounds tempting.”

After Salinger sent me away, I informed my publishers that I would not be embarking on the book tour they’d planned for me, after all. I took $17,000 I’d earned from the sale of
Looking Back
and made a down payment on an old house on 50 acres of land at the end of a dead-end road four miles outside of a very small town in New Hampshire. On Memorial Day of that year, one month after the publication of my book, I moved in to that house. I planted a vegetable garden there and bought copies of
The Tassajara Bread Book
and Helen and Scott Nearing’s
The Good Life
.

I lived in that house, alone, for a little over two years—continuing to write articles and record radio and television commentaries as the anointed Youth Spokesperson of America, though my own life bore less resemblance than ever to that of my contemporaries. Alone on those 50 acres, I inhabited a state of deep grief and a profound sense of failure.

In 1975, I moved to New York City to take a job as a newspaper reporter. When—a little over a year later—I met the man I would marry, I quit my great job at the
New York Times
(explaining as I did so, to the shock of the managing editor, that I wanted to get married and have babies). My future husband and I left New York and moved back to that New Hampshire farm. We raised our three children there for the 12 years our marriage lasted.

I wrote a number of books, and a few hundred articles and essays. Gradually, over the years, I learned that the best writing is the kind in which the writer dares to tell not only the easy stories, but also the uncomfortable ones.

I am still doing that. It’s work I love. I no longer write to please. I write to tell the truth. Sometimes, first, I have to locate the truth within myself. It is not always readily apparent.

In 1998—over 25 years after the publication of my first book about my life—I published a memoir,
At Home in the World
, that told the story I hadn’t felt able to write back when I was still living it. I was criticized in many circles—literary and otherwise—for doing this, most particularly for speaking of Salinger, and in many ways, the cost was great for doing so. A lot of people called me “shameless.”

It’s a label I accept proudly. If there is one difference between the girl I was at 18 and the woman I am now, it may be that. I would have been not only a better writer, sooner, but a woman more at peace had I believed then what I know now: There is nothing shameful about honesty.

Oddly enough, it was the words of Salinger himself, delivered a quarter century before, that offered particular sustenance at the time.

“Honest writing always makes people nervous, and they’ll think of all kinds of ways to make your life hell. Forget this business of tripping along as some blue-jeans-wearing spokesperson. Just write what you love, and nothing less. Write what’s true. ”

I am looking now at that photograph of me, from late winter of 1972, in my red-and-white checked sneakers, that appeared on the cover of the
New York Times Magazine
that April. All these years later, hardly a week goes by in my life—hardly a day, sometimes—in which someone or other doesn’t mention that image. They remember the big watch I was wearing and the way I folded my legs around each other, years before I’d set foot in a yoga class.

The youthfulness on that face is long gone from now, of course. But it’s not the simple effects of aging that most strikingly differentiate the face I have now from the one of the girl in that picture.

It’s the sense that image conveys of trust and innocence and faith. Whatever I said in that article (and say, in expanded form, in this book), there existed, in the 18-year-old version of myself, a belief that all things were possible. She could write a letter to the managing editor of the
New York Times
to say she’d like to write for him and he’d write back. A famous writer would send her a letter, himself, to say they were soul mates (the word he used:
landsmen
) and she’d believe him. One day she’d be writing a paper on Chaucer. The next day, she’d be on the train to New York City, auditioning for the starring role in a movie.

Strangely enough, I am an optimist still, and still a person who believes—as my heroine since childhood, Anne Frank, wrote—that people are more likely to be good than not. But I also know, we are all of us imperfect and damaged in all kinds of ways, and the only thing I know to do about that is to admit it and look for the compassion I believe exists among my fellow human beings.

Not surprisingly, I see many things differently now from how I did forty years ago. Read this book as the words of a young person, at the beginning of what has proven to be a long writing life—not the final words on anything, only the first ones. She knew a few things and had much to learn.

She was growing up, but not grown up yet, and like a lot of young people, she knew a lot less than she thought she did. She was limited in her understanding of the world and not always as compassionate or humble as I’d wish. She could only tell part of the story. I forgive her for this. Who among us, confronted with the pronouncements we made about life at age 18 (the music we believed timeless, the candidates in whom we placed our trust, the goals we set for ourselves, the values we held most dear, the people we believed we’d love forever) could say they got it all right? And if by some fluke they had, what was the point of all the years that followed? Thank god it’s only a book, not a tattoo.

Some things are true as ever, though. I still like the idea of that farmhouse in the country, though the farmhouse of my youth belongs to someone else now. I was wrong about many things, but right about the children. All of them grown now, and older by at least a decade from the age I was when I wrote this.

As for retirement, I’m not even close to wanting that any more. I feel no weariness for the world. Only a hunger to know as much of it as I can.          

I see
Looking Back
now as a piece of cultural history in part, and partly an offering of nostalgia, for those readers born around the time I was, who lived through the experiences I did, and like me, formed so many of their ideas about the world from what went on in those times.

I also see
Looking Back
as a book for young people—most of all any young person who feels like something of an outsider, as I now understand, and wish I’d known sooner, so many teenagers do. It would make me very happy to think that reading this book might inspire some young person to record and make sense of his or her own growing-up experiences—not the Kennedy and King assassinations any more, or Vietnam, but Columbine, and 9/11, and Iraq, the obsession with technology, the vast and seemingly irreversible destruction of air and soil, forest and ocean.