Salinger (29 page)

“Through the years,” says Andreas Brown, the owner of the Gotham Book Mart, a store in Manhattan where Salinger first established an account in the late 1930s,
“Salinger would come into the store five or six times a year, usually with his son. He normally made a beeline for the philosophy/religion alcove and if Mrs. Steloff, who founded our
store, was in, he’d sit and talk with her for a considerable length of time. His demeanor in our store was this: If he needed something, he would talk to the staff. We
treated him very offhandedly, as if he was nobody, because that’s the way he wanted to be treated. We would help him, quote books for him we thought he might be interested in, and search for
books for him on occasion. But if a fan came up to him and wanted to strike up a conversation or wanted him to sign something or talk to him, he would excuse himself and almost always leave the
store. People would want him to explain why Holden Caulfield did something in chapter seven—that sort of thing. Or they’d ask him what he meant by something in
Franny and
Zooey.
They’d be playing college sophomore. Then again, more than one generation has grown up with Salinger.

“The first time he brought in Matt I thought to myself, ‘That’s Holden Caulfield, he’s stepping right off the paperback,’ because Matt had his baseball cap sideways
or backwards at a time when kids didn’t wear baseball caps that way. This little kid came into the store looking just like that and he’d be completely disinterested in what his father
was doing. He’d find the cartoon books. He could sit on the floor for hours looking at Charles Addams.”

About Claire, one question lingered. Did Salinger fall out of love with her because, once she grew up and became a mature woman, he was no longer physically and emotionally
attracted to her in the same way he was when she was nineteen? In looking at Salinger’s life up until this point, there was certainly evidence that he felt an attraction to younger women. In
his fiction, as he said in one contributors’ note after another, he was interested in writing about “very young people.” Many of the very young people about whom he wrote, often
in gushing and adoring terms, were teenage or prepubescent girls, among them Esmé (“For Esmé—With Love and Squalor”); Leah (“A Girl I Knew”); Barbara
(“A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All”); Ginnie and Selena (“Just Before the War with the Eskimos”); Elaine (“Elaine”); Phoebe Caulfield (
The Catcher
in the Rye
); and Mattie Gladwaller (the Babe Gladwaller stories). The young girl in Vienna,
who seems to have exerted a strong hold on his imagination, was about his
own age—mid- to late teens—when he met her. Oona O’Neill was about the same age, though he was seven or eight years older when they met. Claire Douglas was also in her late teens
when they married, while Salinger was well into his thirties. In the years following his divorce from Claire, Salinger may have indulged his attraction more than ever. “I heard local gossip
about his entertaining a succession of young female visitors,” says Warren French, who lived in Cornish Flat in the early 1970s. “There were other stories about other women being there
for various periods of time but no names were ever attached to any of them. Apparently there has been an irregular succession of these women through the years.”

Then, on Sunday, April 23, 1972, as he sat in his house, Salinger was leafing through the
New York Times
when he spotted the cover of the magazine. The cover story, “An
Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life,” was written by a Yale freshman, Joyce Maynard. Sitting on the floor of a corridor in the picture, she wears red socks, blue jeans, a beige sweater. Her
black hair hangs uncombed. Her gaze is childish, wide-eyed. Her smile is impish. The look and the pose—she props an elbow against a step as she tilts her head sideways to rest her cheek in
the palm of her hand—combines to make her seem girlish, yet she is clearly a woman. “There were pictures of her taken around this time that show her,” one friend would later say,
“as the Lolita of all Lolitas.”

Salinger, who would on several occasions be attracted to public figures, was intrigued by the magazine. The cover showed his ideal type—a girl on the verge of becoming a woman. The article
was also
impressive. Maynard had written a long, neo-conservative essay about how the generation that was born in the 1950s—hers—was “a generation of
unfilled expectations . . . special because of what we missed” and held together by common images—“Jackie and the red roses, John-John’s salute, and Oswald’s on-camera
murder.” It was an essay that impressed at least some readers with her ability to take events that are intimate and small in scope and make them larger-than-life. Salinger was one of the many
who were impressed. Spontaneously, he sat down and typed a one-page letter to Maynard warning her about the hazards of fame. He mailed the letter to her in care of Yale University.

In 1972, Joyce Maynard may have been only eighteen, but she had already lived a complicated and productive life. She was born to intellectual parents who taught English at the
University of New Hampshire in Durham. Her mother, Fredelle, had published two highly regarded books,
Guiding Your Child to a More Creative Life
and
Raisins and Almonds,
a memoir of her
Canadian youth. Joyce’s father, Max, who was twenty years older than Fredelle—which put him in his fifties when Joyce was born—was a painter, though not a successful one. There
was, however, as Joyce later characterized it, “an elephant in the living room”: her father was an alcoholic. Joyce had a theory as to why. She blamed it on the fact that he had been
unsuccessful, a view Max’s family and friends did not share.

Joyce attended Durham public schools where she was not popular, which contributed to her transferring to the Phillips Exeter
Academy as part of the first class to include
girls. While there, she published a story in
Seventeen
based on the unwanted pregnancy of a teenage couple in Durham; this angered local citizens who felt she had invaded the
couple’s privacy. In the fall of 1971, Joyce entered Yale University; again, she was among the first women to enter this all-male institution. At Yale, she published “The Embarrassment
of Virginity” in
Mademoiselle,
then her cover story in the
New York Times Magazine.
Her fellow students could dismiss the former but not the latter. “When I walked
into the first class we had after the
Times
article appeared,” says Leslie Epstein, who taught the creative-writing class Maynard took that spring semester at Yale, “I could
see the envy rising off the other students like steam off a radiator.”

So, late in the spring term in 1972, Joyce was an accomplished, disliked, famous college freshman, a child of an alcoholic. She was, as she would later admit, in transition from being anorexic
(which she was when she was a teenager) to bulimic (which she was when she was a young adult). Then, one day, as she was sifting through the bags of fan mail she got concerning the
Times
article, she started reading one particular letter. Over the years, Joyce would say that, even as she read it for the first time, she knew the letter was the most profound and insightful she had
read in her entire life. What’s more, she felt an instant connection with the letter’s author, as if the two of them were long-lost soul mates. Then, reaching the end of the page, she
saw the signature—“J. D. Salinger.”

For the rest of the semester, Joyce and Salinger corresponded. Salinger sent several letters, each one to two pages long; she answered them all.
“It was known at the time that Joyce was in touch with Salinger,” says Samuel Heath, who attended both Phillips Exeter and Yale with Maynard. “It seems Salinger was telling her,
‘Don’t let them spoil you. Don’t let them destroy you as a voice’—‘them’ being the establishment, the publishers, the outside world. He was doing the
Catcher in the Rye
routine—protecting her.” Salinger’s apparent effort to connect with Joyce worked. When she returned home to New Hampshire, she continued their
correspondence. After they had exchanged about twenty-five letters, Joyce finally got the nerve to go through with what she had probably been thinking about for some time. She went to Cornish to
see Salinger.

Then, instead of returning to Yale for her sophomore year, she moved in with Salinger. “Her father was furious,” says a friend of the Maynard family, “not only because she was
living with J. D. Salinger but, on a more practical level, because she had dropped out of college. Her father always thought she had the potential to write literature. He didn’t want her to
sell out.” No doubt Joyce must have felt she
was
fulfilling her father’s dreams, for during the fall and on into the winter, while she lived with Salinger, who worked regularly
on writing he did not intend to publish, she labored over a memoir called
Looking Back,
a book based on her
New York Times Magazine
cover story. One highlight of the long bitter
winter was the trip she and Salinger made into Manhattan one day when Salinger bought her a black cashmere coat and then took her to lunch at the Algonquin Hotel to meet his friends William Shawn
and Lillian Ross.

Mostly, Maynard and Salinger stayed in Cornish and wrote. When they were not working, Maynard puttered around the house, which she later described as being furnished in a
“pedestrian” fashion, and Salinger lectured her on the advantages of Zen Buddhism and homeopathic medicine. One activity the couple did not engage in was a conventional sex life. As
Maynard later revealed, she was unable to have vaginal intercourse with Salinger, either because of physical or psychological reasons or both. They did have oral sex, with Maynard being the one to
satisfy Salinger, who appears to have been content with this sexual arrangement.

In the months they were together that fall and winter in New Hampshire, the one subject they could
not
agree on was whether or not they would have children. One of Maynard’s life
ambitions was to have a family, but Salinger made it clear he had no intentions of having any more children.

This issue became a source of contention. Finally, in the late spring, when the couple traveled to Florida on a vacation, the conflict reached a breaking point. One day, they were lounging on
the beach when Maynard gave Salinger an ultimatum. She wanted to have a baby—or else. With this, Salinger gave her his own unqualified answer. If that’s what she wanted, then their
relationship was over. When they got back to Cornish, she should move her things out. It was at this point, as Maynard later described it, that she stood up from the beach, brushed the sand off her
arms and legs, and left. Her affair with Salinger was over. It had lasted ten months.

1

By 1973, Salinger had become such a part of the literary landscape in America that when
Esquire
published an unsigned story entitled
“For Rupert—With No Regrets,” which contained numerous echoes of Salinger’s work, intense speculation broke out in literary circles—even in the public at
large—that Salinger had written the story, or that some other author had written it with the intention of making it appear as if Salinger had. Few readers guessed who the author actually
was.

“Lee Eisenberg, a young man for whom I imagined a great future, became editor of
Esquire,
” says Gordon Lish, the magazine’s fiction editor at the time. “Lee was
under enormous pressure from the owners, who wanted to kill the magazine because it was selling so poorly on the newsstands. So one day Lee asked me if I had any stunt we could pull to boost
newsstand sales. This was the days of my considerable drinking. Many days I’d drink a bottle, sometimes two. I remember
being really boozed up when this discussion
took place. I also remember saying in a drifty way that I’d go home and try something but that he must never tell anyone I was behind it. Then I went home, quite drunk, and, within the space
of two hours, I wrote ‘For Rupert—With No Regrets.’ I brought it in the next day and gave it to Eisenberg on the guarantee that my authorship should never be revealed. When we ran
it in the magazine, which we did right away, there was no signature on the story. There was just a statement that the story had come in over the transom unsigned and it didn’t matter where it
came from.”