Salinger (37 page)

Her name, of course, was Joyce Maynard, and she had traveled to Cornish from her home in Marin County, California, where she had bought a house with the money she made from selling the film
rights to her novel
To Die For,
the Gus Van Sant picture starring Nicole Kidman, after she had lived most of her life in her native New Hampshire. Maynard had come
to see Salinger for a very specific reason. After not discussing their affair for years, she had decided she was going to write about it in a memoir. Actually, over the last few years, Maynard, who
had come to view “openness” with nothing short of a pathological zeal, had not been
completely
silent about her connection to Salinger. In 1992, she discussed it with the
Toronto Star.
“I have nothing to hide,” she told the
Star
reporter. “Jerry is a very private person, as I’m sure you’re aware. And I will always
respect his privacy. I made that promise a long time ago. However, I do have ownership of our shared past. And yes, I can say I was permanently changed by the relationship. He was as much a force
in my life as any person I’ve known. After I left, it seemed like I’d been in
Lost Horizon.
There was no place on earth for me to go.” Then, as late as only days before
she made her trip to Cornish, Maynard had discussed Salinger with the
Sacramento Bee.
“I was giving a speech one time,” Maynard recalled, “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.’”

Maybe not, but at some point in 1997, she decided to disregard Salinger’s desire for privacy and write a book documenting their affair. So Maynard had to rush to New Hampshire to try to
get a meeting with Salinger—which would be the concluding scene of her memoir—before word of her proposed book leaked out into Manhattan’s small, gossip-hungry publishing
community.

When word did leak out, only days after her trip to Cornish, the prospect of Maynard writing her memoir at the expense of the reclusive Salinger was enough to spark a
heated debate within literary and publishing circles. The
San Francisco Chronicle
accused Maynard of having “no sense of shame”; the
New York Post
agreed, calling her
“shameless.” Soon the debate spilled over into Maynard’s Internet chat room. One fan charged Salinger with being “a pedophile,” while another believed Maynard
“had every right to want the relationship, as is normal for an eighteen-year-old, physically mature woman” since “she was sufficiently mature . . . to make an ‘adult’
decision.” Finally, when one Internet user accused her of exploiting Salinger, Maynard herself weighed in. “And I wonder,” she wrote, obviously angry, “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?”

On her Web site she provided a few more details. “Last time I saw him, I was a frightened and crushed girl . . . and he was, to me, the most powerful man in the world. . . . He told me I
was unworthy. But when I stood on his doorstep the other day, I was a strong and brave forty-four-year-old woman and I knew he had been wrong.”

Their exchange that day was unpleasant. Salinger said she had never written anything worthwhile. Maynard accused him of taking
advantage of her when she was young and
impressionable. Once she left, with Salinger shouting after her that
he didn’t even know who she was,
she was consumed by a haunting feeling. One night, years earlier, she was at a
dinner party in Manhattan when she met a writer who told her about her former au pair girl who had had some sort of relationship with J. D. Salinger. She was young. She was beautiful. She had met
Salinger by chance and they had started writing to one another. The writer was fascinated, of course, since the girl had ended up with a cache of letters from Salinger—letters, Maynard
realized that night in Manhattan, not unlike the ones he had written to her. Over time, Maynard became obsessed with the girl. She found people who knew her. She even got hold of a picture of her.
Today, even though she didn’t acknowledge it in any way when it happened, Maynard had finally met her. She had opened the door for her when she knocked—Colleen.

Over the years, there would be much speculation about why Salinger has decided to live his life the way he has. “I would not assign any high-minded reason to it,”
says Gordon Lish. “The man probably initially lost his nerve and then he got in the habit of being quiet. One gets fixed in a position for no reason at all. I don’t think there’s
some kind of transcendent statement to be derived. My sources tell me that he did not take criticism well. They tell me he was much wounded by critics lighting out after him. It suited him to keep
his distance and he felt unduly assailed.” Russell Hoban agrees, although he does question the healthiness of Salinger’s situation. “He began to write for himself and not for
others,” Hoban says. “Good work can’t have meaning for only the writer. He lost the ability to make the judgment of what is interesting to others—and not just to himself.
What he’s doing now is not life-affirming in any way. The
whole thing seems very unwholesome. In fact, it seems to me he lives in a state of resentment for reasons I
don’t know. He doesn’t have what he wants and I’m not sure what it is. Maybe he didn’t get the kind of recognition he wanted. He became famous, but that’s different,
isn’t it?”

On the issue of Salinger’s secrecy, George Plimpton believes that “Salinger finally ran out of things to write about and so he just stopped.” “Capote stopped,”
Plimpton says. “Harper Lee stopped. Margaret Mitchell stopped. If you’re not a recluse people say, What are you doing now? What are you doing next? It’s a constant problem with
agents and friends.”

In popular legend, Salinger writes on and on, churning out story after story written only for himself. In the spring of 1999, for example, the Associated Press reported an interview with a
Salinger neighbor who said that in 1978 Salinger told him he had written fifteen or sixteen unpublished novels that he kept in a safe in his house. There was no evidence to support the neighbors
story. But no matter what Salinger has written over the last three and a half decades, he did stop publishing, it seems now, for good.

Did Salinger stop publishing because he lost his nerve? Did he stop because he discovered he could not deliver the fiction he had promised his readers? Did his writing become so inward it lost
touch with the real world, making it dull and unpublishable? And why did he go into seclusion? Was he sincere in his desire to be left alone? Was it a publicity stunt? Or could it be that,
overriding everything else, he sought and protected his privacy because he had a penchant for young
women that he did not want to reveal to the public? After all, a recluse
can live out his fantasies and obsessions without too many people knowing about them—for a while at least. Now as he lives his final years in the house on the hill in Cornish, who’s
with him in his world besides Colleen? Many people, actually—real and imagined. There’s Franny and Oona and the Girl with No Waist and Betty Eppes and Phoebe and Joyce and Esmé
and Claire and Seymour and Whit and Zooey and Sylvia and the young girl in Vienna. And Holden, of course. Always Holden.

A SIGHTING

TWO BIOGRAPHIES

SONNY