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Meow! >> Critiquing the catfight over Joyce Maynard's biography by JULIET WATERS
Jealousy is one of the most common professional hazards of the writing life. So, after her freakish, early success, and after receiving the attention and love of a writer famous for rejecting the attention and love of the legions of teenagers whose lives were changed by Catcher in the Rye, it's not surprising that Maynard's suffering at the hands of J.D. Salinger isn't getting much sympathy from reviewers of her memoir of the affair. But 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, which casually dismisses the emotional and sexual abuse Maynard suffered from her parents with the claim that this pales compared to the sin of having "led their daughter to believe that she, and everything she says or writes, is of supreme interest." Last month, Maynard was ripped apart by Larissa McFraquhar in, ironically, the New York Times Magazine, for being nothing more than a middle-aged mother and a hack trying to make a few bucks off the affair. Last week, Susan Delacourt and Elizabeth Renzetti sparred off in the Globe and Mail over whether Maynard is more guilty of being small-minded and narcissistic or pathetic and facile. Sure, there are some good reasons to take a few swipes at Maynard. Her portrait of her teenage relationship with the 53-year-old Salinger, which is the main selling point of the book, is disappointing, trite, irritating and martyrish. Nevertheless, it's believable. He pursues her, sets himself up as a mentor, gets all romantic and attempts but can't consummate a sexual relationship with her. Then, when she makes the kind of mistake one should have expected from a 19-year-old aspiring journalist--she tells a friend where Salinger lives--he dumps her immediately, painfully, refusing to ever speak to her again. I think the ungenerous reaction to Maynard's book is more of a jealous writer's thing than a feminism thing. However, it is an example of the full swing that feminism has made from p.c. paranoia to a ball-scratching, "we're just one of the boys" attitude. Twenty years ago, Salinger would have been lynched for his callous treatment of Maynard. Five years ago, he would have been at least burned in print. Now, this story is greeted with, "Ya, so what's her point?" But, while I'm glad that feminism is acknowledging the legal and moral right of a 53-year-old man to fall in love with a 19-year-old woman, we're overlooking a different kind of betrayal. The betrayal of a 19-year-old writer by a 53-year-old writer, of a protégée by a mentor. Even if Salinger had never even kissed her, that betrayal alone is cruel and devastating and deserves to be commented on. Perhaps Maynard doesn't deserve the pity that she's seeking, but neither does she deserve to have her eyes scratched out. And Salinger, frankly, doesn't deserve to be fought over. At Home in the World by Joyce Maynard, Picador, hc, 352 pp, $33.99
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In the spring of 1972, Joyce Maynard, a freshman at Yale, wrote an attention-grabbing article in the New York Times Magazine called, "An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life." At 19, she got a job as an apprentice editorial writer at the Times. She followed that with a book contract and a $20,000 advance for her autobiography, and also appeared in Vogue for a feature on young upcoming minds. The only thing she failed at was auditioning for the part of Regan in The Exorcist, which she lost to Linda Blair. And finally, she was approached and seduced by icon and famous recluse J.D. Salinger.