The recent PBS documentary seems to criticize J.D. Salinger for preferring the company of young women.
These women were of age or were chaperoned, and eagerly sought his companionship. In the documentary Joyce Maynard expressed that she felt she was exploited by Salinger. Her mother even encouraged the relationship, sewing her a "sexy short dress" (her words) to wear to their first meeting. Maynard wrote a kiss-and-tell betrayal memoir and auctioned Salinger's love letters. The evidence suggests she was a highly ambitious, if not vindictive, young writer who expected to profit from a relationship with a well-known older writer. Maynard continues to benefit from her former relationship with Salinger by granting interviews on the topic to promote her writing. You can't Google "Salinger" without her name scrolling to page one.
Maynard portrayed Salinger as a despicable man who preyed on young girls. Her allegations played on public sympathies and cast a shadow over a highly respected writer's reputation. Salinger's silence can be seen not as gentlemanly conduct but a sign of guilt. The shadow has grown over the years as Maynard's repeated version of their relationship went unrebutted by Salinger himself, though not unchallenged by a few third parties. There is always more than one side to a story.
Just as there can be despicable men, there can also be misguided young women who prey on insecure older men and play the victim to avoid scrutiny. Such crimes don't leave many tracks, so the evidence is often circumstantial. You have to do some digging and connect the dots. (More on this below.)
History has shown that the title of Victim doesn't wear well with young women like Monica Lewinsky and Joyce Maynard who of their own volition court relationships with famous older men and cry "foul" when things don't go their way. Joyce received many letters from admiring male fans when her face appeared on that magazine cover; yet it was Salinger she chose to pursue. Who exploited whom?
That Maynard and Lewinsky may have been swept away starry-eyed or encouraged by their mothers may help explain, but not excuse, their behavior. They were past the age of consent and no one twisted their arms.People who at eighteen years of age are adult enough to fight in wars, purchase alcohol and vote, should be adult enough to take the consequences of poor relationship choices without the "poor me" pose.
An eighteen-year-old boy in similar circumstances with a fifty-five year-old Cher Bono would be laughed out of town if he complained, and girls mature more rapidly than boys. Why is Maynard begging for and getting so much sympathy? Welder's goggles are needed against the glare of that double standard. Another glaring example is The Summer of 42, a '70s feature film and novella about a fifteen-year-old boy seduced by a beautiful young war widow played by Jennifer O'Neill. The novel was a best-seller and the film a "blockbuster" success. Harold and Maude is another highly popular mid-'70s film with an older woman opposite a teenage boy. The lack of outrage toward older women having sex with underage boys reflects a societal bias toward young women that Maynard is exploiting.
She talks about an imbalance of power, pointing to their chronological (emotional maturity is addressed below) age difference. Nothing prevented her or her mother from doing that arithmetic when she was eighteen. Maynard put on her sexy dress and made a beeline for Salinger's bed having weighed their age difference against some potential gain from a relationship with a handsome, successful, famous man.
Over the strident objections of her father, eighteen-year-old Oona O'Neill--Salinger's earlier love--married millionaire moviemaker Charlie Chaplin, a man thirty-six years her senior. Despite the odds, it was a marriage that worked. The risks paid off on both sides. Where is the outrage over that imbalanced union?
Maynard wants us to believe that she wrote her tell-all and auctioned Salinger's love letters to pay for her kid's college, and revenge had nothing to do with it. She didn't keep a sex-stained dress; she kept the intimate feelings he poured onto paper on her behalf, let them age like a fine merlot, then sold them to the highest bidder. Whatever you choose to believe, she cashed in on a bet she made when she was eighteen. Some people will respect her for that. Others will not.
Maynard said Salinger summarily dismissed her because she wanted children and he did not. Other sources say she had given out his phone number to agents and editors while marketing her work. Later--as did Martha Gellhorn and James Michener--Maynard adopted children and then handed them off to someone else to raise. There are elements here of half-truth, impulsiveness and ambition. Self-promotion is a messy process and can be embarrassingly self-revealing.
Despite his privileged origins, J.D. Salinger earned his respect the hard way, with talent and hard work and by risking his life with honorable military combat in some of the most difficult battles Americans ever fought. He sidestepped a wartime draft deferment to get into the Army and courageously volunteered to return and hunt Nazis after recovering from a nervous collapse. The blood, sweat and terror of his honorable service surges through his writing like steroids. I wonder if Maynard considered Salinger's record versus hers when she wrote her tell-all.
If anyone in this paring is due sympathy it is Jerry Salinger. Emotional maturity matters in a relationship, and there is ample evidence that he was fragile. He was socially withdrawn. He was born with one testicle, a deformity that made him extremely self-conscious and insecure in intimate settings. An inexperienced woman would be less likely to discover his freakishness and ruin the moment by laughing, or screaming. Salinger spent months in a mental ward recovering from battle fatigue. Could Maynard have sensed his fragility and sought to exploit it? She certainly knew there was no risk of him going public with his embarrassing deformity to defend his predilection toward young women.
On the other hand, where was Maynard on the scale of emotional maturity? She could have been emotionally much younger than her chronological age. Was it then a case of child-on-child mutual exploitation? It's an unanswerable question that must be considered and demands that we not judge too harshly either party.
Some men have a certain gullibility with women. Was not Salinger's demonstrated when Oona married Chaplin without so much as phone call or a "Dear John" letter to the man in uniform she had professed to love? And again later, when Salinger was a Nazi hunter in Army Intelligence and was fooled into marrying a Nazi? Insecure and devious women are drawn to powerful men they sense to be vulnerable, a profile Salinger fits.
Maybe the clincher in this lopsided romantic mystery lies between the covers of The Catcher in the Rye. Maynard wants us to see Salinger as Stradlater, Holden's sexually aggressive roommate. But as we all know, Holden, heroically fought Stradlater to protect Jane. "What a technique that guy [Stradlater] had. ...I damn near puked listening to him. His date kept saying, 'No--please. Please, don't. Please.' But old Stradlater kept snowing her in his Abraham Lincoln, sincere voice, and finally there'd be this silence in the back of the car." Does Holden, J.D.'s doppelganger, sound like a predator or a protector? There are a dozen similar instances in which Salinger, through Holden, displays a fundamentally compassionate nature incongruent with someone prone toward child exploitation.
Maynard, by contrast, has clearly demonstrated exploitation--by giving out Salinger's telephone number, by writing a tell-all memoir and auctioning love letters, by granting interviews and writing articles about their relationship to gain publicity and by playing on public sympathies toward young women to justify her exploitation of a socially withdrawn aging writer. However she tries to camouflage it, Maynard's behavior is like something from the pages of Seventeen, a magazine that to this day features revenge as a tonic for the fragile egos of jilted teenage girls.
Maynard accuses Salinger of being "seductive with words and ideas" yet her own words betray her own intent to manipulate and play to readers' sympathies. In her New York Times Sunday Magazine article, September, 2013, "Was Salinger Too Pure for This World?" she writes: "...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?" [emphasis added] So, if a girl ends a relationship she's just moving on, but if a guy does it it's "crushing" a "poor girl's heart." Maynard's gender bias and pandering for sympathy ripples throughout her article. She accuses, interprets and judges, lulling the unwary reader into nodding in agreement.
Compare Joyce Maynard with the tragic case of Natalie Wood, a true example of childhood exploitation. At age sixteen while filming Rebel Without a Cause, she carried on concurrent affairs with fellow actor Dennis Hopper and the film's director, Nicholas Ray. Hopper and Ray should have been dragged before a judge and Natalie's parents cited for neglect. Her tortured life and tragic death can be attributed to childhood exploitation, but for Maynard to cast J.D. Salinger in a similar category with Hopper and Ray is unjust and vicious.
Maynard may have been too emotionally immature at age eighteen to have a relationship with Salinger or anyone else, and maybe it took a few months for him to figure that out. But Salinger should not be scapegoated for the inadequacies of her parents.
J.D. Salinger is gone. We will never know his side of it, but I am inclined to be wary of someone who would publicly disparage a former lover she knew could not or would not stand up for himself, and then, with all the sympathy of a pit viper for a field mouse, auction his love letters without a word of apology. At a minimum, we know there is a lot more to the story than Maynard let on. And the more she tries to justify her actions, the worse she looks.
Women don't make themselves strong by playing victim. The young Joyce Maynard rolled the relationship dice and came up snake-eyes. We've all done that, and most of us move on and lick our wounds in silence. Choices have consequences.
Victim or viper, Maynard will go down in history as a whiner unless she writes something truly worthy of notice. She has a lot going for her; I hope she does. It takes courage to admit mistakes. What it comes down to is whether she wants to be known as a writer or as a girl dumped by a famous writer a half-century ago.
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