Maynard vs Salinger: Another Side to the Story

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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Codependent Holden Caulfield

A classic codependent is someone so emotionally entwined with an addict that she cannot extract herself from the chaos of his drug-induced lifestyle. His addictive erratic behavior harms not only himself, but her and others indirectly. Another type of codependent is someone whose life spins out of control because they are drawn irresistibly to the neediness of others, as seems to be the case with The Catcher in the Rye 's Holden Caulfield.

A close reading reveals ten instances in which Holden goes out on a limb for someone. The first is when he takes a swing at his prep school roommate, Stradlater, because he sees him as a sexual predator to Jane Gallagher, a vulnerable girl whom he knows well. Here are Holden's thoughts after he has been knocked flat and had his nose bloodied by the large and stronger athlete: "I just kept laying there on Ely's bed, thinking about Jane and all. It just drove me stark staring mad when I thought about her and Stradlater parked somewhere in that fat-assed Ed Banky's car. Every time I thought about it, I felt like jumping out the window. The thing is, you didn't know Stradlater. I knew him. Most guys at Pency just talked about having sexual intercourse with girls all the time--like Ackley, for instance-- but old Stradlater really did it. I was personally acquainted with at least two girls he gave the time to. That's the truth. ... I kept laying there in the dark anyway, though, trying not to think about old Jane and Stradlater in that goddam Ed Banky's car. But it was almost impossible. The trouble was, I knew that guy Stradlater's technique. ...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." 

In the next instance, Holden lies consolingly to Mr. Spencer so this aging History teacher will not feel bad about flunking him: "I told him I was a real Moron, and all that stuff. I told him how I would have done exactly the same thing if I'd been in his place, and how most people didn't appreciate how tough it is being a teacher. That kind of stuff. The old bull. ...'Look, sir. Don't worry about me,' I said. 'I mean it. I'll be all right. I'm just going through a phase right now. Everybody goes through phases and all, don't they?'
'I don't know boy. I don't know.'
I hate it when somebody answers that way. 'Sure. Sure, they do,' I said. 'I mean it, sir. Please don't worry about me.'"

Next, on a night train to the City Holden runs into to classmate Ernest Morrow's mother and concocts an elaborate lie about Ernest's friends wanting him to run for Class President. Holden's intent is to make her feel better about her horse's ass of a son: "'Ernest's father and I sometimes worry about him," she said. ..."He's a very sensitive boy. He's never really been a terribly good mixer with other boys. ...'
Sensitive. That killed me. That guy Morrow was about as sensitive as a goddam toilet seat.
I gave her a good look. She didn't look like any dope to me. She looked like she might have a pretty damn good idea what a bastard  she was the mother of. ...Mothers are all slightly insane. The thing is though, I liked old Morrow's mother. She was all right.
...'Old Ernie,' I said. 'He's one of the most popular boys at Pency. Did you know that?'
'No, I didn't.'
...I had her glued to her seat. You take somebody's mother, all they want to hear about is what a hot-shot their son is.
...'Did he tell you about the elections?" I asked her. 'The class elections?'
She shook her head. I had her in a trance , like. I really did.
'Well, a bunch of us wanted Ernie to be president of the class. I mean, he was the unanimous choice.'"

Holden next tells about playing checkers with Jane Gallagher when she became upset over a confrontation with her stepfather, and Holden overreacted. He describes his actions as almost involuntary: "Then all of a sudden, this tear plopped down on the checkerboard. On one of the red squares--boy, I can still see it. She just rubbed it into the board with her finger. I don't know why, but it bothered hell out of me. So what I did was, I went over and made her move over on the glider so that I could sit down next to her--I practically sat down in her lap, as a matter of fact. Then she really started to cry, and the next thing I knew, I was kissing her all over--anywhere--her eyes, her nose, her forehead, her eyebrows and all, her ears--her whole face except her mouth and all. She sort of wouldn't let me get to her mouth. Anyway, it was the closest we ever got to necking."

In a nightclub later Holden tells a group of tourist women from Seattle that they just missed Gary Cooper. It's a lie he tells so they will have something interesting to report back home. Holden even worries about the welfare of animals, repeatedly expressing concern over how the ducks in Central Park get by during winter. Holden offers some nuns an over-sized donation, which they gracefully turn down. He even changes his mind about having sex with the prostitute, Sunny, whom he sees as too young. They talk instead, even though she had taken off her dress.

The ninth example of Holden's codependent drive to help and protect others is when he confesses to his younger sister Phoebe what he wants to do with his life--to be a "Catcher in the Rye" and protect children from going over an imaginary cliff. Near the end of the book, Holden sits in the rain in his red "people-hunting" cap while he watches Phoebe ride the carousel. "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" is playing in the background. The depth of his emotion shows how strongly he feels about seeing her safe and happy: "My hunting hat gave me quite a lot of protection, in a way, but I got soaked, anyway. I didn't care though. I felt so happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn  happy, if you want to know the truth. ...It was just that she looked so nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all."

It could be said that Holden is just a caring, kind person and these are all just examples of his compassionate nature. But if that were so, it wouldn't have put him in a mental hospital.

On the contrary, a case can be made that Holden became  hypersensitized by the death from leukemia of his little brother, Ailee. The suicide of Holden's classmate James Castle deepened that sensitivity. Holden's unresolved grief sabotages his life, rendering him unable to function normally. He is highly intelligent, but he can't concentrate and repeatedly flunks out  or drops out of school. Everywhere he turns he sees something wrong, making him anxious, confused, lonely. He cries and has feelings of bleeding from the gut. To make sense of his chaotic state of mind, he overreacts to everyday events, like meeting Earnest Morrow's mother on the train and concocting that elaborate lie.

Unresolved grief can be complicated and debilitating as we obsess over our relationship with the loved one who  died. Guilt can arise over something we said or did or failed to apologize for to someone whose dearness we may never have acknowledged.

When we are emotionally intimate with someone over a period of years the shared experiences and feelings become a part of our identity, anchoring us in the swirl of life. The sudden loss of these identity reference points can shake us to our knees, and it can take a long time to recover--years. Codependency can be a coping mechanism whereby we mimic with strangers a ritual cascade of apologies for our imagined inadequacies toward the person we lost. On the outside we seem normal, but inside our skin we writhe in pain from an invisible unnamed source.

Compassion may be the highest human value, but some people get hooked on it like a drug. Codependency is the clinician's label for being too human, so attuned to others' pain that we spin out of orbit as our own needs go unattended.

The measure of Holden's emotional investment in Ailee and James Castle is the level of chaos in his life that surfaced in the wake of their passing. Like a junkie, Holden craved the good feelings that came when he did something that relieved or prevented suffering. It gave him a sense of control over his chaotic life and made his bad feelings go away for a while. But it was never enough. And we are left wondering whether Holden will spend the rest of his life playing God and trying to fix the world instead of taking care of himself.

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The Effect of Salinger's Combat Experience on His Writing

In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield's unrealistic concern for "little kids" resonates with the classic layman's definition of a codependent personality--someone whose life is spinning out of control out of concern for someone with a substance abuse problem.* Holden's codependency is addressed in a separate posting, but it is worth noting here that Holden, as a doppelganger for Salinger, can reflect the author's emotional state. Codependency, the compulsion to rescue others, can be the result of having seen so many men shot, killed, wounded and maimed and the Dachau concentration camp's emaciated bodies among the smell of burning flesh.

Salinger's war experience may account for the rambling structure and overall content of The Catcher in the Rye, as the book was worked on during endless months of combat overseas. Thoughts and memories of home gave the mind relief from the blood, chaos and gore and had a lot to do with Salinger's exquisite loving attention to these details of setting and character. I suspect it kept him from going mad sooner than he did.

He was once seen typing away under a desk while his unit was under fire. Everyone else had taken cover.

It has been widely expressed that Salinger was suffering from PTSD caused by combat trauma. It is logical that an extreme need to protect the innocent could arise from witnessing over a period of years the massive destruction of humanity. Holden could represent an expression of this distorted hyper-sensitivity for the welfare of the innocent. Holden could have been a healthy way to channel and defuse overwhelming emotions, expressing a self-destructive compulsion by creating a character to act out and resolve it.

*[Wikipedia]"Codependency is defined as a psychological condition or a relationship in which a person is controlled or manipulated by another who is affected with a pathological condition (typically narcissism or drug addiction); and in broader terms, it refers to the dependence on the needs of, or control of, another.[1] It also often involves placing a lower priority on one's own needs, while being excessively preoccupied with the needs of others.[2] Codependency can occur in any type of relationship, including family, work, friendship, and also romantic, peer or community relationships.[2] Codependency may also be characterized by denial, low self-esteem, excessive compliance, or control patterns.[2] Narcissists are considered to be natural magnets for the codependent."I also STRONGLY suspect that a major factor in the rambling structure and overall content of CiTR is that it was largely written while overseas during wartime. This had a lot to do with Salinger's exquisite loving attention to the details of setting and character. That he cherished his memories of home is clearly evident in the richness of this content.

Misjudging Mr. Antolini (from The Catcher in the Rye)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R66eQL..."

I just watched a John Green video (see link above) interpreting The Catcher in the Rye. It has some pretty good analysis. A little on the frenetic side, but decent overall given how much is wedged into the narrow timeframe.

But I've got an issue with describing the apartment scene with Mr. Antolini as a sexual come-on. It's irritating to think that a man can't pat a kid on the head without having it blown out of proportion. A woman can stroke a boy's hair and it's fine. But let a man breathe on a kid and the world comes down on him. That's rotten. Men care about children, and they can be just as loving and nurturing as a woman. More than many that I've seen, short of breast feeding, and plenty of women don't breastfeed.

I think Holden's reaction was way over the top. We know how unreliable he is.

In that scene, Holden pushed away the only person who had recognized his panic, who expressed empathy and concern and gave him great advice and a place to crash.

Remember, it was Antolini who was there when James Castle committed suicide at another prep school Holden attended before Pencey. Antolini covered the bloody corpse with his coat and carried it away, proof that he was a compassionate man. Patting Holden on the head is hardly a gay pass when he knew Holden as well as he did. Like a doofus, Holden overreacts and leaves.

What I'm saying to the guy who made the video is: don't blame Antolini for Holden's touchiness.

Nevertheless, Holden took it the way he did and rejected a valid and valuable adult source of solace and consolation, not to mention world class advice. There's a lesson in this: Sometimes we misinterpret good intentions out of mistrust and are the worse for it.

The teenage years are when we begin questioning or rejecting our parents' world view and look for answers outside the family and extended family circle of comfort and trust. They've lied to us about Santa Claus and the Boogey Man; what else have they been lying about? We've begun noticing their flaws and started looking elsewhere for answers. We want to be prepared for life, for making our own decisions. The hypocrisy (phoniness) within our formerly godlike inner circle of family has discredited them. Who can we trust? Where are the answers?

And so we pick up books like Lord of the Flies, Dianetics,  Atlas Shrugged and Hunger Games.

This teenage crisis period of searching is brilliantly rendered by Salinger in the character of Holden Caulfield.

Flash forward in the novel to where Holden is in the rest home, reflecting on Antolini's quote of Wilhelm Stekel, The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one. Holden kept Antolini's handwritten quote.  It's doubtful that he would have kept it if he hadn't resolved his concerns about Antolini.

So what if someone is gay? That doesn't mean he/she's a pedophile or that you can't trust what he/she says. Crapolla! Holden would say.  One of my best teachers was overtly effeminate and he never made a pass at anyone that I'm aware of.

I like to think that Salinger would be a lot like Mr. Antolini.

First Thoughts About Blogging Salinger

 I became a slow and reluctant fan of JD Salinger after first reading The Catcher in the Rye in college, 1964. I was intrigued by the writing but not the spoiled intellectual Holden. I read Franny and Zooey and Nine Stories and still nothing really zinged but the writing quality. Then fifty years later I reread Catcher and was impressed by the novel's concentrated depth and emotional punch. Zing! It was clear Salinger and I had something in common other than PTSD in how to view the world.

I have engaged extensively in discussions on Salinger's life and publications at Goodreads.com. Some of them will be posted here along with new insights and questions. I want to know more, and will make available what I learn.

I hope you do the same. Feel free to comment. Share your thoughts. What have you learned? What do you want to know? Perhaps together we can discover some useful knowledge about writing. And about life.

What I post here will sometimes seem like I am defending JD Salinger, but my main interest is to understand him and through him his writing. Salinger would not like that, for he stated more than once that what matters is what is on the page and only that. I agree, but not entirely. Insights about someone's work are contaminated by the life experience of each reader and cause confusion Knowing something about the author can prevent some of this.

People who suffer from traumatic nervous illness often are permanently impaired. I say this as one who has PTSD from years of childhood trauma that included torture and beatings in addition to serial abandonment and severe neglect. I have had years of therapy and medication. For me to be functioning at all in society is a small miracle. I raised two daughters in a dysfunctional marriage, sticking with it for nearly twenty years before the plug was pulled on me. I wasn't a rotten father, but I fell short of my own ideals due to a late life nervous breakdown. Both girls, young women now, are doing well in life despite my shortcomings and we have good relationships. 

The personal experience provided here is part of my credentials to speak on the subject of PTSD. I am not professionally trained but I know about the subject from having lived it nearly all my life and from having read books, gone to workshops and through informed observation of those I know and have known personally who were traumatized, some in my presence.

Let us be clear; there is trauma and there is TRAUMA. The simplest and easiest to treat form of PTSD arises from a single event. The most difficult form to treat is serial trauma, like in combat, month after month, year after year. The consequences of that are impossible to erase, but they can be mitigated to varying degrees depending on the quality and length of treatment.

I do not know how much counseling Salinger had after the war, but he would have found it frustratingly difficult to find a therapist who could keep up with him intellectually. How does one trust even a therapist with the horrors? Because once they are "out there" they can hurt again, re-traumatizing the patient. Salinger's writing may have indeed been his therapy. It has been extremely effective for me, but having a capable therapist was invaluable as well.

Salinger had a limited relationship with his kids. He provided well for them. He was physically on the premises even if he locked himself away for long periods. He was an imperfect father, but he didn't abandon them entirely.

People will fault Salinger for breaking off his relationship with Joyce Maynard over whether to have more children. Couples often break up over children. Better that than to bring an unwanted child into the world. To this I can attest from having lived in an orphanage with dozens of examples.

Having children is an issue that should be discussed early in a relationship. I don't fault him for stepping up and making that difficult decision. He probably informed her the very minute he made it, which is admirable. It allowed her to get on with her life sooner, despite the pain she seems to continue to struggle with, judging from her interviews and writings. My sympathies to her and to anyone negatively affected by secondhand PTSD.

It is important to be mindful that people like JD Salinger experience the traumatic consequences of going to war so that others don't have to and to protect and preserve the way of life we value highly. There are long term consequences of this heroism, to the combatant and to those around them.