The Fame Lunches

by Daphne Merkin

  GLASS HOUSE

  (J. D. SALINGER AND JOYCE MAYNARD)

  1998

  I remember the first time I came upon Joyce Maynard. It was a Sunday morning—late morning, no doubt, because I hated getting up. I sat down at my parents’ dining-room table, blearily pulled the Times Magazine toward me, and there she was: a small-boned young woman with enormous eyes, dark bangs, and a pixie charm that practically tap-danced off the page. She was eighteen years old, not much older than I was, but she looked younger. She looked, in fact, like a nymphet with soul, an Ivy League Lolita, sitting cross-legged on the cover, dressed in blue jeans and sneakers, an oversize watch drooping from her slender wrist. While I’d been sleeping late, Maynard, a Yale freshman, had been busy, summing up her generation in a lengthy essay called, majestically, “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life.” She had caught the attention of the world by mouthing off like a Wise Child, a teenager who could explain her less articulate peers to adults, and in a way that would leave them smiling.

  Among the many people who noticed Maynard that day—April 23, 1972—was someone who could be considered the reigning authority on precocity, J. D. Salinger. Salinger was, of course, almost as famous for his disappearance from the stage of life as for his fiction; he had moved to Cornish, New Hampshire (population one thousand), in 1953, a year and a half after the publication of The Catcher in the Rye. In 1965, after publishing three more books, he appeared in print for the last time. Indeed, it was hard to imagine him picking up something as prosaic as the Sunday Magazine; one thought of him as more removed than that, communing with the birds and a favored few, like William Shawn.

  I remember hearing sometime later that Maynard and Salinger had become involved: it seemed almost ghastly in its unlikeliness, the venerated hermit of the hills taking up with the cultural pinup girl of the moment. But this coming together of two generational mascots also made a kind of sense—the one forbidding and soured on mankind, the other chirpy and fresh-faced. (“I’m basically an optimist,” Maynard had written.) Salinger, it seemed, had been hiding behind a one-way mirror: although he had resolutely cut himself off from his readers, when he wanted to communicate he had only to reach out a long arm from his rural hideaway and beckon to whoever caught his fancy. There was, too, the thirty-five-year difference in the couple’s ages—that faint whiff of pedophilia. This was a writer whose greatest lyricism was saved for the subject of young girls, whose Seymour Glass, in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” had given a tender goodbye kiss to the arch of a little girl’s foot before going back to his hotel room to kill himself. However you looked at it, though, Joyce Maynard was living out the fantasy of ambitious, neophyte female writers everywhere: to be taken under the wing of a Famous Older Male Writer.

  And then, just as precipitously, the affair was rumored to be over. In the years that followed, with rare exceptions, Salinger maintained an unbroken silence, while Maynard went on to clamorously document her life in newspaper columns, magazines, and books. Meanwhile, she championed the rewards of motherhood and domesticity until she got divorced, then wrote about that. She also became an avid self-promoter, setting up a website for her fans before it was de rigeur and marketing a CD of songs she’d listened to while writing one of her novels. I never heard Maynard’s name without thinking of her dazzling leap into Salinger’s arms. How had it happened? And what had gone wrong between them? Their romance seemed almost mythic, like a vine-covered cottage in a fairy tale.

  * * *

  Now, in a flurry of publishing excitement, including a juicy excerpt in Vanity Fair, Maynard has gone public with the details of an affair that has continued to haunt her. In the introduction to her memoir, At Home in the World, she says that she remained “desperately in love” with Salinger: “For more than twenty years I revered a man who would have nothing to do with me … But I put the experience away, just as I’d put away the packet of letters he’d written me.” The obvious question is why Joyce Maynard has unlocked this drawer again after all these years, and the obvious answer is that ours is a culture addicted to exposure, to “outing” ourselves and others. But do we really want to hear that the author of “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” spent time whipping up arcane homeopathic cures for both people and dogs? Or that his diet consisted of frozen Birds Eye Tender Tiny Peas for breakfast and laboriously prepared organic-lamb patties for dinner?

  J. D. Salinger has been the last holdout against guts spilling, and, no matter how fetishistic his position, we’ve come to respect it. Ian Hamilton suggests in his foiled biography, In Search of J. D. Salinger, that there is something disingenuous about his subject’s passion for privacy. It is a gauntlet thrown down—an elaborate game of come and get me. “To what extent,” Hamilton asks, “was Salinger the victim of America’s cultural star system? To what extent its finest flower?” Even so, many of us continue to feel a protectiveness toward Salinger that other writers don’t inspire. His real-life aloofness is directly at odds with his literary gift for intimacy: to read him is to be invited into a magic circle in which your unacknowledged aura of specialness—your genius—has finally been recognized. (It is this same effect of inclusive self-regard, this “terrifying narcissus pool,” as Mary McCarthy called it, that some critics have questioned.)

  Maynard’s pretext for breaking a code of silence that she had repeatedly vowed to honor is the usual one offered in such memoirs: the quest for self-knowledge. “All my life,” she writes, “I had been trying to make sense of my experiences without understanding a crucial piece of my history.” Thus, after hundreds of pages of autobiographical minutiae (her affair with Salinger actually takes up less than half the book), Maynard arrives at the conclusion that it took a relationship with someone as powerful as the fifty-three-year-old writer to help free her from her parents. “It was a terrible, wrenching way to be taken from my home.” Taken from her home? You would think that Maynard was a helpless child, scooped up from playing with her crayons and dragged off to Salinger’s cave, when the plain truth is that she had already separated from her parents in the age-appropriate way that many privileged young adults do—by living in a college dorm. But at this point we’ve grown accustomed to Maynard’s habit of glossing over her own extraordinary force of will and to her slightly hysterical, movie-of-the-week sense of drama.

  Joyce Maynard conceived of herself as destined for great things from the start. She was the younger of two sisters who grew up in an intellectually vibrant household in Durham, New Hampshire. Her father taught eighteenth-century literature and was a passionate amateur painter. Her mother was Jewish, an intense woman who had a doctorate in English. They were doting, albeit problematic, parents. Joyce’s “Daytime Daddy” taught her the crawl and took her on long walks; her “Nighttime Daddy” drank and roamed the house, “red-eyed and ranting.” Joyce’s mother was highly invested in her daughter: she knit a sweater on toothpicks for her daughter’s toy bear and catered to her picky eating habits with special soufflés. But she also cuddled inappropriately: “She may comment on my body,” Maynard writes, “check to see if I have any pubic hair yet, make a joke about my pink, childish nipples.”

  It’s all a bit contradictory, depending, at any given moment, on whether Maynard wants to blame her parents for insulating her from grown-up reality (she claims that her mother never discussed menstruation with her) or for failing to keep their dirty grown-up secrets to themselves. “Who else has a mother,” she demands, “who taught her the meaning of the word ‘cunnilingus’?” Still, her parents’ greatest sin was arguably that they led their daughter to believe that she, as well as everything she said or wrote, was of supreme interest. Witness a notation in the eleven-year-old Joyce’s journal (which she has preserved, along with every other scrap of paper in her life): “I realize now that even Mummy has flaws! I guess truly no one can come into the ‘divine circle’ except me. One is always so alone!”

  * * *

  Maynard’s affair with Salinger must have seemed like a tri
umphant end to her loneliness. A few days after her essay appeared in the Times, she received a letter from him, in which he warned her about the hazards of visibility. She hadn’t read anything he’d written, but “the fact that a famous man has conferred approval on me thrills me.” For the next six weeks or so, their correspondence flew fast and furious. “This half-Jewish business” that they share weighs heavily in her favor, as does her non-intellectuality. He told her that they are “landsmen”—from the same place—and that they’re both lowbrows. “We share a deep affection for Mary Tyler Moore,” Maynard writes, “although we like Carl Reiner a lot, too.” She went to visit him in June, wearing a short, sleeveless A-line shift “printed with ABC’s in bright primary colors” and “purple Mary Jane–style flats.” She and her mother have concocted this fetching “child innocent” outfit, and I assume that its subtext is lost on neither of them.

  Salinger had prepared a pristine lunch of bread, cheese, and nuts, which he set on folding TV tray tables, and the two traded banal confidences. She told him that Joyce was actually her middle name, while he said that he hated his own given name, Jerome: “Sounds like a podiatrist.” For the Fourth of July weekend, Salinger drove to New York City (Maynard had begun a summer job as an apprentice editorial writer at the Times) and brought her back to New Hampshire. They retreated to the bedroom, where Maynard got her first glimpse of a naked man, but then the romantic scenario bogged down. “When we attempt intercourse,” Maynard writes, “the muscles of my vagina simply clamp shut.” Salinger promised to help her, and Maynard, like a terrorized mail-order bride, felt fatally connected to him: “It is my new, terrible secret … The fact that Jerry knows binds me more tightly to him than ever.” Their failure to complete intercourse over the next five days didn’t curb Salinger’s ardor. When he left Maynard off in the city, he told her, “I couldn’t have made up a character of a girl I’d love better than you.” That fall, she dropped out of Yale to move in with him.

  * * *

  Who was it that Salinger saw in Joyce Maynard? Was she the embodiment of Phoebe Caulfield—Holden’s younger sister, a lissome reflection of all he held dear? And what did he see when, less than a year later, he groaned, “How did I let this happen? What have I brought on myself?” It was nine months after their affair began that Salinger abruptly ejected Maynard from his bizarre and exclusive universe, sending her back to snowy New Hampshire to pack up her belongings while he and his two children remained behind on a vacation in Florida. If we are to accept Maynard’s account, much of Salinger’s behavior during the months they lived together was moody and mean: he left her alone in the house while he wrote or pursued his Eastern meditations and kept track of her food consumption in an alarming fashion, icily noting when she had eaten too much of the cheddar cheese he occasionally bought as a treat. She also claims that he taught her how to induce vomiting by sticking a finger down her throat, though it seems odd that a girl who by her own admission was fanatically obsessed with being thin (she weighed eighty-eight pounds when she left Exeter) wouldn’t have resorted to this method before.

  In the end, it’s impossible to know what to believe. Too much of At Home in the World takes the form of reconstructed conversations from more than twenty-five years ago and is narrated in a hazy dream time where past and present blur. Maynard uses this chronological impressionism to plant observations that are clearly meant to lead the jury. She describes how she performed oral sex: “He takes hold of my head then, with surprising firmness, and guides me under the covers … I close my eyes. Tears are streaming down my cheeks. Still, I don’t stop. So long as I keep doing this, I know he will love me.” The subliminal message here is that Maynard was Salinger’s nubile sex slave. But elsewhere she portrays the two of them as a legitimate couple, telling us that they hated to be apart and that they discussed having a child together (an idle plan, since Maynard insists he never managed to penetrate her). Similarly, Maynard writes that after she turned nineteen, she worried, “What if I’m getting too old for him?” This feels like a suspiciously neat emotional flashback, but it’s useful to Maynard’s version (or one of her versions) to imply that a large part of her allure for Salinger was her youth—just in case we’ve forgotten.

  If there is something unsavory about a fifty-three-year-old man’s fascination with an unformed girl, there’s something equally creepy about an unformed girl’s deliberately shaping herself to fit a role, the personification of a recurring motif in Salinger’s imagination. She emulates his writing style (“My letters to him are full of … parenthetical asides, qualifiers, interior debate with myself”) and admits that she presented a tidy version of herself to him—the same eager-to-please version she presented to her parents. She inserts comments that seem designed to appeal to his disdainful, alienated outlook: “There’s so much perversion all around me,” Maynard writes to him, as though they were two elderly monks.

  Maynard appears to suffer from multiple-persona disorder: one minute she is a naïf, lost in the woods, and the next a resilient survivor who rises from the ashes of her affair with Salinger to become a star reporter at The Times. Indeed, her writing career is hardly incidental to this story. I had the eerie sense that Maynard is not simply reproaching Salinger but competing with him as well—the pupil who needs to outshine her teacher. She was always a good student, the kind of girl who applied for all the glittering prizes with a zeal worthy of the young Sylvia Plath: Scholastic contests, assignments for Seventeen, admission to Exeter (where she is a member of the first coed graduating class), the Mademoiselle Guest Editor contest. When she was eight or nine, Maynard wrote to the president of CBS, informing him that she was available to replace Angela Cartwright on Make Room for Daddy. It is possible, in fact, to read her Times Magazine article as an application—a bid—to be loved by the world. The man who responded to it had scant use for the world, but inside Salinger’s misanthropic recluse, we sense, has always lurked a sentimental pushover.

  Now Holden’s adoring little sister has gone and sold him down the river, or at least tried to. At Home in the World strikes me as a bit deluded, as though Maynard thought she could force Salinger to acknowledge her by blowing his cover. The attempt seems not only misjudged but grasping, and one understands why he wearied of her—just as one understands what her sister means when she tells Joyce at one point, “You … take … up … so … much … space.” There is something of the stalker in Maynard, of the oxygen eater. At the end of the book, on the eve of her forty-fourth birthday, she drives to New Hampshire and waits on Salinger’s doorstep until he comes out. She asks him what he wanted from her—what was her “purpose” in his life. It’s a question that, even unanswered, is more lonely and true than any of Maynard’s breathless confessions. Perhaps the real sadness lies not in her betrayal but in the larger, negating absence that hovers over these pages. After a heated exchange about the motives behind her memoir, and about who has exploited whom, Salinger tells her, “I didn’t exploit you! I don’t even know you.” Search as we might in these untranquil recollections, we don’t know him, either.

  SO NOT A FAG HAG

  2011

  I am standing at water’s edge on a broiling afternoon in late summer, lost in conversation with my friend David. We are exploring the whys and wherefores, as is our habit: how come we are the way we are, our problems with maintaining intimate relationships, which sleeping pills are effective and which zonk you out for the next day, how hard it is to get our work done. We’ve had conversations like this many times before and will no doubt have them many times again. It is the song we trill together, mining the inner landscape of the psyche the way other people might discuss their tennis game or the latest sex scandal.

  David has never learned to swim, which I find oddly endearing. He also smacks noisily when he eats, which I find less so. We’ve known each other for what seems like forever and often bicker like an unhappily married couple. We could, in point of fact, never be married, because David is gay, although I so
metimes find myself wondering how things might have developed between us if he weren’t. What’s certain is that we would have had good-looking children.

  David is one of a handful of gay men I have been close to over the years, men who provide a different kind of lens on the world than my female friends or straight men. It’s impossible, however, for me to think of my dealings with gay men without the term “fag hag” immediately attaching itself to these relationships, making a cruel comedy out of what is a complicated and intriguing phenomenon.

  In the popular media, gay men generally feature as bitchy, high-strung confidants to brassy straight women—hairdressers of a sort, the men to whom you tell your more embarrassing secrets and confide trivial concerns. So it goes in TV shows like Will & Grace and Sex and the City and countless movies, such as The Next Best Thing, the dismal Madonna–Rupert Everett vehicle. The idea that a straight woman’s friendship with a gay man may serve a function beyond light relief—that it could touch on deeper needs not met by other relationships—is rarely addressed. One recent exception was the Sundance Channel’s Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys, a short-lived docu-series (inspired by a collection of essays with the same name) in which straight women and their queer male companions laughed together—and, at times, cried together—all the while displaying the fortitude and strength of their platonic bonds. Albeit melodramatic at times, the show proved more layered in its depictions than the usual fare.

  I’ve known David for nearly two decades. We are both writers and were drawn together by shared interests as well as a shared mood disorder marked by free-floating anxiety and a tendency toward depression. Like some, but not all, of the other gay men I’ve known, David is not immediately identifiable as homosexual. This has made it more difficult, if anything, to accept the fact that he is sexually indifferent to women; there’s nothing, on the face of it, that should make it so. Although the common wisdom on the origins of gayness has gone in less than a century from viewing it as a pathology in need of correction to viewing it as a completely genetic trait, like a gift for numbers, I find myself wondering whether our relegating it all to one side of the nature-nurture equation is not a matter of studious political correctness rather than scientific truth. Isn’t it more likely that homosexuality is a combination of genetics and environment, like so many things?