At Home in the World by Joyce Maynard Doubleday 346p, £15 in UK
When I was in college in the early 1960s we used to put Holden Caulfield's name on the invitation list for every tea dance. It was more than a sneer at the nuns for their ghastly social pretensions, it was a lovestruck outburst. It's hard to explain now, in the age of Brat Pack literature and general shock tactic publishing on every front, what the Salinger spell was like in the years when he was a lone voice declaring integrity in a mendacious world, and declaring it in the mid-century, middle-class American vernacular.
To say he was an icon misses the point. To the young and soulful - and it was largely girls who would acknowledge anything like that - Salinger was a romantic hero. He spoke to us through Holden, but much more so through Buddy Glass, the wry narrator of Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters, the illuminating spiritual force in Franny and Zooey. But you wouldn't find Buddy at a tea dance any more than you'd find his creator, who had delivered his small but perfectly formed body of work, and retreated to the wilderness, having fittingly given his final interview to the local girls' school magazine.
The spell was still holding strong in 1972, when Joyce Maynard submitted an article to the New York Times Magazine entitled "An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life" . It was perceptive, world-weary yet innocent, and the editors ran it as a cover story with a picture of Joyce - a waif, slim and small with beautiful large, and very soulful eyes. Joyce was in her first year at Yale University, one the very few girls Yale accepted in its first co-educational intake. She was deluged with letters after the article appeared, including many offering writing contracts and publishing contacts. Only one captured her immediately, the single page from a true soulmate. With great tenderness, he warned her that the literary world was out to exploit her. Of course she recognised the signature. But, she writes in her memoir, she was probably one of the very few people on the entire campus - "or any campus in 1972, or any year for the nearly two decades before" - who had never read the work of J.D. Salinger.
Joyce wasn't much of a reader at all. Her exceptional writing skills were developed by rigorous parental editing. When she had an essay for homework, it was a family occasion, complete with coffee and biscuits. She read each draft aloud to her parents, who took notes on index cards. The next draft would be amended to meet criticisms. The Maynard family was as isolated in its way as Salinger in his New Hampshire hermitage. They spurned outside company and were solely dedicated to intellectual and artistic pursuits. Mrs Maynard was prying, flamboyant and sensual to the point of prurience with her daughters. Mr Maynard was gentle and brilliant by day and a storming alcoholic by night.
Joyce, by the time she began to correspond with Salinger, was anorexic, shy, inhibited and obsessive. She knew instinctively that she did not have to work at her writing for him, that part of her attraction was her ignorance of the literary world, and indeed of his own work. Salinger drew her in protectively, and she left Yale to be with him in his hilltop lair forever. He was fifty-three. Her parents raised no concerns; Mrs Maynard was thrilled.
One year later Salinger pushed Joyce out. That year is laid bare in this memoir, recorded almost without comment. Their long, uneventful days consisted mostly of writing; Salinger, wearing a special robe, got down to it after morning meditation. Joyce struggled at it dutifully to fulfil his expectations. In the evening they watched old movies on Salinger's 16mm projector. They paid as little attention to food as possible. Salinger added undercooked lamb patties to their bleak macrobiotic diet menu as a remedy for Joyce's condition, which became apparent the first time they went to bed together. When vaginismus proved immune to lamb , he brought Joyce to a homeopathic specialist who tried acupuncture, also to no avail. Salinger resigned himself to imposing - in this case, that's the word - what another heroic and powerful man identifies as "one-way sex".
But it is Salinger's conversation that is unnerving, for this is indeed the shrewd and funny, infinitely entertaining and wise Buddy Glass talking. It is only very slowly that he grows more critical, more often. As might be expected, he's a master of the brief and devastating verbal cut. He gives that talent much more scope after Joyce has gone, when she is phoning him constantly, sobbing and begging to be taken back.
Joyce went on, as people do. She eventually married, had children, and became a professional writer, and by the evidence of this book, a very good one. For twentyfive years she kept silent about Salinger. In an author's note, she writes that when her own daughter reached eighteen and was ready to leave for college she realised, as parents do, that you must try to make sense of your own experience before you can hope to help your unprepared children prepare for theirs.
I am wary of confessional memoirs. They are usually announced as "honest", as if candour was the same thing as truth, "moving", as if that was the same as important, and "compelling", meaning gossipy, treacherous, vengeful. They are seldom presented as cautionary tales, which is what the best are. Joyce Maynard has written such a memoir. In the final pages she recounts her eventual confrontation with Salinger - now nearly eighty - but she passes no judgment on him. She leaves him to his private demons and us with a message: beware of your dreams, beware of your powerful heroes.