Since I woke up thinking about it deeply, I guess I’d better try to get my thoughts down about the 2013 J.D. Salinger documentary we watched last night.

One: Privilege

J.D. Salinger apparently felt that writing should be done solely for the art of it. To publish destroyed the purity. As a result, he isolated himself from the world of publishing and other writers to labor in legendary obscurity in the woods of New Hampshire.  Except. He pursued publication vigorously and successfully as a young man, setting and reaching his goal to be published by the New Yorker, and also publishing one novel that still sells over 250K copies a year. He was also raised on Park Avenue in NY by wealthy parents. His ability to devote himself religiously to his craft was enabled by a stroke of fortune, partly inherited and mostly earned. Laboring in obscurity is quite easy for most of us, but we do not have the financial privilege needed to do it full time. He did.

Two: Muses

Salinger needed his muse. She needed to be very young, appealing, pure, and possessed of devastating intelligence. This muse appears to have been crucial to his output for his entire life. His muses were selected, courted, isolated, and eventually discarded when they ceased to be muse material. The fourteen-year-old girl he met on the beach says their relationship was completely innocent until at age eighteen or twenty, when she wanted the relationship to shift to one between adults. He set her aside immediately. The last shot in documentary is of an aged Salinger laughing while getting into a car with a beautiful younger woman who is also laughing. This woman was apparently the teenaged au pair he courted after Joyce Maynard.

At no point in this documentary does Salinger break any laws. His attentions to younger women are creepy, but they do not appear to have been illegal.

Three: Friends

Though he withdrew from the publishing world voluntarily, and he wanted nothing to do with writers and editors, J.D. Salinger was not a recluse. He was a friend, a townsman, he went to local fairs, local shops, he went to shows in New York, ate at restaurants, went over to people’s homes and had dinner and hung out. The people most wedded to the idea of him as a hermit and recluse are people who never actually knew him. They want their idol served up a certain way, to preserve their idea of his monk-like austerity. People who did know him insist that this is not the case at all. He was selectively social, but he was social.

Four: Joyce

I have opinions about Joyce Maynard, not all of them positive, but I don’t like how she was presented in this documentary. When she moved in with Salinger, she was nineteen, quite child-like in appearance, lauded for her writing from childhood, and though she was able at age eighteen to write about the world, she didn’t have much experience in it. I think their relationship lasted less than a year all told. She left it a virgin, having written the book that would make her name.

She was shot oddly in this documentary. Two interviews, one outdoors and during the day, and another indoors and at night (but both on the same day, she’s wearing the same things), are spliced together in quick cuts, left right left right, building up her answers rapid fire. This gives the impression that the viewer is being harried or badgered.

Maynard speaks openly about how isolated she felt, how strange it was to fall into the life and lap of this man in his fifties, to watch old movies and listen to the Andrews Sisters with him while the youth culture of the early seventies exploded across America.

People tell on themselves when given a chance. She talks about being sneered at by an older woman at a party some years later, when the woman told her that Salinger also seduced the woman’s au pair with letters. You can actually see the shift in Maynard’s face, the betrayal. I have watched this shift in other documentaries where a young women was groomed/courted/seduced/predated upon by an older man. That sense of being chosen falls away when she learns that she was just one of many, that her need to feel special has been useful tool in his arsenal of charm.

She drove to his house to confront him, and he exploded at her. He was furious that she would finally write about him. Could this possibly have been a surprise? Joyce Maynard’s initial fame came from describing her life at eighteen. He had to know that, eventually, she would break the great sacred silence around the man and tell the world how he lived. What a repulsive experience that must have been for him. But how could J.D. Salinger possibly have been surprised? That’s what she did!

I was inspired by Maynard’s plight when I wrote The Iris Diaries. In fact, in my only author interview, I talk about this:

Sue: Okay. Do you think Iris has the right to write about her life?

Karen: That’s an important question. He says, “You can’t write about us,” and she says, “But you’re all I’ve got.” The question is more important now than ever. So many women are turning their families into businesses. These curated, blogged-about, Instagrammed families are monetized, but it’s not really a new thing. Joyce Maynard wrote about her family, and before that Erma Bombeck wrote about her family, and before them Shirley Jackson wrote about her family in Life Among the Savages. Jackson was a premier American horror writer and she also wrote these beautiful, hilarious books about raising her family in upstate New York.

So this is a tradition for women writers, and it’s still a big question. For many of us, the domestic realm is our subject matter, this is where we live, where we fight our battles and have our triumphs. And if we deny ourselves the right to write about those, what do we have? It’s a personal issue for me. I used to keep an anonymous blog, and one of my kids found it, and she felt so invaded when she’d pop up in it. And I see her point. That’s why this book, where it’s autobiographical, it’s really buried deeply. I don’t want to be accused of writing about my family and violating their privacy.

Joyce Maynard made a name for herself writing about herself in the world. “Domestic Affairs,” the weekly column I adored in the eighties, was all about her life, her days, her family. This blew up in her face when she left her marriage. I think she lost her syndication deal. Maynard lived through so much public anger and rejection over that decision, I imagine the Salinger stuff was just more of the same.

Maynard’s artistic output isn’t as consequential as Salinger’s, but this doesn’t make what she went through unimportant. And if you want me to condemn her for selling the letters, sorry. Maybe she needed the money. Maybe she wanted young women to understand how he operated. Maybe she wanted revenge. Maybe she just wanted to turn over the rock and expose what was wriggling around under there.

Five: The Work

You knew I had to get there, didn’t you? I love his work. Not so much The Catcher in the Rye, which I read as a teen and disliked, reread in my twenties and disliked, read again in my forties and liked, and read for a final time in my fifties. Then, I found it flooring. But the other three books are incredible. I reread them every few years and admire them all over again.  I even love Hapworth. I remain a devoted fan of Salinger’s work.

At the end of this documentary, there is a list of the works that will start being released in 2015. None of these works have been released. According to an interview with his son in 2019, that list was misinformation, but release of other incredible unnamed work was imminent. That was five years ago. I wonder if the work, written in a vacuum and hoarded in a safe, is any good. I also wonder if I will ever have a chance to read it.

Six: The Documentary

It leaves Prime in a week. If you want to watch it, be forewarned. Harvey Weinstein’s name is all over this (I imagine he liked this story a LOT). It also has a godawful galloping 1980s Michael Mann-like score that must be endured in order to watch it. I almost couldn’t, but I did.