21st
With Love and Bloggeur
I’m going to go ahead an invalidate my English degree here when I say I haven’t read all of my required J.D. Salinger. Catcher In The Rye, sure, and I know all about your bananafish.
But Salinger in my mind always came back to an anecdote told by my favorite writing professor in college: how the notorious recluse made no exceptions for interviews or media — save for the children; he would, from time to time, acquiesce to a juvenile reporter. He wrote them so well! He felt for them even in his retreat from the adult world!
In this way Salinger came to correspond with an ambitious young girl, my teacher said, who professed adoration and found her affections cautiously returned by the author of Nine Stories. She eventually moved in with him, seeming, for a while, to have reversed one of our most famous cases of writer-hermit.
Then the vindictive, ungrateful Lolita fled Salingerville and — worse — she wrote a book about her experience living with the most reclusive/famous author in modern history.
Treachery! Blashphemy! This was viewed as opportunism and gross oversharing by the school of Salinger scholars and lovers, to which my professor belonged.
I didn’t understand how fully until today, when Gawker spliced ex-Editor Emily Gould’s Times cover up next to Joyce Maynard, once Salinger-bait, and a commenter linked to this for further clarification.
It turns out that Salinger may not have been the broken, befuddled, bamboozled-by-a-bimbo rural New Hampshirite we had imagined him to be in class. Turns out there’s some complicity involved in inviting teenage fans to the farm.
Who’s right? No one is. Whose story should be believed? Both, and neither. Why? Because my prof. used to say something else: we’re always the main characters in our own fucking stories.
It’s called perspective. It’s inevitable, brutal, and personal. We can try to show it to others, but they’ll always have the third-hand experience, colored by other sneaking perspectives that are different and equally true.
But I’m pretty sure my professor used to tell the tale of Salinger and Maynard in order to get one point across: Be careful who you screw. Everybody writes.
