AT HOME IN THE WORLD, by Joyce Maynard

EXTRACTS


What I see in Jerry Salinger—and this is far more significant for me than his literary celebrity—is the possibility that there may be another human being on the planet in whose presence I won’t need to conceal my true identity. What’s the desire of a boy to kiss me or have sex with me, compared to the extraordinary sense of relief and comfort of finding a fellow human being who recognizes and embraces me like a long-lost countryman? It’s not his fame as a writer that draws me to him. It’s his voice. Eventually I will come to love his voice on the phone, his voice in the room with me. But what I love first is his voice on the page […]

As I become familiar with his voice in the pages of his letters, I recognize a certain irony to the way that J.D. Salinger is worshiped by so many of my contemporaries. The actual man behind the beloved character of Holden Caulfield, and the characters of the Glass family, possesses contempt for much of what young people embrace on campuses like mine. Jerry despises what he perceives as the watered-down variety of Eastern mysticism popularized by the Beatles’ visit to India with the Maharishi. He barely mentions politics or world affairs—even in this election year, with the Vietnam War still going on, and the early news of the Watergate break-in soon to hit the news. When he does speak of student activism of the kind that’s going on around the country at the moment, it is largely to question the motives behind students’ seemingly liberal politics, and above all else, the adherence to fashion and convention—even the adherence to the fashion of unconventionality […]

“There’s so much perversion all around me,” I write to Jerry.

Perversions! He responds. Oh yes: spiritual, cultural, sexual.

Seemingly out of nowhere he brings up Masters and Johnson, whose names are much in the news this year for their sex-therapy practices and the clinics they’ve set up treating couples with sexual problems. Jerry has never mentioned sex in any of his letters but now he tells me that the publication of the Masters and Johnson report is one of the most destructive things that young people could have been subjected to. The whole thing is a sham, he says, because it comes out of times absent of all “orgasmic normalcy.” I don’t have a clue what he means, but I hang on his words.

His references are an odd mix: Masters and Johnson, Hemingway, Ring Lardner, Lao Tse. Nineteen forties New York, 1970s television; the tweedy world of the Carlyle Hotel, The New Yorker, Westport, Connecticut, and the Biltmore, the ungentrified life of rural New Hampshire. In his early days, he hung around places like the Stork Club in New York with Eugene O’Neill’s daughter Oona before she married Charlie Chaplin—a marriage that took place when she was 18 and he was 53.

Jerry doesn’t go out on the town anymore. His two most frequent visitors in Cornish are a couple in their 60s, Eva and Vernon Barrett, who clean and do odd jobs for him, and a young housewife in town named Sally Kemp, who comes over to study homeopathy with him.

He’s still a New Yorker. Now and then in a letter he’ll mention having a telephone conversation with S.J. Perelman—Sid—or going in to Manhattan to have lunch with William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker magazine, or getting a visit from a couple of longtime New Yorker writers who stop for lunch on their way back from a visit to Cape Cod. But mostly his visits will be with Sally, to work on homeopathy, and the Barretts, with whom he discusses his compost pile, or cordwood, or his tomato plants. He talks to me a lot about writing, but never about writers, except dead ones, and never about the current literary scene, which he avoids. (Though he eventually mentions a particular loathing for John Updike, who once published a highly critical piece about his work.) He writes about his dachshund, Joey, a trip to the health food store in White River Junction, a bet with Matthew that entailed not shaving for a week, getting his car fixed.

In one of my letters I ask him, with a kind of innocence you have to be 18 to possess, if he’s been doing any writing lately. He responds that he writes everyday. Always has. As our friendship develops, he speaks about his writing just in passing, as if that goes without saying, and occasionally he will speak of having had one of those weeks where most of the pages end up in the trash.

One day, near the end of the spring term, I ride my bike over to the Yale Coop and pick up a copy of Catcher in the Rye with its familiar red jacket. It’s an odd feeling, seeing the name I know from a handwritten signature on a page, printed yellow in letters on the cover. Standing in line to buy the book, I feel almost embarrassed, as if I were buying contraceptives or The Story of O. I stuff the book in my bag and carry it back to my dormitory room. I spend the afternoon reading it.

Although this is my first exposure to Salinger’s published work, the voice in the novel is instantly recognizable. It could be Jerry talking. It’s not just that Jerry has inserted so many of his opinions—about movies, or books, or actors, or music—into Catcher in the Rye. What’s familiar is the point of view and the eye of the young Holden Caulfield, which is very nearly the same as the man with whom I have been corresponding these last few weeks.

I read with particular interest the passages in Catcher in the Rye that involve Holden’s dealings with girls. Like me, Holden Caulfield remains a virgin, maintaining that he has had plenty of opportunities to change this. In Holden’s case, he just hasn’t got around to it. Sex has a significance for him that makes it impossible for him to embark on in a casual way. He has to like the girl a whole lot. But in the end, the only girl he really loves is his little sister.

The portrait of Phoebe, the tenderness with which Jerry portrays her, makes all other girls in the novel seem corrupt and practically ugly by comparison. Reading his description of Phoebe makes me love her. I want Jerry to feel, about me, the way he does about Phoebe.

The next time I write to Jerry after finishing the book, I ask him only one question about it: How did Holden Caulfield ever manage to fit so many activities into a single night?

He answers back that he has no idea; we’d have to ask someone really smart. Maybe my mother’s friend, the famous psychologist.

Another time, he will explain to me how he came up with the name of Holden Caulfield (names on a movie marquee: William Holden and Joan Caulfield). Once or twice over the months to come he refers to somebody or other trying to obtain movie rights to the novel—something he’ll never sell. Other than this, Jerry and I don’t discuss the contents of Catcher in the Rye again.