‘I was groomed to be the sexual partner of a narcissist who nearly derailed my life’: On the Experiences of Young Women and Girls with J.D. Salinger (Part Two)
This two-part blog post discusses the predatory and abusive experiences of many young women and girls in their differing relationships with writer J.D. Salinger throughout his long life.
Part two focuses on the experiences of Joyce Maynard, Elaine Joyce, Catherine Oxenberg, and Colleen O’Neill, as well as considering the known experiences of several other young women and girls.
CW: Paedophilia, predation, grooming, emotional abuse, and neglect. Includes mentions of anorexia, bulimia, and sexual molestation.
Joyce Maynard
Of all the experiences detailed in this essay, Joyce Maynard’s may be the least overlooked (though that’s a low bar when considering the continual silencing of women’s voices to the defence of such men, and though being less overlooked, this unfortunately does not imply she has been respected or much listened to).
This is because her experience is the most documented, with Joyce having written a memoir at the end of the millennium which reflects on the first forty years of her life, as well as her year-long relationship with J.D. Salinger in the early 1970s. Her book was deeply maligned by many when first published, but I won’t give any of those assholes any space here — though I will mention more about her memoir and its reception below. (This was also predictably the case with Margaret Salinger’s memoir.)
I don’t think it’s possible for me to detail every aspect of her experience with the famous writer here, nor is it my place to. This is why I can’t recommend enough reading her 1998 memoir At Home in the World, which recounts, so poignantly, her relationship with Salinger, contextualised within the earlier years of her life. It seems wrong to describe her book as ‘beautiful,’ but it is, and it is haunting and moving and devastating and cathartic. I remember so vividly each time I would open its pages and continue from where I last left off — their yellow-brown tinge lit up in the afternoon spring sun — and I would read of her upbringing and her adolescence and her broader family life. Then I would get to her writing about and reflecting on her relationship with the man revered by so many, a man defended by so many — like we see with, for example, Woody Allen and Roman Polanski, and countless men with less fame, both alive and dead.
Finally coming to terms with and recognising the ways in which J.D. Salinger shaped her life — both during their relationship and in the years following, after he coldly and abruptly cut her out of his life — she ends the introduction to her memoir, ‘I knew it was time at last to explore my story.’
**
On 23 April 1972, eighteen-year-old Yale freshman Joyce Maynard became famous. The New York Times Magazine published her cover story ‘An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life,’ in which she wrote of her generational world-weariness. She wrote of being in between: of having the Beatles but not as they were during their height, of being too late to burn draft cards for the Vietnam War but being too early to not be drafted. A ‘generation of unfulfilled expectations.’ Reading her piece twenty-five years on, she cringes at the precocious tone and presumptuousness of it all, and comments on how false it rings, with no mention of the traumas of her upbringing: her father’s alcoholism, her mother’s invasion of her privacy, her eating disorders (another young woman, like Oona and Claire, with a troubled upbringing pursued by Salinger), and how it reverts to third-person when she writes about sex, unable to admit that the embarrassment and insecurity around it was her own.
She was flooded with letters in response — some praising her, others angry and hurtful, some from television producers and book editors offering to take her out for lunch — but one stood out to her. (‘After I read this one none of the others matter[ed].’) It read, written in irregular spacing and with some letters floating above and below the address line, ‘Dear Miss Maynard.’ It was from J.D. Salinger.
Fifty-three years old, he was now living alone after his divorce from his second wife Claire Douglas six years earlier. He read Joyce’s piece and became immediately infatuated with her. In his letter, he wrote of the ‘phoniness’ of the adult world in an effort to protect her and her innocence, as he saw it — being yet another instance of Salinger’s protection/predator dichotomy. He wrote that she was brilliant, that she had a beautiful life ahead of her, that she was perfect. That she was his soul mate. (In Jean Miller’s interview, where she talks of her experience with Salinger — which is discussed in part one — she remarks that her and Joyce looked remarkably similar at the ages they were when they met Salinger. Joyce has said that she looked ‘waiflike’ in the photograph, weighing only ninety pounds at the time. Joyce soon became aware of her appearance to Salinger during the time they would write to each other, stating in her memoir that he would tell her how perfect her writing was; as he said she wrote the way she looked, it is clear, she points out, that he was beginning to suggest a physical attraction to her. Soon enough, he began signing his letters ‘love.’ Salinger’s avoidance to write to her directly may be indicative of the legal guilt and shame he felt about his paedophilia, as Josef Benson has considered; though, again, he still acted on it.)
Within days they were exchanging letters with each other, in and about their vastly different worlds: him secluded high up on his hill in New Hampshire writing but no longer publishing, her in the world at university in Connecticut. She would tell him of the drawings she would make, of the music she would listen to, of the dollhouse furniture she constructed, how she spent her time. They would talk about everything: their favourite actors and performers, Salinger’s family life (though notably absent is any mention of Claire Douglas), even the meals they ate. On how different they were, Joyce writes:
That he’s thirty-five years older is just the first of a very long list of differences between us. We are both (as he has pointed out in that first note) half-Jewish, but he grew up in a family of increasing privilege in New York City in the twenties and thirties. I’m a small-town girl. He fought in World War II, landing on Utah Beach on D-day. I ran the Kids for LBJ headquarters on our tree-lined street in Durham, New Hampshire, and later handed out daisy stickers for McCarthy in the mill town of Berlin, New Hampshire. He has been married before — twice. I have kissed one boy in my whole life.
Though perhaps there were, however, similarities between them in the different worlds; both were isolated. At Yale, Joyce recalls not having many friends, of feeling isolated, separate, of being the only one out of her three roommates without a boyfriend. Just like with Claire Douglas, the allure of a well-established older man fawning over her was undoubtedly influential — and coercive, as no doubt intended by Salinger. The praise and attention he flooded her with, like he did with Jean and Claire, is, we know too well, a common tactic by men seeking to groom young girls.
About these letters, Joyce writes:
I don’t fit in very well in this place, I tell him. I do not need to pretend with this man, as I would with boys my age, that I am cool or knowledgeable about things that make me enormously uncomfortable. Where, all year, I have tried to act like other girls, with this person about whom I know virtually nothing I feel I can speak in something approaching my real voice.
[…]
Standing in the sunlight outside the Yale post office, ripping open my latest letter from Cornish, I take in everything he tells me as the purest kind of truth. I certainly do not observe — and won’t, for a couple of decades — that the letters Jerry Salinger now sends me constitute precisely the kind of danger he has warned me about: unsolicited praise to a writer, from a reader, telling me everything he loves about my work, everything he wants to see more of. In nearly every letter, he assures me he’s no sage. Then he gives me more advice. Even as he tells me I must never think of pleasing people, there is one person I want to please, more than any other. Him.
In her memoir, she writes of finding solace in ‘Jerry’ — as he soon suggested she call him — of spending eighteen years in fear of change, always returning to her parents but at the same time feeling an urge towards ‘another, safer home.’ Within weeks of sending letters back and forth, she found this place in J.D. Salinger.
**
As the spring term went on, Joyce found herself increasingly distant from the happenings of Yale, instead mentally finding herself only in Cornish — no doubt heightened by the fact they were, after a few weeks, talking on the telephone, which soon became a nightly occurrence — knowing the two of them were bound to meet sooner or later.
Once the academic year had finished for the summer, Joyce was determined to travel to Cornish to meet Salinger in person. She travelled back to New Hampshire, where she herself had grown up — in the town of Durham — and was greeted by a mother who was overjoyed that her teenage daughter was receiving the attention of such a famous and admired man (a man three years older than her mother. Joyce writes in her memoir that, as her mother’s ‘sexual and romantic life seem[ed] finished,’ she was, even more than usual, living vicariously through her.) Together in her childhood bedroom, they made a dress for the special occasion. It was spoken of as ‘a costume,’ as though she was to perform — to exaggerate — her youth. The dress they made was almost identical to the one she wore on her first day of elementary school: white broadcloth with ABCs printed in bright primary colours. (Her age never went unnoticed by her. In fact, when she turned nineteen in November 1972 — shortly after moving into his home — she worried if she would then be too old for him.)
They met at the Hanover Inn, both excited to finally see the other. Joyce ran to greet him, as though he was an old friend, and he looked ecstatic to see her. After embracing, he commented on the oversized men’s watch she was wearing as being the same she had worn in the photograph used in her New York Times Magazine article that he had read, before then beginning their correspondence. (I mention this because later in her memoir, Joyce remarks on this, commenting that the thirteen-year-old Esmé wears her father’s oversized watch on her wrist in Salinger’s short story ‘For Esmé — with Love and Squalor.’ Incidentally, this short story was republished as part of a small collection called Nine Stories in 1953. This was the year Joyce was born.)
He drove her to his house, talking all the way. She writes in her memoir of them arriving outside:
The house itself is a simple one, a single-story, ranch-style place with a deck that looks out to the north, a horizon dominated by an unobstructed view of Mount Ascutney. Except for Jerry’s vegetable garden, the land around the house is wild, with acres of open fields below, where Matthew [his son] rides his three-wheeler off-road bike. There’s a trail behind the house that leads to the top of the hill. Jerry’s dachshund, Joey, lies in the sun on the deck as we pull up. “We’re home,” he says.
I have spent less than an hour in the company of Jerry Salinger, but I am feeling something I have never experienced before.
“I’ve waited a long time for you,” he says. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you belong here.”
“Some people would call this an awkward situation,” I say. “Actually, it’s the first unawkward situation I’ve been in for a while.”
He looks at me hard. I do not look away.
They hardly spent a moment apart on their first weekend together. They would eat together — and Salinger would tell her of the toxins that human bodies are filled with — watch old films on his projector, and take walks up the hill around his house, a routine that continued over their months together. At one point, amidst talking about their family lives, with his dog following behind, Salinger reached to hold her hand. The following day, they drove into town to pick up the paper, something he only ever did alone. As they returned and he was turning into his driveway, he paused for a moment, shifting the car into neutral. He leaned over and kissed her. She kissed him back.
**
They continued to see each other that summer, with Salinger driving to pick Joyce up from her summer internship with The New York Times. They continued to write to each other, though their letters became shorter as they had gotten to know each other more, yet Joyce remembers that there was ‘a feeling of hunger in his words that wasn’t present in his earlier correspondence,’ evidenced by their increased attention he was diverting towards her — akin to the cultlike ‘love bombing’ experienced by Claire — by updating her on every minutiae of his life and suggesting occasions for when they should next meet, only days away.
As they saw each other more frequently throughout the summer of 1972, their relationship became more intimate. (Recall that in her New York Times Magazine piece, Joyce mentioned — albeit distantly — her anxieties around sex, that she was conscious of being a university student and not having had sex.) During one visit to his secluded house, she recalls being in his bedroom:
I’m standing at the foot of the bed, in another one of my short little-girl dresses. He pulls it over my head. No bra on my thin body. I have no need for one. Only cotton underpants. He takes those off.
[…]
He says he loves me. I say the same to him. I feel the way I imagine a person does when she has a religious experience. Saved. Rescued, delivered, enlightened, touched by a divine hand.
I have never seen a naked man. Now that I do, I want to curl up on his lap. I want him to wrap his arms around me. I want him to hold me. All this he does. Then I am lying flat on the bed, his body looming over me, pushing my legs apart.
There was no talk of contraception. There was little talk of anything. He instructed, she followed. Described are the following moments in her own words:
When we attempt intercourse, the muscles of my vagina simply clamp shut and will not release. After a few minutes, we have to stop. I am weeping, less from the pain in my genitals than the pain in my head, which feels ready to burst.
I get up from the bed and stagger to the bathroom to pour water on my face. I have never had a headache like this before.
“Lie down,” he says quietly. “Let me do your pressure points.” He has put on his bathrobe now. He sits on the side of the bed next to me and applies his fingers to a spot between the thumb and forefinger of each hand. In a few minutes the worst of the headache goes away, though it will be a few hours before it’s gone entirely.
“I didn’t know it would hurt like that,” I tell him.
She felt embarrassed as a result, a deep shame towards the man she now worshipped, and her experience wasn’t discussed during the rest of their weekend together, though they attempted to have sex several times during her stay in Cornish that weekend, as well as the months that followed. Recall the sexual restraint Salinger practised as part of his religious and spiritual beliefs, seen clearly during the experiences of Jean Miller and Claire Douglas, yet it was a restraint that did not — ever — hold him back.
Their attempts to become sexually involved became a secret so terrible and shameful for her, she thought, that, because Salinger was the only other person who knew, it bound her closer to him. She became further reliant on him through the fact that he sought to solve this in his own way, rather than considering legitimate medical approaches; Joyce was forced to renounce such approaches: Salinger’s ‘views and pronouncements [were] infallible,’ to quote the academic paper Margaret Salinger references in part one. (Also, in her memoir she writes that during her relationship with him, she did not have a single period, which — in addition to her being severely underweight — highlights the intensity and harm of the living situation she was in, owing to her restricted diet and the stresses she faced.)
In addition to this, Salinger gradually distanced her from the world she was a part of — urging her to distrust readers, agents, editors, political leaders, therapists, posers and pretenders (‘phonies’), and feminists. (The second wave was growing in influence as the Democrats reaffirmed their dedication to the Equal Rights Amendment, which Joyce, commissioned to write a piece for Ms. magazine, had reported on from the Democratic National Convention in Miami in July 1972.) He was telling her, in short, that she was alone in the world, that she only had him, thus crafting a sense of dependency, a technique deployed by groomers and abusers like Salinger. Soon enough, Joyce writes, the list of people she couldn’t trust included her own parents.
While Joyce was away in Miami, it seemed that Salinger became aware of how intensely he missed her. Again reflecting the sense of dependency, she writes in her memoir that him telling her this in his letters made her feel deeply responsible for his happiness and well-being, the happiness and well-being of a much older and powerful man. At this time, however, Joyce would tell herself that at least she had a way out of their relationship if she felt she needed to, with Salinger hating so much of the world she adored — though more of a respite, she admits, than leaving forever; she had Yale, her degree, her future. She could not imagine herself leaving college.
**
By the beginning of August, however, Joyce left her place at The New York Times and began to spend more and more time with Salinger in Cornish. When the catalogue for her university course’s second year arrived in the mail at home in Durham, and forwarded to her, she did not open it.
By this time in the summer, Salinger’s two children — Margaret and Matthew — were around their father’s house more frequently, having finished school. (Joyce never once saw their mother, Claire Douglas.) Here in her memoir, she draws on a parallel between her and their mother and father’s divorce. She herself has gone through the difficulties of maintaining a relationship with her children while going through a divorce, as she recounts in the later chapters of her memoir. She writes:
Years later, I try to imagine what Matthew and Peggy must have thought that summer. I have been a divorced parent myself now. In the years following my own divorce, I have attempted to carry on a romantic relationship with someone who is not my children’s parent. And because I have, it’s unimaginable to the woman I am now that even the most secure and well-loved twelve-year-old and sixteen-year-old wouldn’t feel dismay upon walking into their home and finding a girl just a few years older than they are, sitting on their father’s lap or curled up on the couch next to him with her head on his shoulder.
In fact, Joyce’s relationship with Salinger’s children serves as a way of showing the dangerous and austere living situation she was increasingly ensnared in. Salinger’s younger son Matthew was a big fan of pizza, and so despite it being forbidden in his father’s house — with its unhealthy oils and cheese and greasy meats, and cooked at a high temperature, something Salinger detested, believing cooking something about one-hundred-and-fifty degrees Fahrenheit destroyed essential nutrients within the food — he would occasionally treat his son to his favourite food. Joyce would go along too. After returning home and putting Matthew to bed, the more relaxed father would be replaced with the harsh and abusive ‘protector,’ as he saw himself. He would show her how to put her finger down her throat to make herself throw up, something Salinger did every time he had to consume a meal like this. Once she had learnt this, she felt obliged to do it every day, compounding the anorexia she was already suffering from.
**
By September, as the summer was ending, Joyce moved into her new apartment in New Haven, Connecticut, ready for her sophomore year at Yale. Salinger helped her move in over the weekend and when leaving, after Joyce said she would call him when he arrived home that night, he responded by manipulatively suggesting that she might not, that she might meet someone new and never call him again.
As he drove away, she began crying, terrified for the days ahead without him around, terrified that she might not be able to get through them, even terrified that she might get through them ‘too well’; this was worse, she thought, as she was fearful Salinger would then see her as ‘weak and corrupted […] seduced by the shallow attractions of the world.’ Again, the sense of dependency Joyce felt towards Salinger was clear, so cunningly constructed by the man and his power.
Throughout her memoir At Home in the World, as seen so far, Joyce paraphrases conversations she and Salinger had (as well as letters he sent to her, not having legal or physical access to the actual copies). One brief telephone exchange she includes — once she was back at Yale in the early days and ready to begin her second year — represents a clear instance of Salinger’s manipulation once he was no longer around her. Describing her new and organised apartment, she says:
“You wouldn’t recognize it here, my place looks so homey,” I tell him.
“Wish I could say the same about this one,” he says. “Things aren’t the same around here.”
“I’ll be back to visit soon,” I remind him.
“Right,” he says. “Glad you can fit me in.”
In his absence, his influence remained, as she shopped for foods she knew he would approve of. She registered for her classes and caught up with a couple of people she knew from her first year, though was vague on the details of how she spent her summer.
When classes started again, she recalled how excited she was about getting into the Ivy League university, how filled with hope she was when she first arrived a year earlier, but things had now changed. She called Salinger to come and pick her up. She wanted to leave and be with him. Joyce dropping out of Yale. Though different from Claire’s experience in that she had more of a choice — apparently — the fact that two young women left their universities and their futures to live with the same man explicitly represents the predation and coercion Salinger subjected them to (such that one must consider how much choice Joyce really had).
Passing the Old Campus on our way out of town, I see students on the quadrangle, playing guitars and stretched out on the grass with their books. The day is warm enough that people have their dorm windows open. Music filters down into the street. Led Zeppelin. The Doors. Neil Young.
We head out onto the highway, north to New Hampshire.
**
It was a difficult transition. She was forced to live around him, to adapt to his way of life, to do things his way. She would break down and cry, apologising to him that it wasn’t her home. The fact that the lease to her New Haven apartment committed her to pay its rent until the following June — as well as being a financial burden — also contributed to her not feeling entirely settled in Salinger’s home once she had moved in. But she did not want to be anywhere else.
To adjust to living with him, she was made to change certain aspects of herself: she could no longer bake (which created mess and required high temperatures), she could no longer leave her clothes on the floor. But she couldn’t change everything; she was still attached to a world that he so harshly criticised. She was still being commissioned to write, she was still reading teen magazines like Seventeen (though soon found herself looking at women’s domestic magazines when at the supermarket), and the various media figures who approached her for their project ideas occupied her thoughts while she was trying to meditate, something her and Salinger did daily. (Recall the cultlike qualities of her father Margaret Salinger details in part one.)
Their lives continued much the same every day, with Salinger — as seen with Claire — retreating to write, secluded, for hours a day, now in the study of his house. Joyce would also be writing, mostly for a book she had been approached to write after her piece ‘An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life’ had been well-received in April of that year. The memoir was titled Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties and she wrote much of it while living with Salinger (in fact, he was only a few feet away from her in the photograph used for the book’s cover). Just like with her New York Times Magazine article, there was a considerable difference between the Joyce who was being written about and the Joyce who was doing the writing. (It was published later in 1973, shortly after Salinger had cut her out of his life.) Salinger was not supportive: it involved her being in contact with publishers, it required publicity — though she sought to minimise her public appearances surrounding its promotion — and he said she was pandering to an audience, she was selling herself.
Noticing this fracturing between them, Joyce became convinced, as a result of Salinger’s coercion, that the only way to keep them together was to have a baby:
My only hope of redemption is to have a baby. To me, having a baby with Jerry would be a way of experiencing a childhood I never had but longed for. If I cannot be the child myself that he would have wanted, I will be her next of kin anyway. If I can’t please him enough for who I am myself — and the indications are that I cannot — I will please him by providing him with this other person who will be perfect in all the ways I am not. I will get to watch him loving her. He will never leave me, because I am the child’s mother.
Their idea of a child together began to crop up in conversations more and more. They had even settled on a name: Bint. It was from a dream Salinger had had about the two of them having a child together. This remained a central topic of conversation between them even though they avoided talking about their inability to have sex. (Interviewed as part of the 2013 Salinger project, she recalls that a month after the publication of her memoir At Home in the World in 1998, she received a letter from a British scholar informing her of the meaning of the word ‘bint.’ It is a derogatory word, he explained, effectively meaning ‘whore.’)
By the winter of 1972, Salinger had become even more emotionally abusive, just as he had with every other woman and girl as their relationships with him continued. Joyce writes:
Now, in the frigid gloom of January, with snow piled high on the deck outside the French doors, and only a few chickadees left picking at the bird feeder, it is no longer inconceivable to me that I could become one of the people Jerry speaks of with bitterness and contempt.
The lead up to the publication of her memoir Looking Back was a considerable factor that contributed to the fracturing of their relationship. One January morning in 1973, Salinger’s house phone began ringing. He answered. His voice turned cold, giving short responses to the person on the other side, and promptly hung up the phone. It was a reporter from Time magazine, asking about Joyce. The reporter had said that he had found out that Joyce was living with him. His privacy, his isolation, was seriously damaged.
Because Salinger being a recluse is a primary focus for many who write and have written about Salinger, this breach of his privacy through his relationship with Joyce Maynard is often framed as the death-knell for their relationship. Though this is significant, other factors frequently — and deliberately — go overlooked: namely their inability to have sex. His clear perverse sexual interest towards girls much younger than himself cannot go unnoticed. This is apparent when considering what followed.
**
In March 1973, Margaret and Matthew were off school for a week, so the four of them — with their father and nineteen-year-old Joyce— travelled to Daytona Beach in Florida, a city Salinger had been to many times before. It also happened to be the residence of a homeopathic physician who had been recommended to him, and so as well as his children’s holiday, the trip could serve as an attempt to address Salinger and Joyce’s sexual problems, which were rooted in the fear and anxiety she was experiencing that resulted in her vaginismus. (Salinger made the appointment under a false name, and Joyce was referred to as his ‘friend.’) She paraphrases this in her memoir:
“My friend here, Joyce, is anxious to consult you about a problem she’s experiencing that I have been trying to assist her with,” Jerry is saying. For the first time, the doctor turns to me. [The two had been ignoring Joyce so far, instead lost in discussions on different homeopathic remedies.] She studies the single sheet of paper, attached to a clipboard, that I filled out when I arrived. Female. Nineteen years old. 110 pounds. Five foot six inches. Experiencing difficulty having intercourse. Frequent headaches. Amenorrhea.
“So,” she says. “You suffer from a tightness of the muscles surrounding the vagina? How long has this situation existed?”
“Eight months,” I say.
The physician proceeded with a physical examination and then a treatment of acupuncture, with the latter being the same remedy Salinger had attempted on her. She had been hopeful at first, but when returning to the hotel, she was as depressed as before, as humiliated as she had continued to feel around the sexual aspects of their relationship. She had let him down. She was not perfect.
They returned to the hotel, not having spoken about the appointment. They gathered their towels and headed to the beach. Margaret was lying under a beach umbrella and Matthew had run out into the sea. Alone, Joyce and Salinger sat on their foldable beach chairs. He looked old, she writes, and was resting his forehead in his hand.
He told her he was finished with her. He told her she should leave now and clear all her things from his house before he returned with his children. Joyce was distraught:
I get up from the sand. I must be breathing, but it feels as though the air has left my lungs. My vision blurs. I walk back to the hotel.
She was expected to get the next possible flight back but there was a blizzard raging further north along the East Coast. She managed, however, to book a flight that would leave the following day (which was not soon enough for Salinger). One is reminded of the way he fought to get Jean Miller on a flight away from him as quickly as possible twenty years earlier. He lied to his children, telling them that Joyce’s father was sick, so she had to return home.
During their last night in the hotel, Joyce’s crying woke him up from the other room. (During their stay, her and Margaret had been sharing a room, while Salinger and his son shared the other — a peculiarity, Joyce remarks, as his children had seen them sharing a room together since the previous July, which suggests he was near hopeless about his further investment in their relationship.) She pleaded to him that she could not live without him.
A sleepless night ensued for her, and then the morning arrived. She was snuck out of the hotel before his children had woken up.
We walk out in front of the hotel, where a row of taxis is lined up. “This girl needs to go to the airport,” he says, easing me into the backseat as one would a very frail elderly person. I am looking into his eyes, still hoping he’s about to hit his palm against his forehead in that way he has and say “Christ! What was I thinking of?” and pull me out of the taxi.
“Don’t forget to turn the heat down and lock the door after you, once you leave the house,” he says. “I’ll give you a call.” He pats my shoulder and kisses my cheek.
I watch out the window as the taxi pulls away. He looks at his watch and runs his hand through his hair. He turns and walks back into the hotel.
Daytona Beach, Florida. As well as serving as inspiration for the location of Seymour Glass’s suicide and predation towards a four-year-old girl in ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish,’ it was the same place where he abruptly broke up with Sylvia Welter in 1946, where he met fourteen-year-old Jean Miller in 1949, where she later saw him on holiday with Claire Douglas in 1955, and now where he coldly broke up with Joyce Maynard in 1973. ‘[W]hen he was finished with a person, he was through with them.’
**
It was all over, she thought.
One day Jerry Salinger is the only man in my universe. I look to him to tell me what to write, what to think, what to wear, to read, to eat. He tells me who I am, who I should be. The next day he’s gone. […] Not having Jerry to lead me, I feel left behind and lost, not simply alone physically, but spiritually stranded. I’ve been well acquainted with the sensation of loneliness all my life. Never like this.
Within a day of being forced to leave him, she tried to call, and continued to try for days afterwards. She tried to write to him. He continually dismissed her.
With the money she received from the publication of her memoir Looking Back, in the spring of 1973, she decided to get a cabin of her own in the town of Hillsboro, in New Hampshire. She tried to create a life she thought Salinger would approve of, just as she had when she returned to Yale for her sophomore year only half a year earlier, when her life seemed so different.
She kept trying to reach out to him throughout the summer, pleading for him to visit her. He eventually did, though, she thinks, more just to appease her, hoping she would then leave him alone. She spent the morning preparing lunch for the two of them. He arrived late, and with Matthew, having already eaten. They stayed for only fifteen minutes. He clearly wanted nothing more to do with her. This was the last time she saw him for over twenty years.
Salinger’s powerful hold remained over her, however:
Months pass, whole seasons. Young as I am, the life that lies before me looks like a seemingly endless expanse of icy water without borders, more fathoms deep than any diver ventures. The space Jerry’s departure has left feels bigger than any land mass remaining.
I have begun to understand that Jerry is gone forever from my life. Now that this has sunk in, I am left believing I will never love any other man again the way I loved him. I will marry and have children one day, but nobody will ever again know me the way Jerry did.
I also hold to the unshakable conviction that Jerry will never love anyone else the way he loved me once. I take my remaining comfort from the assurance that what existed between us — irretrievable though it may be — will never be duplicated. The place I occupied in his heart could not be filled by any other girl.
**
Things did gradually change for her, thankfully, as she secured a job as a reporter for The New York Times, and through this, became reacquainted with Steve Bethel, who she had known briefly back at Yale, meeting in the first play she took part in there. A romance quickly developed between them — as she recounts in the later chapters of her memoir — and she soon became pregnant (with the first of three children, as well as an abortion she describes in Chapter Sixteen).
Looking back, I realize there was never a time I felt more hope than I did during those first few months with Steve. I was finally going to be part of a happy family.
Then, in July 1977, then got married.
It was not all perfect, however. Though the nuances of their relationship, and her family life more broadly, is beyond the scope of this (already quite long) essay, and for more on these years in her life, I would recommend reading At Home in the World.
**
As briefly mentioned in part one of this blog post, when detailing the experience of Oona O’Neill, Joyce Maynard tried once more to get back in touch with J.D. Salinger in 1997, twenty-four years after they last saw each other.
In November, days before her forty-fourth birthday, she returned to New Hampshire, depressing in the winter. She met up with a friend and began talking with her about the memoir she had been writing. She recalls discussing the part that details her inability to have sex with Salinger, and finally — cathartically — was able to see it differently, reframing it, taking her power back:
In the past, I’ve always regarded my inability to consummate my relationship with Jerry as a terrible and even tragic event in my youth. For the first time, as I’m telling Peggy [her friend] about this, I understand something new.
My body was sending me a message. Nobody around me — not my mother, my friends, my teacher — told me to be careful, that this was not right. But my own body would allow no trespass.
The next day, she drove to Cornish, the quiet town in which she had lived with Salinger for six months. As the final light of the day was fading and clouds filled the sky, she reached his house. Stood at the back door, she rung the bell. She was greeted by a woman she had seen before, Colleen O’Neill (whose experience, though little is known about her, is discussed below). To her surprise, Salinger, called by Colleen, then came to the door, smaller and more stooped over that she had remembered him. He was seventy-eight, white-haired and in a bathrobe.
‘Spitting’ is how she describes Salinger’s first words to her as she stood out in the cold on his doorstep, not invited in. He asked what she was doing at his house. She came with a question, she said:
“What was my purpose in your life?”
He became angry, saying she did not deserve an answer.
He had figured out — somewhere, somehow — that she was writing a book, and he would be in it. He became cruel to her, as harsh as he had been twenty years earlier when she was nineteen and had wished to be part of the world — at home in the world — a world so hated and maligned by Salinger. It cannot go unnoticed, and nor does it by Joyce, of course, that when the two of them had begun exchanging letters all those years ago when the two of them first met, Salinger had adored her and her writing: his love for her had been an extension of his love for her writing.
Joyce remained calm through all of this, wishing to say goodbye, to have closure. She soon turned and walking away from the bitter old man for the last time, leaving him in the cold.
These were some of the last moments documented in her memoir, released just under a year later in August 1998.
**
It was in 1994 when she first felt ready to tell her story. It was an immense psychological struggle at first, but when she finally decided to look again at the letters J.D. Salinger had written to her between the ages of eighteen and nineteen — and motivated by her daughter having recently turned eighteen herself, which in part inspired her to tell her story — she knew she must do what she had always done: write.
More aware than anybody else, of course, of her being so directly and immediately associated with Salinger (which is the foundation for much of the awful and stupid criticism directed towards her and her memoir, and even led to implications in her professional career), Joyce Maynard has been explicitly clear in the purpose of her memoir, saying as such in the preface to its 2013 edition. She writes that in deciding to write her memoir, she had chosen to tell her story, not a story about Salinger; he just chose to make himself a part of it.
And her story continued, of course. Just like Claire Douglas, she has published more works than the man they are both so associated with. She has written ten novels to date, two of which have been adapted into films (1995’s To Die For, starring Nicole Kidman and Joaquin Phoenix, and 2013’s Labor Day, starring Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin). She has written several non-fiction books, including another memoir The Best of Us (2017), which focuses on her relationship and marriage with and untimely death of Jim Barringer in 2016. She has also published hundreds of essays in countless publications. Her most recent work is the novel Count the Ways, which was published last summer — and I hope to finally start it soon — and her next expected book is to focus on her return to university; in 2018, she returned to Yale as a sophomore student to complete the degree that she had left behind forty-six years earlier, to live with the man who chose to make himself a part of her story.
In writing her 1998 memoir, she used her voice, the ‘most powerful tool most of us possess,’ she writes. In doing so, she was able to, twenty-five years on, recognise the truth. In her 2021 Vanity Fair article — discussed more below — she reflects on her experience with J.D. Salinger, writing:
I was groomed to be the sexual partner of a narcissist who nearly derailed my life.
Jean Miller, in her interview for the 2013 Salinger project, has said regarding Joyce’s memoir:
That poor girl — he was so casual and cold to her. She was very courageous in breaking the code that we all had, not verbally but emotionally, signed onto: don’t talk.
**
Having mentioned, just now as well as countless times throughout, David Shields and Shane Salerno’s 2013 Salinger project, it would be worthwhile to consider it more closely, namely the very justifiable criticisms Joyce Maynard has levelled against it.
In her New York Times article titled ‘Was Salinger Too Pure for This World?’ Joyce gives her opinion on the two-hour Salinger documentary film that had aired the previous week (with the oral biography being released alongside it). In it, she writes of how Shields and Salerno’s work frames Salinger’s PTSD as the explanation for his lifelong interest in young girls. As well as considering this tied up with his need to recreate his relationship with Oona O’Neill before the Second World War in 1941, this very quickly is framed not just as an explanation for his actions but as a justification for them (which we all know too well is so consistent with the defence of other famous, predatory men, but also abusive men more generally, in any and every context). Though this consideration of Salinger — of focusing on his relationship with Oona and the war that followed — is also taken up by Josef Benson in his J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye: A Cultural History, I don’t think he seeks to frame Salinger as sympathetically as Shields and Salerno so obviously do, as well as all the famous talking heads throughout the documentary and quoted in the biography. The film and oral biography are so centred around Salinger that when it comes to discussing a few of these women and girls, it’s only concerned with him and his trauma, instead of theirs, so manipulated and abused by him. (This apparent need to frame Salinger as the central focus is seen in that two separate sources referenced for this essay are titled ‘J.D. Salinger’s Women.’ It’s a shorter title, I’ll give them that, but an unnecessary, unsuitable, and harmful one.)
By centring it around the man himself — and indulging so much in his fictional stories while doing so — constructs the image of the tortured artist, a man with a broken psyche who withdrew from the world and wished only for his privacy (and so speaking out against him at all is a gross violation, one where harsh, misogynistic criticism against women like Joyce Maynard is therefore rightly deserved), and so, in short, Salinger is the true victim here, we’re told. Indeed, we’re told his life, according to film historian Richard Schickel, was ‘normal.’ There is nothing to see. ‘Stop the presses,’ writes film critic David Edelstein, Salinger was just an ordinary man who ‘liked pretty young girls.’ Edelstein even goes out of his way to state that Jean Miller was ‘legal’ when her and Salinger had sex, as though that’s all that matters. It doesn’t matter that he met her when she was fourteen and then, in her own words, courted her.
And so J.D. Salinger, like with many such men, staggers this line between being apparently completely ordinary, where no evaluation of his relationships with young women and girls needs to be had, and being an ‘icon,’ a ‘god,’ as Joyce Maynard writes, where any evaluation necessarily concludes that his actions were entirely explainable and justified. (Salinger purists love to overlook the problematic behaviour of his fictional characters.)
Further, the women and girls mentioned in the documentary are only a fraction of the total. Joyce alone has said that she has received, since publishing her memoir, countless letters that reveal more than a dozen have had Salinger make himself a part of their story, one way or another. In one case, Salinger was writing letters to a teenage girl when he was currently living with Joyce herself as a teenager.
In her 2013 piece, Joyce makes it clear that her relationship with Salinger, as well as the relationships of all the others, was consensual, but calls into question the ethics of people, namely men, who use their power — within and conferred by the patriarchy — to bring about an emotional and sexual relationship with someone considerably younger. But then, how consensual are these relationships? Particularly those with Salinger, predicated on predation and abuse? When considering the coercion and predation inherent to their relationships with Salinger, it necessitates questioning to what extent consent can even be given. (Personally, I don’t think it can, but it’s not for me to put words in a survivor’s mouth.)
In 2018, she wrote another New York Times piece titled ‘Was She J.D. Salinger’s Predator or His Prey?’ In it, she writes about how, even twenty years on, her and her 1998 memoir still receive consistent criticism for having spoken out about the abuse she suffered, as this — more importantly to her critics, which we have seen with Shirlie Blaney in part one — shattered the privacy of a man so revered. Hoping her experience would be recontextualised within the #MeToo movement that has since emerged, she writes of hoping her experience would be received differently now than it was twenty years ago — never mind twenty years before that when she was actually living through it — but little seems to have changed. She tells the truth, but nothing changes.
Another example, from an endless list to choose from, is Dylan Farrow’s allegations of sexual molestation against her father Woody Allen when she was seven years old, in 1992. It was said to have taken place eight months after Dylan’s adoptive mother Mia Farrow had learned of him having an affair, instigating a sexual relationship with another of her adoptive daughters, twenty-two-year-old Soo-Yi Previn. (They eventually married in 1997, with a forty-year age gap between them.)
Joyce Maynard herself draws a parallel between these predatory actions of Woody Allen and those of J.D. Salinger. In April of last year, she wrote a Vanity Fair article titled ‘“Predatory Men With a Taste for Teenagers” Joyce Maynard on the Chilling Parallels Between Woody Allen and J.D. Salinger,’ in which she considers the silencing of women’s voices when they attempt to speak out against these powerful and artistically adored men. (Both men’s work prominently feature older men in relationships with, or have clear interests towards, significantly younger girls.) She writes of the endless misogynistic hate she has faced since the publication of her memoir in 1998, and has continued to face in the years since, and notes that it’s practically identical to that which Dylan and Mia Farrow still experience, as people scramble to defend the great auteur Woody Allen. Just as Salinger has been framed as the true victim, those on Allen’s side have worked hard to shift the narrative in their favour, to one that paints Mia Farrow as a vengeful, jealous older woman, one who has brainwashed her daughter in order to get revenge on her past partner, a man more powerful than her.
The vitriolic hate Mia Farrow has faced (‘I’d like to smash her face in’) is typical of the aggressively misogynistic attacks directed towards women who speak out against their male abusers in a world designed to keep them quiet. The same can be said about the utterly venomous hate directed towards Amber Heard in the recent Depp v. Heard defamation trial. (Maynard herself has written about this, and I was sincerely surprised to read that those were her opinions. It was a deeply unpleasant read.)
Three Girls
Before continuing to discuss the experiences of women which are, to varying degrees, known to us, there are many who have had differing experiences with J.D. Salinger throughout his life that have hardly been documented, that are little known to us at all, as mentioned above.
These following experiences are the ones that we at least know something about.
In At Home in the World, Joyce Maynard writes of hearing about several instances of Salinger becoming involved with young women in much the same way she had been years before: beginning with letters. After her divorce from Steve Bethel (finalised in 1991), she and her children moved to Keene, in New Hampshire. They began to settle in, making it their home, with her continuing to write novels and pieces for magazines about family life. She began to make new friends. One was the mother of her daughter’s friend, who had recently moved to Keene from Cornish. She mentioned that she herself had not met J.D. Salinger, but her younger daughter Mary had, and that Salinger was crazy about her. This is as much as we know.
Joyce, in her interview for the 2013 Salinger project, also mentions a young woman from the United Kingdom who had exchanged over a hundred pages of letters with Salinger. From when and over what amount of time, I cannot determine. What we do know, however, is that Salinger then flew all the way to Edinburgh to see her. He had intended to tour with her the Scottish setting that was represented in the Hitchcock film The 39 Steps, one of the many old films he enjoyed. Apparently, however, when Salinger finally saw her in person, she did not represent the small and youthful ideal he was so attracted to, and he quickly left. She never heard from him again.
Another experience is that of a college student in 1977 or 1978, when Salinger would have been around sixty years old. For a while, they exchanged letters with each other, her in California and him in New Hampshire. How their correspondence began, however, like with the young woman in Scotland, is not known; one might assume they contacted him, perhaps writing a fan letter to express their feelings towards his work, but considering he deliberately isolated himself from the world as his fame as a writer reached its peak, his choice to respond to such letters — if he even opened them at all — seems unlikely. Unless he was able to determine that the authors of these letters were young women? Salinger only wrote letters to women who had captured his attention — on the television, for example, as is discussed below — and as far as I can tell, the women mentioned here were not actresses, were not famous at all, otherwise that would certainly have been mentioned.
One day, she flew all the way from California to meet him in New Hampshire on the East Coast. The two of them met up at a diner, but just as quickly as he left Scotland, he sent her away back to the West Coast. She was devastated. She later tried to get a job in Hanover so she could live in a neighbouring town to Salinger (this was the same town Joyce had first met him in person around six years earlier). She was refused it. This was because the person who had put out the job advertisement was an acquaintance of Salinger’s, so he knew not to hire her. She continued to try to get close to him, such that he soon filed a police complaint against her. As a result, this young woman suffered a breakdown and was hospitalised for a period of time. (She continued to write letters to Salinger afterwards, which he would then turn in to the police.)
Of course Salinger was within his right to refuse further communication with her if she made him feel uncomfortable (though we don’t know the reason why he suddenly no longer wanted to see her, and one cannot forget the deeply problematic thought process of his which drove him to leave Scotland immediately). And no doubt this is as far as many like Shields and Salerno would take it, so easily wishing to defend Salinger and other such great and powerful men. But that’s what is overlooked: their power. This young woman flew all the way across the United States to be near him; he is not absolved of responsibility here, his coldness and his power contributed to the mental harm she faced and the breakdown and hospitalisation that it resulted in.
Elaine Joyce
The experiences of many young women and girls with J.D. Salinger are not known to us at all (their names are not even known) and many are only briefly mentioned. His fixation on young actresses — stemming from his hurt and the sense of entitlement he felt towards Oona O’Neill and seen through Jean Miller’s experience with him, discussed in part one — persisted throughout his life. He was a huge fan of films and television, as Joyce Maynard’s experience of living with him can attest to, and would frequently try to contact actresses that caught his attention. He would make phone calls and write unasked-for letters to them and use his fame — his power — to get their time and attention, often by introducing himself as the author of The Catcher in the Rye, a book that he, as is often considered, regretted writing for his whole life because of the fame it gave him. He seemed to have no problem with his fame when using it to his advantage, however.
One actress we know of who he approached this way was the then thirty-six-year-old Elaine Joyce. She received a letter from the sixty-two-year-old in 1981 while she was starring in the television sitcom Mr. Merlin. In the letter, Salinger praised her for her work and suggested that the two of them meet. Elaine recalls being ‘shocked’: ‘I really didn’t believe it.’
She wrote back and a correspondence ensued. They eventually met, spending much of their time together in New York, just as Salinger had with Oona forty years earlier. About their relationship, she has said:
We were very, very private, but you do what you do when you date — you shop, you go to dinner, you go to the theater. It was just as he wanted it.
They were together for a short time in the early 1980s. ‘You could say there was a romance,’ Elaine has said.
Because so little is known about their relationship, we cannot determine the nature of it (as I’ve said about his and Sylvia Welter’s marriage, discussed in part one). Although Elaine, at the time of their relationship, was older than the other women discussed here, it is still — and I regret that this frames her around the man — indicative of Salinger’s persistent interest in women significantly younger than himself. It’s wrong to put words in her mouth but it’s equally wrong to ignore the clear, lifelong patterns in Salinger’s behaviour and actions towards young women.
I know the discourse around age gaps in relationships is deeply problematic — particularly when the rhetoric of grooming is used towards queer couples — and I don’t at all mean to remove the agency of the older women in their relationships with Salinger, infantilising them, but it being very clear that Salinger was a predator, I think it’s necessary to detail every relationship on which I can find information.
Catherine Oxenberg
Another young actress who Salinger contacted in a way similar to Elaine Joyce was the then twenty-six-year-old Catherine Oxenberg in 1987. She had been appearing on the soap opera Dynasty around this time. I cannot determine if she responded to any of his correspondence.
According to Salinger biographer Ian Hamilton, the sixty-eight-year-old fell in love with Catherine and left his reclusive dwelling in Cornish, New Hampshire on the East Coast (where the famous ‘recluse’ had been living since 1953) and travelled all the way to the West Coast to pursue her. Reports in the press at the time said that Salinger showed up unannounced at the Hollywood studio where Catherine was filming and had to be escorted away. (Even more deeply distressing is that this mirrors the actions of Catcher in the Rye-inspired obsessive and misogynist Robert John Bardo in his efforts to track down actress and model Rebecca Shaeffer two years later in 1989, before pursuing her again and murdering her.) When these reports appeared in newspapers, through his lawyers, Salinger tried to contact Catherine’s agent to threaten a lawsuit. None was ever filed.
Jean Miller has said of him stalking Catherine:
The trip to Hollywood to see Catherine Oxenberg — I just didn’t want that to be true, but I knew how he felt about child actresses. It was just acting, so it was just as phony as anything else. It’s just as phony as a rock musician playing the same thing over and over again and getting the audience all riled up, and then stalking off the stage filled with ego.
Catherine’s experience represents one of many in which Salinger used his power — both as a man, moreover a significantly older man, and as a celebrity — to gain control over them. Many of these experiences, however, are hardly known, hardly documented beyond a brief mention, if at all (and let alone from their own perspectives, though that is, of course, not their fault), which, as we see is still the case, makes it difficult to prosecute these predatory men and deliver what justice is possible.
Colleen O’Neill
As with many women’s experiences discussed here, little is known about Colleen O’Neill or her relationship with J.D. Salinger. This is even more striking, perhaps, because of how long their relationship lasted. And so just like with Elaine Joyce’s experience, the nature of their relationship cannot be determined. Having said that, the tiny sliver of information we have about Colleen and her perspective suggests she was very happy with him, and him with her — though the substantial age gap between them cannot be overlooked.
In the later chapters of her 1998 memoir, Joyce Maynard writes of the first time she found out that Salinger had been writing to other women. Though by this time, she been able to process somewhat her relationship with Salinger, she noticed that she was ‘unable to speak’ after being told by writer Phyllis Theroux that a nanny she had hired a couple of years earlier in 1980 had been receiving letters from the same man. Salinger’s manipulation of Joyce, which sought to convince her that she was special, unique (which is reflected in what she thought in the aftermath of their relationship, notably after he briefly visited her one final time for fifteen minutes, with his son alongside him), was now proven to be that: manipulation. The nanny hired was twenty-one-year-old Colleen O’Neill.
Her correspondence with Salinger began a couple of years earlier. In 1977 or 1978, when she was eighteen or nineteen, she was taking a bus to the annual Winter Carnival at Dartmouth College, in the town of Hanover, New Hampshire. (This was where Claire Douglas had returned to complete her degree a few years earlier.) It’s said that on the long journey there, she began a conversation with a much older man, around sixty, who was sat next to her. When the bus had reached its destination, she still had a few miles to travel, planning to take a taxi or find another bus. The stranger sat next to her, however, offered to give her lift. She accepted. They exchanged names (he told her his name was Jerry Salinger, to which she responded, ‘Do you mean J.D. Salinger?’ which makes clear right away the power imbalance between them) as well as addresses, and began writing to each other. Considering the time, this would mean Salinger’s correspondence with Colleen overlapped with the young woman who flew all the way from California to be nearer to him. Their correspondence may also have overlapped with Salinger’s very private relationship with actress Elaine Joyce in the early 1980s.
At first, it appeared to Colleen to be more of a chore: ‘Do nails. Wash hair. Write J. D. Salinger,’ as Phyllis explained to Joyce Colleen’s initial attitude to the letters. Though it was apparent to both Colleen and Salinger that he was the famous one, the powerful one. This sense of obligation Colleen felt (‘how she owed him a letter,’ as Phyllis recalls her framing it), even though there was no apparent hint of romance, we’re told, still suggests that Salinger was using his power to take her time and attention. Considering Colleen has said (briefly) that her relationship with Salinger was a happy one, I do not mean to put words in her mouth and assume she did not enjoy writing and receiving these letters, but it cannot be forgotten Salinger’s clear history of predation and coercion towards younger women, which so often started with the writing of letters.
Throughout the time Colleen was working for Phyllis, in the summer of 1980, she received frequent telephone calls from a young man called Mike who she had met back in Maryland before getting the job. He was in love with her and wanted her to move back south. She was torn as she too adored him but had always wished to travel.
She eventually moved back, and the two of them got married. At the time, Mike had a nine-month-old son, left by the child’s mother for a reason I cannot determine. In marrying him, Colleen decided to leave her college course, committing herself entirely to raising his baby, whom she adopted. Theirs was a happy marriage, it’s said, and a happy family life, raising their son — Mike, Jr. — together. Colleen soon proudly revealed that she had received letters from J.D. Salinger. Mike was okay with this.
During the years of their marriage, it seemed Colleen — once a devout Catholic — had begun to develop a deep interest in Christian Science, just as Salinger had. Then on the day of Thanksgiving in 1985, when all of the family would arrive later, she called Mike at work to tell him she was leaving him and their now four-year-old-son.
When she moved out (after a brief stay at her sister’s), all Mike had to contact her was a PO box address in Windsor, Vermont, to which he wrote letters asking why — concerned for her mental health, thinking she might have suffered a breakdown — every day for two years. While writing these letters, divorce papers were sent to him, which he signed. It’s said Colleen visited Mike and Mike, Jr. a couple of times each year, but they were never allowed to visit her. She sent $50 of child support each month, as well as a sum of cash equal to Mike, Jr.’s age each year on his birthday. The return addresses on these envelopes was the PO box in Windsor, Vermont.
This is all as of 1997, for the story is according to Mike himself, documented by Joyce Maynard. In trying to find out more about Colleen O’Neill’s story and by extension her own, Joyce, in writing her memoir, tried to get in contact with Mike, and was able to. ‘After all these years, finally there might be some kind of explanation,’ Mike said when Joyce told him why she had reached out to him after being made aware of him through Phyllis Theroux. (Phyllis had shown her pictures of Colleen and Mike’s wedding day — this is why she recognised Colleen when at Salinger’s doorstep on that dark afternoon in November 1997).
**
What Mike does not mention, however, but is clearly implied, is the reason why she left — or was made to leave. The pattern of having to give up everything has been seen time and time again throughout this essay. To be with Salinger, one must commit. One must submit. We simply do not know any more about Colleen and Salinger’s relationship at this point, however. Perhaps she became interested in Christian Science independent of Salinger and decided to write to him about it, which no doubt increased his fascination with her. Or perhaps she became interested in it through Salinger and his letters to her. One thing that we simply do not know is for how long they wrote to each other. Phyllis Theroux says they were only corresponding for a few months in 1980, and if so, when did they get back in touch? Because she was willing to show her letters to her employer at the time, as well as mentioning them to her husband, it has been said that the contents of the letters must have indeed not been romantic at all, that they were simply ‘mildly amusing reports of household goings-on with his son, his garden, his house,’ according to Phyllis. But did the nature of the letters later change? And from there, Salinger’s powerful influence dictated that she must cut ties with everybody she knew in order to live with him. It is clear she did move in with him, with the Vermont PO box being to preserve her and Salinger’s privacy — or rather his privacy, which she was now a part of.
There is another overlap here. Not only does his early correspondence with Colleen overlap with that which he had with other young women, but his relationship with her — likely beginning in 1985, when she left, or was made to leave, Mike and Mike, Jr. — overlapped with Salinger’s predation towards actress Catherine Oxenberg, flying all the way to Hollywood in 1987 to stalk her.
A year later, in 1988, Colleen and Salinger were married. She was twenty-nine at the time, with Salinger forty years her senior.
According to residents of the small town of Cornish, Colleen seemed sincerely in love with Salinger, loving him for who he was. Little seems to be known about her besides that she is a nurse, a quilt-maker, and a very lovely person. (It has been said that her quilts are exquisite, but her husband was quick to dismiss them, as he did so often, frequently berating women. In reference to her quilts, he has said, ‘It’s been my experience that people who excel at that kind of work never possess a really fine mind.’ Colleen seemingly had to put up with this.) Ethel Nelson, a Cornish resident and once nanny to Claire Douglas and J.D. Salinger’s children during their marriage in the 1950s and 60s, has described her as ‘delightful.’ She has also said of their marriage:
From what I understand, their marriage came to be so that she could take care of him, because at this time he’s pretty feeble and he really needs someone there with him. […] Colleen is a giving person and I think she saw a need there and she fulfilled it. She could take care of him. She could make his elderly life a little more comfortable.
It has been said that one time, Colleen was mistaken for being Salinger’s daughter, to which Salinger had to respond clarifying she was his wife. This no doubt reflects the lifelong Salinger had about his attraction towards women substantially younger than himself. The forty-year age gap was clearly noticed by many of their town’s fellow residents.
Margaret Salinger, J.D. Salinger’s daughter, who was thirty-three at the time her father married Colleen — who was four years younger than her new stepdaughter — recalls in her memoir Dream Catcher that Colleen and her father were, at one point, trying for a baby, as her father was nearing eighty years old. (The same can be said of her father with Joyce Maynard many years earlier.) Margaret writes of beginning to question Colleen about their decision to have a child, what their life would be like in the reclusive world her father inhabited, but then stops, feeling as though she was talking to a girl ‘too young to be having sex, about responsibility and consequences, hurling limp reason at a dream glowing in the moonlight.’ (They did not have any children. Recall, however, Salinger’s changed attitudes towards his second wife Claire Douglas when she was pregnant with Margaret. One can wonder how or if his attitude would be different years later with Joyce or Colleen — though it did not seem to be according to Margaret, when she was pregnant with her own child thirty years later.)
This is as much as is known about their marriage. Salinger’s privacy must, to a significant degree, be rooted in his insecurity around and the legality of his perverse interest in women and girls many years younger than himself. His need for privacy only intensified as the years went on; if it became widely known that he was married to a woman forty years younger than himself, who he met when she a teenager, his other, previous relationships with young girls — some even younger — might be brought to attention.
**
The couple lived out their days together in seclusion until J.D. Salinger died of natural causes in January 2010, aged ninety-one. In an email she sent to Valley News following her husband’s death, she wrote:
Cornish is a truly remarkable place. This beautiful spot afforded my husband a place of awayness from the world. The people of this town protected him and his right to his privacy for many years. I hope, and believe, they will do the same for me.
After their many years of marriage, Colleen Salinger, upon her husband’s death, became, along with his son Matt Salinger, coexecutor of his literary estate. (One fact I’m always reminded of is that Matt, an actor, played the character of Danny Burke in the sickening 1984 film Revenge of the Nerds, a portrayal, I assume, he regrets, now adopting the suave persona of Great Male Writer’s Son since becoming more public in recent years.) They are tightly holding onto his writing, only releasing them in line with strict guidelines from Salinger. This alone must suggest a close relationship between Colleen and her husband — though, again, the substantial age gap and power imbalance present from the beginning of their relationship cannot go overlooked, nor can the nature of their eventual marriage, considering Colleen had to distance herself from everyone she knew, just as his previous wife had to. Margaret writes that, at the time of her writing her memoir — ten years into her father’s third marriage — Salinger was still putting Colleen ‘through the wringer about contact with her family.’
As mentioned, many of the experiences of young women and girls with J.D. Salinger throughout his long life have hardly been documented beyond a passing mention, if at all (and their lack of disclosure around their experiences is often used by apologists and deniers as defence against Salinger, against these men). Only in a couple of instances do we hear from them themselves: in the moving and distressing accounts of Jean Miller and Joyce Maynard, as well as the occasional words of Claire Douglas through those who knew her closely.
The telling of their experiences, by those able and willing — bravely standing in solidarity with countless other victims and survivors who weren’t or aren’t or may never be able to or want to speak out — and by those who have a duty to listen and amplify their long-silenced voices, has a profound healing power.
To finish with Joyce Maynard’s final words in her Vanity Fair article:
I’m a woman. I told the truth.
References
Alexander, P. (1998) ‘J.D. Salinger’s Women,’ New York, 9 February. Available at: https://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/features/2162/ (Accessed: 18 January 2022).
Benson, J. (2018) J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye: A Cultural History. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.
Elias, B. (2019) ‘J.D. Salinger Was A Shockingly Creepy Womanizer Who Took Home Underaged Girls Into His 60s,’ Ranker, 26 February. Available at: https://www.ranker.com/list/jd-salinger-love-and-relationships/beth-elias (Accessed: 18 January 2022).
Halpin, M. (2010) ‘Salinger: “Recluse” with an ugly history of women,’ Salon, 9 February. Available at: https://www.salon.com/2010/02/09/jd_salinger_and_the_women/ (Accessed: 18 January 2022).
Hummel, K. and Wood, S. (2015) ‘Salinger’s Fictional and Non-Fictional Love Affairs,’ Cabrini College Salinger Project, 1 June. Available at: https://ccsalinger.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/salingers-fictional-and-non-fictional-love-affairs/ (Accessed: 18 January 2022).
Maynard, J. (1999) At Home in the World: A Memoir. New York: Anchor Books.
Maynard, J. (2013) ‘Was Salinger Too Pure for This World?’ The New York Times, 14 September. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/opinion/sunday/was-salinger-too-pure-for-this-world.html (Accessed: 30 May 2022).
Maynard, J. (2018) ‘Was She J.D. Salinger’s Predator or His Prey?’ The New York Times, 5 September. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/books/review/joyce-maynard-at-home-in-the-world.html (Accessed: 26 May 2022).
Maynard, J. (2021) ‘“Predatory Men With a Taste for Teenagers” Joyce Maynard on the Chilling Parallels Between Woody Allen and J.D. Salinger,’ Vanity Fair, 1 April. Available at: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2021/04/joyce-maynard-on-chilling-parallels-woody-allen-and-jd-salinger (Accessed: 18 January 2022).
Salinger, M.A. (2001) Dream Catcher: A Memoir. Glasgow: Scribner.
Schmidt, D. (2015) ‘J.D. Salinger’s Women,’ Cabrini College Salinger Project, 1 June. Available at: https://ccsalinger.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/j-d-salingers-women/ (Accessed: 18 January 2022).
Shields, D. and Salerno, S. (2014) Salinger. London: Simon & Schuster.
