At Home in the World

Joyce Maynard's memoir At Home in the World is an attempt to make peace with herself. At times, however, it's hard not to see it as an act of war--on her parents and, most notably, on J.D. Salinger. Maynard's account of her year-long relationship with the reclusive writer is the centerpiece of the book and the publicity pivot on which it turns. And how not? She first encountered Salinger when he wrote her a fan letter following her world-weary but not necessarily wordly wise New York Times Magazine cover piece, "An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life." He was then 53 and, as Maynard paraphrases, wanted her "to know that I could be a real writer, if I would just look out for myself, as no other person is likely to." By the time she was 19, she was living with the increasingly controlling Salinger and doing her best to adhere to his regimens, from homeopathy at any price to a mostly macrobiotic diet heavy on frozen peas. (Lamb burgers, formed into patties and then frozen--before being cooked at a dysentery-friendly 150 degrees--also figure heavily.) What's worse, he does his best to turn the hugely driven young woman into a mistrusting, publicity-shy prig, not to mention helping her perfect her already anorexic bent. Maynard is such a skilled writer that it's hard not to take her side as the relationship falters. In fact, even when it's going well, it's not easy to sympathize with a man whose idea of an endearment is, "I couldn't have made up a character of a girl I'd love better than you." But Maynard is as hard on her younger self as she is on the great man. Though she had published intimate essays since her early teens, and long been feted for her "honesty," it has taken the overachiever many years to realize that she had carefully left out her most personal burdens--her father's alcoholism, her mother's nighttime "snuggling" and overwhelming intrusions, the distance between her and her older sister. Still, At Home in the World is more than a clearing-house for past parental and amorous wrongs. It's a cautionary tale about using language and the pretense of truth to obscure key realities. One of the many curiosities in this discomfiting book? Salinger dreamt that he and Maynard had a child together: "I saw her face clearly. Her name was Bint ." The World War II veteran then looks up the word. "What do you know," he says. "It's archaic British, for little girl." Maynard never, even now, has questioned his definition. In fact, it's slang, used especially in World War II, for prostitute . When Salinger forced the 19-year-old to clear her things out of his New Hampshire house, she was still unaware of the word's force. "On the window of Jerry's bedroom, where the glass is dusty, I write, with my finger, the name of the child we had talked about: BINT." --Kerry Fried From Publishers Weekly Maynard, novelist (Baby Love; To Die For) essayist, columnist and Web-page chatteuse, was a freshman at Yale in April 1972 when the New York Times Magazine published her cover article, "An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life." Of the hundreds of letters she received, one from the reclusive J.D. Salinger, then 53, praising her talent and warning her against the dangers of early success, struck a particular chord. Maynard quickly wrote back and, following a summer of letters, phone calls and visits to Cornish, N.H., she dropped out of Yale and moved in with him. Maynard's observant, straight-faced presentation of what are nonetheless often hilarious events chez Salinger has to be one of the shrewdest deflations of a literary reputation on record. What's plain and most damaging is the nature of Jerry's interest in Joyce, who looked about 11 and who arrived for her first visit in a dress almost identical to one she wore in first grade. Maynard poignantly describes her alienation and isolation, which Salinger reinforced before cruelly discarding her. Unable for legal reasons to quote Salinger's letters, Maynard nevertheless makes the reader see why his words so captivated her: "I fell in love with his voice on the page," she says. Once she moved in, however, Jerry began to sound like an aging Holden Caulfield, abrasive and contemptuous. Maynard takes too long setting up her family history pre-Salinger and far too long recounting her life since, inadvertently revealing why Salinger and others seem to have wearied of her. But her painstaking honesty about herself lends credence to her portrayal of Salinger as something worse than a cranky eccentric. This will be a hard story to ignore. First serial to Vanity Fair. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal "For over thirty years Jerry Salinger has sought his protection in privacy and silence. I have come to believe that my greatest protection comes in self-disclosure." Unfortunately, as this creepy and pathetic memoir reveals, Maynard's self-protection comes at the expense of the notoriously reclusive author of Catcher in the Rye. Since the age of 18, when a cover story in the New York Times Magazine brought her to the attention of the public (and Mr. Salinger), Maynard (Where Loves Goes, LJ 7/93) has been writing, mostly about herself. (One critic dubbed her "Me-Me-Me Maynard.") Here discretion is not her middle name. Besides the already-reported details of her ten-month-affair with Salinger (his unsuccessful homeopathic treatments for her frigidity, his enjoyment of The Andy Griffith Show), Maynard goes into excessive detail about other aspects of her personal life (her father's alcoholism, her bulimia, her bitter divorce, her breast implants, etc.). Strangely, she says little about her parents' reaction when in 1972 she dropped out of Yale, forfeited the tuition money, and moved in with the 53-year-old Salinger. This is compelling in a horrifying way (like gawking at a car wreck), but in the end, the reader finishes it feeling a bit soiled.?Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. If you don't want to invade the privacy of J. D. Salinger, you can shun altogether Joyce Maynard's memoir, AT HOME IN THE WORLD. Or you can skip the rest of the chapters and move on to her remarkable life. But if you follow either of the above paths, you'll miss a portrait of a comic genius, Salinger himself. Perhaps Ms. Maynard didn't intend to draw humor from a painful episode, but that's what she did for me and I laughed over the eccentricity of the hermit of Cornish. Surely he's laughing himself, unlike the solemn asses now shooting their squibs at this wry, painful, engaging book. -- Frank McCourt, author of ANGELA'S ASHES Joyce Maynard was born and raised in New Hampshire. She is the author of several books, includin g To Die For, Where Love Goes, Domestic Affairs, Baby Talk, and her memoir Looking Back, which she wrote at the age of eighteen. Joyce Maynard has written for many national publications, including The New York Times Magazine , Parenting and Good Housekeeping . She lives in Mill Valley, California, with her three children. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter OneTHE HOUSE WHERE I grew up, in Durham, New Hampshire, is the only one on the street with a fence surrounding it. That fit. Our family—my mother, my father, my older sister, Rona, and I—never belonged in that town. Or anywhere else, it seemed to me, but in that house, with one another, like a country unto ourselves, a tiny principality with a population of four. Arguably three, since my sister tried to remove herself as much as possible.There was a phrase we used in our family: “one of us.” We didn’t use it often, but what it meant was that we’d encountered a person who might get inside the fence and enter the fortress of our family. No one ever did, fully. The only ones who were truly “one of us” were ourselves.My father comes into my room just after six every morning and wakes me with the snap of my window blinds. “Time to get up, chum,” he says. Four decades since he lived there last, you can still hear England in his voice. Years later, when I’m in my thirties and beyond, and he’s long dead, I will sometimes be at a movie and Sir John Gielgud appears on the screen, and, though he looks nothing like my father, the sound of his voice will be enough to make me cry.There’s no unkindness in the way my father wakes me. He simply believes it’s an unconscionable waste to stay in bed when the sun is shining. Or even if it’s not. My whole life, I have been unable to sleep late.Every morning, my father brings my mother coffee in bed, then comes back down to make his breakfast. He’ll be eating it when I come down the stairs. Porridge, maybe, or an egg. He always reads while he eats breakfast. It might be the letters of Harold Nicolson, or the journals of Simone Weil. Although he knows Paradise Lost by heart—eighteenth-century literature is his field of specialty, and he teaches it at the University of New Hampshire—he may still read over a passage from Milton that he’ll be lecturing on today. Sometimes my father will read the Bible at breakfast—another book he knows well.My father’s parents were British Fundamentalist missionaries who left the Salvation Army because of its excessively liberal teachings to join a sect known as the Plymouth Brethren. The second to last of their seven children, my father, Max Maynard, was born sometime around the year 1900, in India, where his parents had come to proselytize. Of the many mysteries that surround my father’s family, the first concerned the date of his birth. He claimed his parents told him they were so occupied with the Lord they hadn’t written it down. I never met my father’s parents, or any parents so consumed with God that they’d forget the year of their child’s birth. If nothing else, the story told me something about my father’s perception of them.As a small child, my father had loved to act and sing, but his deepest passion was for painting. He had known for a long time that he wanted to make art, but hadn’t dared ask his parents for paints. When he was ten, he finally got himself a paintbox, which became his most treasured possession. He painted and read constantly, and with so much reckless abandon that he broke the inviolate rule of his household, to observe the Sabbath with no activity but reading of the scripture. His older brother saw him painting and reported the news to their parents.His father called him to his study.“Bring me your paints,” he said, and when my father delivered them, his father placed them in his desk drawer and slammed it shut. “For one year, Max, you shall not paint,” he said.My father broke with the church and with most of his family when he was a young man, having emigrated from England by now and settled in British Columbia. While most of his brothers and sisters pursued a life within the church—one, Theodore Maynard, becoming a moderately well-known Catholic theologian—my father took up with a group of early modern artists in Victoria who were regarded as a radical bunch. One, a much older woman painter named Emily Carr, would become the mentor and inspiration of a group of young modern artists in the twenties and thirties. Several among this group would later become celebrated in Canada, part of what was known as the Group of Seven.From the little I’ve been able to gather of those early years of his—decades before I came on the scene—my father led a bohemian life: making art, making love, making poetry, and waking up with a terrible hangover the next morning. He was a handsome, dashing man—blue-eyed, blond-haired, compactly but athletically built, with the broad shoulders of a powerful swimmer. He had a cleft chin and a strong jaw, but what probably melted the hearts of women, more than his good looks, was his ability to draw and write for them. He could dash off light verse or a romantic sonnet in flawless iambic pentameter, illustrated with a funny or erotic drawing of a couple in mad embrace, or a caricature of himself, on bent knees, holding out an armload of flowers.When I was sixteen I learned my father had been married once before his marriage to my mother. Although that news came as a terrible shock, the stories of my father’s many flamboyantly romantic escapades in Manitoba and British Columbia were almost a source of pride and legend in our household. I think my mother actually derived some pleasure out of the sense of my father’s romantic and rakish past. He used to say she had probably saved his life; it was all so reckless and undisciplined before she “whipped him into shape.”He met her in Winnipeg, where he had fled, on the lam from some romantic disaster. He was hired by the University of Manitoba as a last-minute replacement for another professor—the only reason he could have gotten an academic job with no more in the way of credentials than a bachelor’s degree.His lack of formal training in literature hardly kept him from establishing a reputation as a riveting lecturer. My mother—at nineteen, in her senior year as the English department’s top student—was assigned the job of being his assistant, with the task of reading student papers. Partly, it was supposed, she was serious and sensible enough to withstand his attempts at seduction. She had already earned a reputation as a single-mindedly driven young woman, headed for a brilliant academic career.My mother labored over her first batch of essays with elaborate corrections and comments. After she’d delivered them, he stopped her outside his classroom to compliment her on the job she was doing.“But you mustn’t trouble yourself with tracing plagiarisms as you have,” he told her.“I didn’t trace them,” she said. “I recognized the sources.”Where my father’s story has tended to be murky (relatives we never meet; an ex-wife I learn of only well into my teens; vague talk of a former career as a cowboy, a radio announcer, a diving instructor), my mother’s is so well known to me, from her own rich retellings, it has taken on the aura of mythology.She was born Freidele Bruser, the second daughter and last child of Jewish immigrants who fled the pogroms of Russia for Canada in the early part of the twentieth century. Her father was a shopkeeper and a dreamer—a tender-hearted, not particularly practical man who once opened every box of Cracker Jack in his store to give my mother the particular treat (a tin ring) she longed for. The store—a whole series of them, always named The OK Store—went bankrupt regularly.My grandmother, a woman of fierce ambition and pride in her children, particularly my mother, launched Freidele in the study of elocution, the oral presentation of poetry, popular in rural areas during the Depression. From the age of four, my mother was hustled to the front of grange halls to recite verses—sometimes comic, sometimes sentimental and tragic—in a voice that was not simply loud but strikingly clear, and capable of bringing the crowd to great laughter or tears.All through my growing up, my mother recited poetry to me. In the middle of dinner or driving to the store or hearing me describe an incident that happened on the playground at school, she plucked lines from her head—maybe Shakespeare, maybe Milton—that referred in some way to what was going on in our lives. For as long as she lived, whenever I needed a line of poetry for a paper, or a debate speech, and, one day, for my wedding, I only had to ask my mother.There was more to my mother’s encyclopedic knowledge of literature than the fluke of her photographic memory. She loved poetry, most of all reciting it out loud. Even when she wasn’t quoting poetry, its rhythms were present in her speech, as they were in my father’s.For both my parents, I think there was a sensual pleasure in shaping the words of Keats or Donne or Yeats or Dylan Thomas or Wordsworth. Neither one of my parents played a musical instrument. For them, language was music. They loved the sound of the human voice delivering the best the English language had to offer.They loved rhythm, meter, timbre, inflection. They were performers who knew instinctively when to take the breath, when to lower the voice very slowly, or pause, or linger over a syllable—and they did it so well, even a person who didn’t speak a word of English would know, just listening to them, that this had to be poetry, and pay attention.My mother won the golden Governor General’s Award at the age of sixteen for being the top graduating senior in all of Canada in the year 1938. That earned her a full scholarship to college at... Read more