To many Salinger partisans, the sale may seem an unpardonable breach. Last fall Maynard broke her silence about their affair in “At Home in the World,” a memoir full of details about Salinger–his obsession with homeopathy, his vault of unpublished manuscripts. The book pointed up the gulf between the compulsively private Salinger and the almost exhibitionistic Maynard, a novelist and journalist who’s written about everything from her divorce to her breast implants. Selling the letters, she says, is practical. “I’m a single mother of three children,” explains Maynard, 45, from her home in California. “I don’t feel any embarrassment at the financial reality of being a writer who’s not J. D. Salinger.”
Despite the auction, the letters to Maynard aren’t likely to become widely public. While potential bidders may read them under the watchful eye of a Sotheby’s employee, no one can publish them–not even Maynard. “The person who writes the letter owns the words, and the person to whom the letter is addressed owns the letter,” explains Martin Garbus, a copyright expert. In a suit that Salinger brought in 1987, the court ruled that a would-be biographer, Ian Hamilton, couldn’t quote unpublished Salinger letters.
The new letters are hardly lurid or full of secrets–Maynard already described them in her memoir. Yet actually reading them–some are typed, some handwritten on yellow paper in red or black ink, in a clear, slanted hand–is a treat. You hear an echo of the voice that wrote “The Catcher in the Rye”–the clean immediacy of the language, the down-to-earth colloquialisms. Salinger may quote Seneca, but he writes more about what he likes to watch on TV (“Andy Griffith” and “I Love Lucy”). He talks tenderly about his two kids from a former marriage–taking his son to a ball game, his daughter’s getting her driver’s license. “They’re wonderful things in those letters,” notes Maynard. “But there’s also an enormous amount of bitterness and disdain for the world.”
And yes, these are love letters–but without a hint of sexual indiscretion. Instead, Salinger is seductive in his praise of Maynard’s writing, her mind, his suggestion that they are soul mates. He signs off, “Love, Jerry.” What bright but naive 18-year-old with literary ambitions wouldn’t fall for this from a brilliant, sensitive, famous writer?
Writer Joyce Carol Oates says she has “mixed feelings” about the sale of the letters but notes that the press has treated Salinger “like he’s sacrosanct… How old was he then? He must have known at the time that this was reckless behavior.” And Maynard apparently wasn’t the only woman to whom Salinger, now 80 and remarried, wrote. Oates says she has a close woman friend who had an affair with Salinger and has letters from him. Maynard herself has heard of others. “It was a painful discovery that there had been other girls,” she says. “But it began to set me free from the worship of this man who had presided over my life for so long.” When his letters go on the block in June, Maynard will be there to hear the gavel fall.
