How to Avoid Salinger Syndrome

By Mark Leyner

Poor Joyce Maynard. Not since Martina Hingis submarined a serve to Steffi Graf in the French Open has a woman been so universally excoriated for underhanded conduct. And all Maynard did was sell a bunch of mash notes she had saved from a boyfriend of 27 years ago to raise college tuition for her children. Except that the boyfriend happened to be J.D. Salinger--the eremite of Cornish, N.H.

For those of you unfamiliar with l'affaire Salinger, here are the highlights. In 1972 Yale undergrad Maynard wrote an article called "An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life." Salinger, who was 53, read the piece and started sending Maynard letters declaring the two were soul mates. Maynard dropped out and moved in with Salinger, making herself throw up, as she puts it. This is interesting because so much of what Maynard does now seems to make other people throw up (New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd called her a "leech" woman and the National Review referred to her as an "opportunistic onetime nymphet"), but such are the vengeful symmetries of pop destiny.

Anyway, Salinger broke off the relationship after less than a year. Maynard kept her mouth shut for 25 years until telling all in a memoir and then putting 14 of Salinger's love letters on the auction block. Peter Norton, a Silicon Valley tycoon, bought the letters last week for $156,000 and announced that he was going to return them to Salinger. For this, Norton has been hailed a noble do-gooder, although I think he's a bit of a killjoy, using his money to quash a nice little scandal right at the beginning of summer.

Obviously, I have no great sympathy for Salinger's privacy mania. If you crave total privacy, don't write books, and if you must, certainly don't publish them. And, for God's sake, lay off the missives. Furthermore, if absolute solitude is your thing, don't have relationships with other people, and surely don't have sex with them. Another good rule of thumb: don't have children. They eventually talk too. Salinger's daughter Margaret ("Peggy") is writing her own memoir about life with Daddy.

I, for one, don't question Maynard's motives in all this. I assume her thinking was: if making this relationship public can provide solace to just one other opportunistic nymphet leech who's had a traumatic affair with a pathologically phobic and exploitative author, then it will all have been worth it.

Call me a skeptic, but I have serious doubts about whether Maynard actually had an affair with Salinger in the first place. Hermetic, paranoid authors all tend to look alike--they're all sort of blurred, at least in the photographs. Maybe she had an affair with Thomas Pynchon, thinking he was Salinger. And how do we know for sure that Salinger actually wrote the letters? Obviously this is pure speculation, but perhaps Patsy Ramsey wrote them. I've heard that handwriting experts who viewed the letters at Sotheby's can't completely rule out that possibility.

Well, as Maynard's therapist asked his beleaguered client: "Where is the lesson in all this?" First of all, if you covet your privacy, never commit anything to writing. If you absolutely must express something to a lover, wife or husband, I recommend the Gambino-family-style "walk and talk." Stroll outside with your interlocutor, covering your mouth with your hand as you converse. Make your conversation as vague as possible, and pepper it with inaudible remarks and gross expletives. Here is an example of a man using this technique to break up with his girlfriend:

John: That thing...that thing I was (inaudible)...I think we're gonna have...you know what I'm talking about...(expletive) ah I coulda done...

Mary: Yeah, that's all (inaudible)...

John: I mean really, uh, really...(expletive). Ya know what I'm saying here?

But if, on the other hand, you're like me, and you don't mind the glare of publicity, then write away! And begin treating everything you compose as if it will someday be published. And I mean everything. Devote real care and imagination to those communications you've typically taken for granted.

For example, in a recent note reminding my daughter to feed the dog, I began with an epigraph from Goethe.

I revised a hastily dashed off Post-it note to my wife ("I'm at the gym--back by 7:30 or so") to read: "I'm engaged in my daily somatic aggrandizement. I'll see you when the crepuscular light imbues your hair with its magenta indolence."

And I'm now on my fourth draft of a note to the plumber about replacing an old cast-iron wastewater line with polyvinyl-chloride pipe. After a fairly straightforward preamble, it veers off into a six-page symbolist idyll about a lake and a passenger-less rowboat "drifting away in errant eddies like a strange and mute child." It's really quite beautiful.

And why not? It might end up auctioned off at Sotheby's. Hey, my plumber's kids deserve to go to college too, ya know.