The September issue of Vanity Fair hasn't yet reached this part of the world so I've had to make do with an article in today's Observer reporting all the excitement whipped up by Joyce Maynard's revelations. There's one apparently fairly recent photograph of Salinger unloading a supermarket trolley for his wife - & another of Miss Maynard. JD, wearing a casual shirt very much like my own, looks eminently reasonable, not angry, not frightened, not startled, just preoccupied handing over the packages & getting on with life generally. Joyce, on the other hand, is pictured staring exophthalmically at the camera as tense & neurotic as you'd expect any poor woman to be with the personal history she ascribes to herself. On these appearances, certainly, it's a no-contest win for our hero. At the same time, I'm pretty sure we shall all come to accept the essential truth of what she reports. And quite a number will be disjointed to think such lofty thoughts & writing could proceed from such mean roots. I think I can already hear the apologists & rationalisers switching on their grindstones in preparation for axe sharpening. The woman is a fantasist, or a money grubber or a scorned lover ....or whatever... Or these little foibles are just what you'd expect from a man of genius & regardless of his personal struggles with the ego his message remains as true as the Christian message remains pure after all the Borgia Popes ... or whatever... But what about another possibility. Maybe Salinger is simply an entertainer. Maybe that's what all artists are. Some people are good at telling stories, others at building model cathedrals out of matchsticks. They're simply knacks. No special merit should be ascribed to their possessors. Are we all quite sure that the artists we call great are not simply those who have managed to sell us the loftier sounding ideas ? We're flattered - as apes would be - to think ourselves in touch with the transcendental. But maybe there's no such thing as the transcendental. Maybe that's all just warm muffins for consumption by gullible adolescents. The irridescence of a soap bubble is charming. But the bubble lasts no more than a second or two & cannot carry the smallest weight. Maybe there really is nowhere other than that darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night. In which case we shouldn't feel the need to apologise for an old vaudeville man who has some funny ideas about his diet & a weakness for impressionable young women. Scottie B.