Jail Bait
Baader, Cecilia (cbaader@casecorp.com)
Tue, 29 Jun 1999 17:12:38 -0500
Though there's been a flurry of media speculation over the last few weeks,
I've never seen quite this take on the letter auction. From Yesterday's
(June 28) Chicago Tribune Op-Ed Page:
Return to Sender: Salinger's letters
There used to be term for the likes of J.D. Salinger: dirty old man.
Salinger, who at some point became as well known for his reclusiveness as
for his writing, was 53 years old and famous when he seduced 18-year-old
Joyce Maynard into leaving Yale University to live with him in a cottage in
Cornish, N.H.
That means that he was four years older than Bill Clinton and she was three
years younger than Monica Lewinsky when they began their now-infamous
affair. Indeed, Maynard was very nearly what in benighted old days used to
be called "jail bait."
Yet, oddly, as Maynard in recent years has begun to reveal details of her
long-ago relationship with the author of "Catcher in the Rye" - first in a
memoir and now by auctioning off his letters to her - all the opprobrium
seems to have fallen on her. She has been scorned for trading on the
relationship for money, for violating a lover's expectation of privacy and
so forth.
So much so that, when Sotheby's last week auctioned off on Maynard's behalf
14 letters that Salinger wrote to her over a 17-month period in 1972 and
1973, the winning bidder, California philanthropist Peter Norton, said he
did so because he was "sympathetic to Mr. Salinger's desire for privacy" and
would return the letters to the writer.
Fair enough, perhaps.
Actually, more than fair to a dirty old man.
________
*grin* Gotta love our paper here in Chicago.
Cecilia.