|
|
|
|
 |
Pit Bull Journalism
Why Does the American Press Hate Joyce Maynard?
For those too young to remember, the caption above refers obliquely to the time post-operative President Lyndon B. Johnson pulled up his shirt to show photographers the stitches from his gall bladder operation. The joke (if you want to dignify it with that honor) here is that Joyce Maynard wrote about having breast implants and then about having them removed. The Vanity Fair story was illustrated with a photograph of her holding up the silicon prostheses. The squeamish little world of conventional media found this absolutely outrageous. You can imagine how they felt about this at The New York Times "Fashions of the Times" Sunday supplement. This is the background against which to seethe Times coverage of her book and the letters auction. Maureen Dowd's column comparing Ms. Maynard with Monica Lewinsky and calling them both "leech women" was so vicious that I was shocked the Times allowed it to go through. In general, I found the Times coverage of this issue brutally unfair. Surely a bit of investigation would have turned up at least one or two sources to provide a more balanced view. The rest of the media reaction wasn't much better -- just a literary gangbang of today's designated victim. I'm pleased to report
that Blue Ear, a new London-based online
publication, agreed with me about this and commissioned "Pit
Bull Journalism: Why Does the American Press Hate Joyce Maynard."
An 800-word excerpt follows:
-- Joyce Maynard, "Writing for Health," http://www.joycemaynard.com When Sotheby's announced the auction of fourteen love letters written in 1972 by secretive novelist J. D. Salinger, then 53, to teenage prodigy writer Joyce Maynard, then 18, the American press raised up a wild howl of pit bull journalism chasing a non-scandal without reference to truth or justice. Although many commentators (including Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd) called her "predatory," Maynard is merely one of the teenage females Salinger is known to have pursued by mail, seduced and abandoned. The controversy began in August, 1998, with the publication of her memoir, At Home in the World, in which after 26 years of silence she finally revealed some of the details of her nine-month affair with Salinger. At Home in the World mostly evoked the kind of language usually reserved for abortion rights flame wars, but in my San Francisco Chronicle I found the book "absorbing, funny and emotionally blistering" I also called it "dazzling," her writing "clear, eloquent and unpretentious, like Shaker furniture rendered in words." When Sotheby's announced the auction, much of Peter Applebome's New York Times article was devoted to explaining that it was not the contents (Salinger's property) that were being sold but the letters themselves (Joyce's property). In the coverage that followed it did not seem as if many commentators had read Joyce's book or were aware of any of the facts. Cynthia Ozick told Appelbome that Maynard "attached herself to the real artist in order to suck out his celebrity." Joyce never "attached herself" to Salinger. In 1972, after seeing her photograph on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in connection with her essay "An 18 Year-Old Looks Back on Life," Salinger began a months-long courtship by mail and telephone that culminated with Maynard's visiting him at his farm in New Hampshire, dropping out of Yale and moving in with him. At the time she wrote her book, Joyce told me, she had heard of three women with whom Salinger had struck up relationships when they were still teenagers, largely through the mail. "I have since learned of several others," she informed by e-mail. Every young woman she heard about was a teenager when Salinger sought her out, she said, and there was always a correspondence. One who called her after At Home in the World was published reported that Salinger later got his letters back, promising to keep them for her in his safe. "She handed them over," Joyce told me, "believing they would be together always. She never saw him again." In her hysterically bitter column "Leech Women in Love!" Maureen Dowd linked Joyce Maynard and Monica Lewinsky as "Leech Women" because they supposedly are feeding off the blood of old lovers. She called them "parasites" and "sexual climbers" who were "pillaging the identities of men and peddling their love messages." "The publicity-phobic writer has been the object of Ms. Maynard's leech for quite awhile," she asserted confidently. She was frightened that "Monica might try to feed off her affair with Bill for as long as Joyce has fed off hers with Jerry" -- a story as long-running as "Cats," she wrote. Even when pressed by interviewers over the years Joyce Maynard said nothing about Salinger until the publication of At Home in the World. Dowd not only got all the important facts wrong, but also failed (as did every other American writer who commented on the case after Applebome broke the story) to mention that Joyce Maynard was not the first of Salinger's correspondents to let go of his letters, many of which are in library collections available for any scholar to inspect. In a conciliatory New York Times Op-Ed piece Joyce Carol Oates very sensibly pointed out, "Though Joyce Maynard has been the object of much incensed, self-righteous criticism, primarily from admirers of the reclusive Salinger, her decision to sell his letters is her own business, like her decision to write about her own life. I am reminded of Jeffrey Massom's histories of 19th-century German child abuse and incest victims, who were punished and even institutionalized for accusing their betters of rape, torture and perversion. Shame is the least expensive weapon of social control. When Joyce Maynard (or anyone else) asserts her right to complain and to be shamelessly independent, she threatens the class structure. "Why are you wearing that collar?" Aesop's hungry wolf asks the well-fed dog. The pit bulls of American journalism think they are being ferocious when they are set snarling on today's officially designated victim, but all they are doing is showing the collar and rattling the chain in socially approved tantrums that are among their most satisfying rewards for loyal service. [an error occurred while processing this directive] |
Joyce Maynard,