SWNOVELS Chapter 2: J.D., an introduction
O.K. So maybe this famous American author doesn’t need an introduction.
Everybody knows him.
Many of us came of age with CATCHER. We empathized with Holden and how difficult it is to fit in. Especially, when you are young and an outsider. Sometimes, I thought that he was writing about me, but I’m sure many of us did.
But, J.D. remained elusive and mysterious. Why at the peak of success did he retreat to a remote town in New Hampshire? Why, despite lucrative offers, would he not relinquish his rights for a movie? Hollywood, after all! Why wasn’t that important to him?
If I only knew who he was writing about, I decided that I would learn something more about him. Or at least, I thought so. Who was the Glass family anyway? And, are you really Seymour Glass? There were so many unanswered questions. After my initial adoration, time passed and I went on with my life until some things happened that I cannot explain. I needed to know more about J.D. as a person.
So I researched him.
I cannot imagine calling one of the great American writers a pedophile. But there is evidence that he had a propensity for younger women and girls, both in the characters that he wrote about and in his personal life.
When he was 22 he dated then 16-year-old, Oona O’Neill, daughter of the playwright, Eugene O’Neill. When he was 30, he met 14-year-old, Jean Miller, at a Daytona Beach hotel pool. He carried on a relationship with her for 5 years. At 36, he married Claire Douglas, a 19-year-old Radcliffe college student. A pattern? And it goes on in his later life. At age 53, shortly after his divorce from Claire, he met an 18-year-old Yale student, Joyce Maynard. She lived with him for 10 months.
And yet, saying that he was a pedophile doesn’t seem true. Was he inappropriate? Yah. There seems to be evidence.
But, that’s not what troubled me most. What was particularly disconcerting was how drawn I was to one of his fictional characters, the young Sybil Carpenter. She was portrayed in the short story, A Perfect Day for Bananafish. She was the young girl on the beach with Seymour Glass. But for me, she became real. And somehow, she entered my life.