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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

It's well past time for Salinger to chill out

Posted: 06/13/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

In this 1951 file photo, J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories and Franny and Zooey is shown. (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS)

A fascinating dispute over an intellectual property issue will be aired Monday in a Manhattan courtroom.

That's when lawyers for a British distributor will begin to defend their client's right to release a novel that lifts a character from one of the famous works of 20th-century American literature.

Holden Caulfield is the troubled teen protagonist of J.D. Salinger's 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye. Thanks to Holden's railing against "phonies" of all types, the novel continues to sell a reported 250,000 copies a year, and it still appears on high school course lists, including many in Manitoba.

Salinger, now 90, has lived in seclusion in rural New Hampshire since the early '60s, when he stopped publishing.

His life has been of enormous interest over the decades to the American chattering classes, largely because he is said to have several manuscripts tucked away in his cabin.

The other thing, of course, is that he is a notorious whack job.

This has come through loud and clear in a couple of unauthorized biographies and a memoir by the novelist Joyce Maynard, who was his teenage mistress in the early '70s (and whose mother, the late writer Fredelle Bruser Maynard, attended the University of Manitoba).

A short while ago a small British firm, Windupbird Publishing, announced the forthcoming release of a novel called 60 Years Later -- Coming Through the Rye.

Its pseudonymous author, John David California, has already been outed as American Fredrik Colting, who lives in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Colting's novel imagines Holden as a grumpy old man who escapes from a nursing home and, wandering the streets of New York, meets a "Salinger-like figure."

The actual Salinger has sued for infringement of copyright. Besides asking for all copies to be "recalled and destroyed," he wants "unspecified" cash damages because his copyright "is worth an enormous amount of money."

The defendant, SCB Distributors, has countered that Colting's novel is "an independent work" deserving U.S. First Amendment protection: "Readers will find 60 Years Later to be an imaginative commentary not only on Salinger and his relationship to the character that defined him -- but also on their joint status as cultural icons."

The knee-jerk reaction might be to side with Colting. Why does a 90-year-old hermit who still earns annual royalties on 250,000 books need more money?

As well, numerous exponents of copyright liberalization, from the journalist Malcolm Gladwell to the novelist Jonathan Lethem, have made the persuasive case that art history is essentially a series of building blocks.

Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern borrows its title characters from Hamlet, and Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours reimagines Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway.

There are countless such examples across artistic disciplines. This past winter my wife and I visited the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, where one gallery boasts 50-plus studies of Velázquez's famous painting Las Meninas.

In most of these cases, of course, the plundered artists have the decency to be long dead. In the U.S. a creator's copyright expires 70 years after they themselves do. In Canada, it's death plus 50 years.

Sometimes homage-paying artists are able to get copyright holders to grant them permission, as with the post-Ian Fleming James Bond novels. Others win in court, as happened with a sequel to Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind.

In the U.S. a couple years ago, J.K. Rowling won her case against an American who wanted to publish a Harry Potter encyclopedia. But in Britain, the author of a non-fiction tome lost his claim of copyright infringement against Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code.

In truth, few living authors' works are sufficiently part of the intellectual landscape that it makes commercial sense to build from them.

Catcher in the Rye is a clear exception. Since Salinger himself has refused all offers, he should chill out and let his challenger reach for the brass ring.

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 13, 2009 C3

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