“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
It is one of the most famous first lines in literature, introducing a voice that countless generations of teenagers have felt speaks only to them, describes their feelings, senses the same “apartness” that they feel. It may come from a pre-mobile, pre-internet, more innocent time – from a postwar New York in which the big band era hadn’t quite died out, rock’n’roll hadn’t quite begun and teenagers hadn’t really been invented – but it still seems relevant. If it weren’t for that kid with the specs and the funny mark on his forehead, 16-year-old Holden Caulfield from JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye would be the most famous teenager in the world.
That novel’s opening is certainly more famous than this first line: “I open my eyes and, just like that, I’m awake.” This is from 60 Years Later: Coming Through The Rye by the Swedish writer and publisher Fredrik Colting, writing as John David California, which brings Caulfield back to life as a 76-year-old escapee from a nursing home. If a small news story in The Bookseller had not been picked up by The Guardian, this self-published first novel might have gone the way of so many others. Instead, after the media widely dubbed it the “sequel” to Catcher, Salinger’s legal camp quickly moved to prevent its publication in the US.
A battle began in the US courts which mirrored UK author Ian Hamilton’s own fight in the late 1980s. Then it was about Salinger’s letters, and whether or not Hamilton would be allowed to quote them in his biography of the author. The more recent battle has been over who “owns” Holden Caulfield and who has the right to use the character.
One has to admit Salinger has a point. Why should someone be allowed to borrow a character someone else created and piggyback on that success? Can you imagine if an unknown, first-time writer wrote a novel featuring an older Harry Potter and received huge publicity and sales as a result. Don’t you think JK Rowling would have a right to feel aggrieved?
Salinger’s response has been typical. He is arguably the most prickly author in the world, certainly the most protective of his work and his life. He has always refused permission for Catcher to be filmed, and since 1958 has stipulated that no image be used on the cover – hence all those plain, coloured covers that Penguin has produced over the years. In 1982 he sued a man who allegedly tried to sell a fictitious interview with him, and in 1995 successfully prevented an Iranian film, Pari, a loose adaptation of his novel Franny and Zooey, from being shown in New York.
Since 1953 he has lived a famously reclusive life in Cornish, New Hampshire, where his modest house, tucked away behind trees off a remote hillside road, has become a pilgrimage point for fans from all over the world – and journalists too. The internet is full of accounts by those who have made the trip, trekked up to his forest idyll, knocked on his door and been politely – or not so politely – waved away by the man himself or his third wife, Colleen, a former nurse 40 years his junior.
Forever young
So what has he been doing all these years? The best account of his life is in Dream Catcher, the cathartic memoir by his daughter Margaret. She describes on the one hand a marvellous world of magical childhood stories played out in a fairy-filled forest, on the other one of almost Amish-like isolation. She describes her father’s obsessions with various belief systems or practices – yoga, macrobiotic diets, Eastern religions, even a brief dalliance with Scientology – and woe betide anyone, even his own children, who got in the way of his “work”, his writing, his quest for enlightenment.
It seems likely there are several manuscripts at the house. Margaret recalls being shown a new filing system “for the material in one of his safes. A red mark meant ‘if I die before I finish my work, publish this as is’, blue meant publish but edit first ... ”. There is no doubt that his death, the details of his will and the fate of these works will be of huge interest, the next global, front-page, publishing story. But she ponders aloud the question she had wanted to ask over the years: “What are you doing that is so much more important than taking care of your kids and family?” It is a powerful and important question, one with which all artists have wrestled.
With regard to the issue at stake, consider this: Salinger is now 90, he has a new hip and can’t run to catch anyone in the rye any more. But Holden is still 16, still running through our imaginations, forever young, like a teenage Peter Pan. Perhaps – with all due respect to Colting, and setting aside Salinger’s selfishness – he should be left alone.
The man who has dared to bring Holden Caulfield back, Swedish publisher Fredrik Colting, 33, whose company Nicotext publishes the sort of humour titles that clutter bookshops at Christmas and are often described as “toilet” books, says the idea came to him when he thought about his relationship with his own father.
“I was born in Sweden and he moved to Canada when I was young, so I grew up far away from him,” he says. “The relationship between Salinger and Holden is not so different. Brought into this world by a loving father, there’s always a connection there, no matter how much time passes. When I read Catcher the first time I was about the same age as Holden, 15 or 16. As my own life unfolded and I grew older, I found myself wondering whatever happened to him. I had this idea that what if it’s not just people that grow old, but also characters, and that’s when I decided to take a closer look at the relationship of Holden and Salinger.”
Did he have any idea how protective Salinger was about his most famous novel? “No, but it makes perfect sense. After all, Salinger is Holden’s father and every parent protects their child with the force of a lion. I can’t blame him for that.”
The lawsuit took him by surprise: “I really had no idea this would happen. I don’t think I have done anything wrong. I may have upset a few people, but other than that I don’t understand the grounds of the lawsuit.”
He adds that he thinks Salinger “truly loves Holden, and that Holden loves his father. It sounds a bit corny, but it’s the relationships we have in life that truly matter. My book is so much more than a clinical dissection of Catcher. Apart from being an exploration of the relationship between Salinger and Holden, 60 is also a story about growing old, about the relationship between father and son, wife and husband, creator and created ...”.
While it seems Colting’s motives are sound and he clearly bears Salinger no ill will, one is left with the feeling that he could make a lot of money on the back of someone else’s efforts.
He may not be a “phoney”, to use one of Holden’s favourite words, but even Holden would perhaps feel that what Colting has done is not quite right, even if Salinger does frequently behave in an odd and difficult way.
60 Years Later: Coming Through The Rye by John David California is published by Windupbird Publishing, £7.99
