Who Wrote Holden Caulfield? 4 comments

By Joel Hartse

J.D. Salinger is not the kind of writer who gets a lot of scholarly attention. I can think of maybe five books that can be called“Salinger criticism,” and most of them were published in the 1960s. Salinger is not a writer for critics, he’s a writer for fans. Most writers, or at least the ones who write “literature,” don’t really have “fans” in the way that actors or rock bands have fans—you don’t hear people say things like “I’m a big Updike fan,” or maybe you do, in which case your friends are more literary than mine, but what I mean is that J.D. Salinger has fans like Green Day has fans, and they tend to be the same people: teenagers who have, for the first time, found someone whose words speak to them in a way few others’ can.

Fans like to do covers. For example, if I am ever in a band (which I sometimes am), chances are that the band is going to play a Weezer cover, because I love their songs and I want to share them with people. Covers are the way young bands build their chops (in fact, I first heard Weezer when the garage band I played bass in when I was 19 covered “Say it Ain’t So”), pay homage to greatness, and learn the craft of music within creative limitations. You stay true to the melody and the chords, usually, but you change a hundred other little things, stretching notes, maybe, or adding harmonies or extra guitar solos or an accordion, and create something new and exciting.

People perk up when they hear covers—combine a band you like with a song you like, and BAM! It’s exciting.

I mean, have you ever heard Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah?” Or Johnny Cash’s “Hurt?” Or even—really—the Postal Service’s cover of Phil Collins’ “Against All Odds?” Revelatory, all. There are legal hassles involved sometimes—you have to get permissions and somebody has to be prepared to fork over some money—but ultimately, most musicians seem to be pretty cool with covers of their work.

Salinger is not cool with covers. In fact, he is probably not even cool with anybody mentioning his name, because he has been a paranoid recluse (I imagine him sitting in shed on top of a pile of typewritten pages about the Glass family, clutching a shotgun aimed at the door) for the last fifty years.

He can’t make us forget him, because too many of us like his books, so what he does is try his damnedest to put the kibosh on almost any other text related to his work. He prevented a New York showing of Iranian director Dariush Mehrjui’s film Pari, which is loosely based (without permission) on his Franny and Zooey. He prevented Ian Hamilton’s unauthorized biography from being printed in its original form, so that the published version became a book about trying to write Salinger biography. He even pulled the plug on the reissuing of his own novella, Hapworth 16, 1924 (his last story to appear in the New Yorker, in 1965) solely, it seems, on account of the pre-press publicity it was generating.

So it’s no surprise that Salinger’s lawyers are now going after 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, a book written by a pseudonymous Swedish author J.D. California, which is billed as a “sequel” to Catcher in the Rye. Details are sketchy (the book is supposed to have been published already in England, though I can’t seem to find a review written by anyone who has actually read the thing), but the story seems have two main characters—“Mr. C,” who is obviously Holden Caulfield, and Salinger himself. In the new book, Mr. C is 76 years old and seemingly as peripatetic and confused as Holden was at 15.

Leaving aside the question of whether a septuagenarian would still be using words like “phony” and “crummy,” I have two things to say on this matter: first, this book sounds terrible, and if I were Salinger, I would probably sue to prevent its publication also; and second, whether it’s pop lit or pop music, you can’t prevent people from covering something they love.

California’s book, however dubious its quality, is at its heart a cover—a re-interpretation, a personal and creative (and maybe even loving) remaking. The impulse behind covering Catcher in the Rye is the same one behind Buckley’s “Hallelujah”—“to take something beautiful and make it one’s own. It may not be legal, and Salinger may yet succeed in preventing the American distribution of the sequel, but the drive to cover cannot be stopped. Have you noticed, for example, how many covers of OutKast’s “Hey Ya” there are on YouTube? A lot. If OutKast demanded that they all be taken down tomorrow, new ones would eventually find their way to other video websites. And even if California’s book isn’t published stateside, a few million American high school students will still discover Holden Caulfield next year, and dream about him, and wonder what he will do next.

Green Day asked, in a song on one of their early records, “Who Wrote Holden Caulfield?” Salinger created him, of course, but the truth is that anybody who loves him did, and does. Salinger will probably succeed in his lawsuit, but he will not destroy the art of the cover. That will live for at least as long as there are 15-year-olds who love Green Day and Holden Caulfield.