Salinger Remembered

Just got this note from Malachi Edwin Vethamani via Facebook :

The School of Education, Languages and Communications and the Centre for Professional and Continuing Education of Wawasan Open University will hold a J.D. Salinger: In Memoriam session on 20th March at 10 a.m. at Wawasan Open University, 3rd Floor Wisma PGRM, 8 Jalan Pudu Ulu, Cheras, KL. The event is open to all and admission is FREE. There will be readings and some interesting short talks on Salinger and his work. Further details contact Ms Amy 03-92817323.

The Ardent Heart

I knew J.D. Salinger. But he did not know me. I could not call him up whenever I felt like it. No one could. Because I knew J.D. Salinger like you knew him, the way he wanted to be known, through his work.

Umapagan Ampikaipakan mourns the passing of a favourite author in The New Straits Times, and he remembers how he read Catcher in the Rye at 13 :

I did not know J.D. Salinger then. All I knew was what some kid told me at school. He told me that John Lennon was dead, that someone had killed him, and that he done so after reading this particular book. ... For weeks afterwards, I would pore over the 192 pages of my tattered red and white Penguin edition, scanning through its minuscule 10-point font, for hidden messages, for secret codes. For something, anything, that would inspire murder. I read it forwards. I read it backwards. Needless to say, I discovered very little.

I remember reading the novel when I wasn't much older (probably 15 - in those days I had a very long bus journey to school and that was my perfect reading time). It was the quintessential teenage novel, the one that you had to read. 

But it was only last year that I came across his short fiction in Nine Stories (a tatty copy that Dina Zaman wanted "rehomed") and would consider myself haunted by the stories (particularly the autobiographical For Esme With Love and Squalor) and hungry for more.

Much of his short fiction though remains unpublished and there is also the hope (probably unfounded)  that there may be some unpublished works in his safe that  could at last see light of day. I hope so.

Do read Adam Gopnik's moving piece about Salinger in The New Yorker. As he quite rightly says  :

Writing, real writing, is done not from some seat of fussy moral judgment but with the eye and ear and heart; no American writer will ever have a more alert ear, a more attentive eye, or a more ardent heart than his.

(Pic from The New Yorker)

Sequels as Homage

... the urge to write sequels and prequels is almost always an homage of sorts. We don’t want more of books we hate. The books that get re-written and re-imagined are beloved. We don’t want them ever to be over. We pay them the great compliment of imagining that they’re almost real: that there must be more to the story, and that characters we know so well — Elizabeth Bennet, for one, or Sherlock Holmes, who has probably inspired more sequels than any other fictional being — must have more to their lives.

Charles McGrath's essay on literary prequels and sequels entitled The Sincerest Form of Lawsuit Bait is at The New York Times and takes in Austen + Zombies as well as J.D Salinger's injunction to halt the publication of Fredrik Colting's 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye.

McGrath notes that :

... Mr. Colting’s book has ... become a literary cause célèbre, with a number of legal experts, including one from The New York Times, seeking to overturn the judge’s decision. The argument is that the Colting text is “transformative”: that instead of being a mere rip-off, it adds something original and substantive to Mr. Salinger’s version.

Holden Caulfield Stays in Retirement

We've seen before that some authors chose to write a sequel based on an older classic, picking up the characters and taking them off on a new journey.

A Swedish author, Fredrik Colting (writing under the pen name John David California) has written a sequel to J.D. Salinger's 1951 classic The Catcher in the Rye. But it isn't going to be seeing light of day after a judge ruled in favour of Salinger who sued to block publication of 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye. Judge Deborah Batts ruled that the main character in was "an infringement" on Salinger's main character, Holden Caulfield.

According to Jennifer Schuessler in The New York Times the book features:

... the ultimate alienated teenager, as a lonely old codger who escapes from a retirement home and his beloved younger sister, Phoebe, as a drug addict sinking into dementia.

The Catcher in the Rye has been a staple of the American high school curriculum over the decades although now it seems the younger generation are finding it harder to relate to Caulfield:

What once seemed like courageous truth-telling now strikes many of them as “weird,” “whiny” and “immature.”

I remember reading it decades back and liking it very much, but can't recall much else about it. I am though at the moment reading Salinger's Nine Stories (a copy of which I inherited from Dina Zaman) and am enjoying it thoroughly. (You can read A Perfect Day for Bananafish here - and lazier so and so's can watch the video here. The story blew me away. )

Salinger is now one of the world's more famous recluses, although he is reportedly still writing every day. Maybe one day ...