The Phantoms of Holden Caulfield’s Youth
The Clyde Fitch Report has launched The Preservation Diaries, a new online column about historic preservation issues, written by author, and co-chair of the preservation campaign to protect historic Marx Brothers Place in Carnegie Hill, Susan Kathryn Hefti. The column, published twice a month, will cover a wide range of preservation issues.Mercifully, a July 2009 federal court ruling spared the 76-year-old version of Holden Caulfield the experience of padding about the New York City streets that were such an indelible part of his adolescent universe. In finding that the new novel, 60 Years Later: Coming Through The Rye — in which Swedish author Fredrik Colting, writing under the taunting nom de plume J.D. California, imagines one of the most famous teenagers in American literary history as a man who’s been collecting Social Security for more than a decade — is sufficiently derivative of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye to constitute copyright infringement, Judge Deborah A. Batts issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting its distribution in the U.S.
But the Brits published the Swede’s novel. And this has me worried about poor Holden coming unglued all over again. For the Salinger-California case, which has yet to go trial, provided a haunting observation about New York City’s track record on protecting historic structures and the sense of place they evoke.
As Clyde Haberman remarked in the New York Times, many of the places visited by Holden in the original novel no longer exist. Sure, Central Park has a carousel, but not the one he envisions his sister, Phoebe, riding in his mind’s eye. The Biltmore Hotel, where young Holden waits for his date, is long gone. So is the Paramount movie theater. And, of course, the Pennsylvania Station that Holden knew was tragically demolished in 1963.
So my concern for Holden goes way beyond Salinger’s legal right to protect his intellectual property. I believe that if California’s senior version of Holden were to ever actually set foot in New York City, the brevity of his visit would be epic. As Kent Barwick, president emeritus of the Municipal Arts Society (MAS), explained in a phone call while reflecting upon the imperative to reconstruct Warsaw after World War II, it’s a “basic need of human beings to be oriented.” When you take away physical reference points, the effect can be quite traumatic…
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