I I can well imagine a period of time when having your book banned by the paper police might have been a big deal. I’ve little doubt that the first public reading of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl – captured in all its tantric anarchism in the pages of Kerouac’s Dharma Bums – really was quite the event. I’m still very taken by the idea of Burroughs in Tangiers, gibbous-eyed and crooked over his typewriter, stewing a postmodern nightmare in the grim cauldron of his mind. Without a doubt, he knew that novels had narks too, always on the lookout for junk to cell. But all the fuss about Dorian Gray just seems a bit embarrassing now, as does the expurgatory fondling of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Was that really us? Did a bit of sepulchral buggery and a little wood amidst the trees really make us mad? In a time where, strangely, every book is both freely available and completely forbidden – for what novel is not accessible, illegally, on the internet? – censoring, silencing or outright condemnation is just, well, a bit naff really.
Which is one of the many reasons why a man who calls himself J.D California is a spectacular prick. For those of you who don’t, won’t or can’t read (if this is you, you’re probably in the wrong section, by the way), here are a couple of pieces of information you’ll need in order to make any sense of what follows. Firstly, in 1951 a man called J.D Salinger wrote a novel called The Catcher In The Rye. It became a classic and is now a GCSE exam-board favourite (the alternative for most British 16-year olds is Educating Rita, a double-edged sword if you ask me, though perhaps more of a dual-pointed, used, soggy, sodden, spinached, toothpick). Secondly, earlier this year a sequel to Catcher was published, written by a man called J.D California. And therein lies the problem – these are two very different J.D’s (to clarify, that Womble-face off of Scrubs is another, totally different person). J.D Salinger didn’t write this sequel, nor did he want it written. Nor, dear readers, does he want it read. Hence the importance of Nietzsche. Apologies – hence the big red sticker on the front of my copy that says, like some terrible Springstein tribute, ‘BANNED IN THE U.S.A’. Salinger took California to court, and won.
This silly book by this silly man has a silly title. It’s called ‘60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye’. Yuk. Sounds like a chapter from old Chatterley. But it doesn’t end there. An awkward sub-sub-title and whimpering apologia follows: ‘An Unauthorized Fictional Examination of the Relationship Between J.D. Salinger and his Most Famous Character’. By the time you’ve dragged your screaming eyeballs across all this, you don’t care if it’s ‘A Fictional Re-Daydreaming of an Imagined Fantasy in Which Harry Potter joins the BNP and Appears on Question Time Wearing Nothing But The Emperor’s New Clothes and a Pair of J.K. From Jamiroquai’s Lace Pantaloons’. You really don’t (spot the Salengerism?).
And then, of course, there’s his name. What kind of a Saved-By-The-Bell nom de plume is J.D California? This palm-tree parable all gets a lot less exotic when we learn that the author is actually a Swede called Fredrik Colting. Joyously, the only quote I could find from this snivelling idiot was the following: ‘I am not a pirate’. What I want to know is, why the hell not? We’re all pirates now, J.D, and if you’re not one of Us then you’re one of Them.
But perhaps this quote was taken out of context. Perhaps he’d just arrived at a fancy-dress party garbed as a musketeer, and an already soused host had mistakenly exclaimed ‘Why Fredrik! You’re a pirate’! ‘I am not a pirate’, Freddy ejaculates. But again – why not J.D? Pirates are much better than musketeers, with their poncey wigs and gold buttons. Frankly – given all the bad press – admitting to a swashbuckling history of plunder on the high seas might have helped your case.
You might ask why I seem so angry about all of this, and the truth is, I’m really not. I hardly care. I didn’t much like The Catcher In The Rye. I got the impression it’s a book which – if it comes along at the right time in your life, and if you’re the right kind of person – can be transformative. Well it didn’t, and I’m not. But what I do understand is the importance of Catcher as a springboard for other things. Without Holden Caulfield we would never have had Vernon God Little. Nor would we have Christopher John Francis Boone (from The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time). The claustrophobic subjectivity and grim unease that permeates both these books – each wonderful and important for its own reasons – owe their deep traumatic force to the characterisation worked through Salinger’s text. Has it dated over time? Well, yes actually. Most kids nowadays would just expect Holden to take a Prozac and get over it. But I expect that says more about today’s sprogs than it does about yesterday’s literature.
We don’t need a Slaughterhouse 6 or a 1985, and we don’t need a sequel to a classic nearly 60 years old. JD Salinger, a notorious recluse and bitter guardian of his rights and his privacy, has taken photographers and biographers to court on numerous occasions in the past. Whatever made Frederik Colting think he could sneak under the Salinger censor, let alone the US copyright beam, is beyond me. I hope he’s out there somewhere now, wandering aimlessly about the grey city, reading this cruddy article, thinking to himself, ‘what a prince I am, what a phoney’.