J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [217]
Hamilton won his case in the District Court, but Salinger appealed the decision. On January 29, 1987, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit overturned the District Court verdict and handed down a decision in Salinger’s favor. The court ruled that it was permissible for Hamilton to report on the contents and tone of Salinger’s personal letters but commanded that he further remove direct quotations and close paraphrasing if he ever wanted to see his book in print. Random House attempted to challenge the decision of the Appellate Court. The case went to the Supreme Court, which refused to hear it, in essence reinforcing the decision in Salinger’s favor. To this day, Salinger v. Random House is regarded as a building block of U.S. copyright law and is mandatory study for law students nationwide. But in truth, Salinger had done himself damage by pursuing it. In 1987, Hamilton went on to publish a version of his original Salinger biography that was only slightly altered from the second galley. He renamed the manuscript In Search of J. D. Salinger and incorporated his legal struggle into the story line. In the end, not only did the biography remain basically the same, but it now had a bitter tone against its subject. Even The New York Times observed, “Mr. Salinger would have been better served if he had allowed his letters to be quoted rather than described so vindictively.”20
The court case had been front-page news. It enhanced the sale of In Search of J. D. Salinger many times over. When asked who would be the subject of his next project, Ian Hamilton replied that he was unsure but “quite certain that it won’t be anyone who hasn’t been dead for at least 100 years.”21
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Salinger’s threats of litigation and attempts at privacy proved powerless to curtail the public’s fascination with his life and seclusion. Far from being forgotten, he had become America’s most famous private person. He was now a living legend—not so much for what he had written as for what he had become, or at least the public perception of what he had become. He had been somewhat successful in protecting his characters and the young man of his youth from exploitation, but the myth surrounding his adult life and retirement proved to be something he was unable to control. He became the subject of countless rumors and strange stories, myths that his silence actually reinforced because he never refuted them.
Unwilling to accept that Salinger had actually stopped publishing, many of his fans searched for similarities in other writers, hoping that Salinger was publishing under a pseudonym. In 1976, the SoHo Weekly News featured an article that claimed the author Thomas Pynchon was actually Salinger. The belief became widespread. Pynchon’s first publication had appeared in The New York Times Magazine in 1965, the same year Salinger had retired. Like Salinger, Pynchon was intensely private and especially averse to being photographed. In 1973, he produced his brilliant novel Gravity’s Rainbow, a book of many voices, one of which sounded remarkably like the voice of J. D. Salinger to his fans. Even after Pynchon surfaced a number of times, proving that he was not Salinger, and the SoHo Weekly News had apologized for the confusion, many Salinger fans found it difficult to let go of the illusion. When in 1991 Little, Brown and Company released a new paperback design for Salinger’s books, it displayed a rainbow on an otherwise plain white cover, and the Pynchon-Salinger theory was reignited.
Some Salinger myths grew out of actual events. When Salinger’s wartime partner John Keenan retired in 1982, Salinger attended his farewell dinner. Almost immediately it was reported that Salinger had made a speech at the dinner announcing that he had completed a novel about the Second World War. The source of