J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [225]
A visit to Colting’s website following the trial showed the sequel claim removed, replaced instead by a white-on-red notice on the cover of 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye: “BANNED IN THE USA!”
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In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden’s troubled mind is soothed by memories of the Natural History Museum, of the reassuring sameness of its diorama. He thinks longingly of the glass-encased stuffed exhibits, safely frozen in their perfection and never growing old. He remembers figures of Indians unmoving in the act of building a fire, of Eskimos eternally fishing, of motionless birds suspended in flight. “Everything always stayed right where it was,” he fondly recalls. “Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.”14
Since 1951, Salinger had denied many appeals to adapt Holden’s character to other media. Among others, he had refused requests by Elia Kazan, Billy Wilder, and Steven Spielberg to render Holden onto stage and screen. In 2003, he threatened the BBC with litigation over a planned television dramatization of The Catcher in the Rye. And he had consistently fought attempts to portray Holden’s image on book covers.
Salinger may have presented Holden to readers as longing to preserve a suspended world of stuffed diorama, but it had now become Salinger himself who gazed through the glass, looking on his own creation in jealous awe, desperate to preserve him unchanged. “There is no more to Holden Caulfield,” Salinger told Betty Eppes in 1980. “Holden Caulfield is only a frozen moment in time.”15
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Colting promptly filed for appeal, and the case was assigned to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. On July 23, Rosenthal submitted a brief to the court on Colting’s behalf more precise than his arguments to the lower court. Although he remained adamant that 60 Years Later had been crafted as a parody that did not infringe upon Salinger’s copyright, this new appeal contained an underlying willingness to compensate Salinger for what 60 Years Later had borrowed from Catcher. Home in Sweden, Colting remained hopeful but was growing increasingly resigned. “I hope we will win,” he reflected. “Not only for my book, the work is done and I will not cry for what happens to it after, but for the sake of all other books the vultures will try to tear apart. I piss on them.”16
Colting’s sentiments were elevated on Friday, August 7, when the appellate court was presented with an amicus brief, a legal pleading in support of his position demanding that the decision in Salinger’s favor be overturned. The document was filed by four of the nation’s most powerful media giants: the New York Times Company, the Associated Press, the Gannett Company, and the Tribune Company. The brief was acute and unequivocal. It called the June 1 decision “banning” Colting’s book to be in clear violation of the First Amendment, “where,” the document reasoned, “the only harm appears to be to the pride of a reclusive author in not having his desires fulfilled.”17
Salinger’s attorney submitted a counterargument on August 13 rebutting Colting’s appeal and countering the amicus brief. In the filing, Marcia Paul expounded the lower court’s opinion that the enjoined Catcher sequel was in violation of Salinger’s copyright. She then charged both Colting and the media moguls of attempting to set precedent by “proposing sweeping changes in the law and entirely new standards for granting a preliminary injunction.”18 Paul’s argument was well structured and certainly valiant, but it could not undo the damage done by the media giants when they arrayed themselves against her client.
For Salinger and his legal team, the amicus brief was chilling. It signaled a shift in the media’s portrayal of their case. The press now accused the author of attempting to ban a book while reminding readers that The Catcher in the Rye had itself suffered under unfair restrictions for