Lot 153
Salinger, J.D (1919 -) American author, best known for The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Typed Letter Signed, 1½ pp, 11 x 8½ in., Windsor, Vt., July 19, 1957. To English stage producer and director, explaining Salinger's objections to proposed stage and screen adaptations of The Catcher in the Rye. In part: "I'll try to tell you what my attitude is to the stage and screen rights of The Catcher in the Rye….Firstly, it is possible that one day the rights will be sold. Since there's an ever-looming possibility that I won't die rich, I toy very seriously with the idea of leaving the unsold rights to my wife and daughter as a kind of insurance policy….I keep saying this and nobody seems to agree, but The Catcher in the Rye is a very novelistic novel. There are readymade 'scenes' - only a fool would deny that - but, for me, the weight of the book is in the narrator's voice, the non-stop peculiarities of it, his personal, extremely discriminating attitude to his reader-listener, his asides about gasoline rainbows in street puddles, his philosophy or way of looking at cowhide suitcases and empty toothpaste cartons - in a word, his thoughts. He can't legitimately be separated from his own first-person technique. True, if the separation is forcibly made, there is enough material left over for something called an Exciting (or maybe just Interesting) Evening in the Theater. But I find that idea if not odious, at least odious enough to keep me from selling the rights….What he thinks and does so naturally in his solitude in the novel, on the stage could at best only be pseudo-simulated, if there is such a word (and I hope not). Not to mention, God help us all, the immeasurably risky business of using actors….Holden Caulfield…in my undoubtedly super-biassed [sic] opinion, is essentially unactable…." Fine; two professional fold repairs on verso; fold toning lightly affects the signature, which is boldly penned in black ink.
Estimated Value $10,000 - 15,000.
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| Realized $9,988 |
